The Mountain Valley War is Louis L’Amour’s third novel with Lance Kilkenny as protagonist. Previous essays addressed the earlier novels, The Rider of Lost Creek (which first appeared in 1947 as a novella-length story in West magazine, and was later fleshed out as a stand-alone novel in 1976) and Kilkenny (1954). With The Mountain Valley War, L’Amour got the band back together and, like a good legacy tour concert, it’s a satisfying experience.
By the time he wrote The Mountain Valley War, L’Amour was seventy years old and had achieved wealth and renown as an author. Whether it was the fame, the money, or the years, L’Amour’s later works lack the compact punch of his earlier novels. From the very start L’Amour never seemed overly-concerned with continuity and consistency, but in his later years these minor flaws grew increasingly irritating to discerning readers. His writing style grew more florid as well, with some of his later novels being so rococo as to be almost unreadable. The worst of those tendencies were still in the future, though, when L’Amour wrote The Mountain Valley War, even if the novel shows early signs of trouble to come.
In our essays on The Rider of Lost Creek and Kilkenny, we dwelt at length on the problems L’Amour created for anyone trying to nail down the years in which those stories occured. L’Amour’s love of biographical and historical references tripped him up repeatedly, and it was probably a fool’s errand from the start. In any event, it is absolutely impossible to reconcile the timeline of The Mountain Valley War with the earlier Kilkenny works. The Rider of Lost Creek occurs in the border lands of Texas and Mexico, and Kilkenny occurs in southeastern Utah two or three years later. The Mountain Valley War is set in Idaho, yet the action clearly must take place during the interval between The Rider of Lost Creek and Kilkenny. It isn’t worth trying to explain how or why Kilkenny and the rest of his retinue could reassemble in Idaho during that short interval. L’Amour himself makes no such effort, so neither should we, and perhaps that is a relief. Because it is impossible to square the timeline of The Mountain Valley War with the other Kilkenny books, we can suspend our critical faculties and just enjoy the ride.
As the story begins, Kilkenny has been living in Idaho for more than a year under his usual alias of “Trent,” trying to escape his reputation as a gunfighter so that he can live in peace as a small-time rancher. Left behind, or so he thought, is Nita Riordan, the love of his life, from whom he rode away at the end of The Rider of Lost Creek. Trouble has come to Idaho, though, in the form of a rancher named King Bill Hale. It’s never clear whether “King” is his actual first name or an honorific that reflects his wealth and power, but in any event he has lots of capital and hired guns, and he starts a range war to drive out Kilkenny and his neighbors, whom he refers to as “dirty-necked nesters” and “saddle tramps.” And he has a trigger-happy psycho for a son, eager to crank up the violence.
The town around which the action revolves, Cedar Bluff, is large enough to sustain a couple of saloons, and, lo! It turns out that one of them is run by Nita Riordan herself. Kilkenny suspects that this is no coincidence, and so do we, and Nita herself confirms this suspicion in Chapter 11. If this all sounds familiar, it is. It’s the same set up as Kilkenny, except that in Kilkenny Nita runs a ranch, not a saloon.
Right away, then, we can see that L’Amour is going plow ground that he has been over many times before. And that’s all right with us. After all, by the time he wrote The Mountain Valley War, L’Amour had been cranking out westerns for twenty-five years, and his groove had become a deeply-worn track. If the groove sometimes feels more like a rut, well, what can you expect? At least the familiar provides comfort.
Still, because we are loyal to Kilkenny and Nita as characters, we look for any new information about them that we can glean from The Mountain Valley War. Kilkenny had already built up a tremendous curriculum vitae in L’Amour’s previous books. We learned in The Rider of Lost Creek that Kilkenny is “a damn good straight-up bronc rider, and a good hand with a rope.” We also learned that he has done some freighting, rode shotgun on a stage, worked as a lumberjack, and has a college education. Added to this, in Kilkenny we found out that Kilkenny can track and build a stone house, and in a fight for survival in the desert “there was no trick of white man or savage that he did not know.” He was (depending upon which novel you consult) either a dispatch rider for the Union Army in the Civil War (The Rider of Lost Creek), or a leader of troops in combat who finished the war with the rank of Major (Kilkenny). Now, in The Mountain Valley War, we can continue to round out his resume. We learn that “He had been born on the frontier in Dakota, but his father had been killed and he had lived with an uncle in New York and then with an aunt in Virginia.” (Missing from this narrative is any mention of Kilkenny’s mother, though in The Rider of Lost Creek we heard that Kilkenny always carried a photograph of his dear old Ma.) He’s a boxer too, not just a rough-and-tumble brawler: “During the days when he lived in the East he had learned boxing from Jem Mace, onetime heavyweight champion of the world and one of the cleverest of the old-time fighters.” Besides the occupations noted in the previous novels, in The Mountain Valley War we discover that Kilkenny has also done stints as a trapper, a buffalo hunter, a stage driver, the foreman on a cattle ranch, a tie cutter, a track layer, a gambler, a gold prospector, and a miner. Basically, Kilkenny has held just about every job that L’Amour can think of in the old west.
As for Nita, her age remains indistinct. L’Amour told us in The Rider of Lost Creek that Nita was twenty-four. That would make her about twenty-six in The Mountain Valley War, though one of the characters guesses that she is “not more than twenty.” Whatever her age, she remains a beguiling siren: “Taller than most women, with a slender yet voluptuous body that made a pulse pound in his throat.” And again, “Her black hair fell over her shoulders halfway to her waist. He saw the quick rise of her breast under the thin material of the nightgown. . . . Her voice was low, and something in the timbre made his muscles tremble . . . .”
Well, well! Kilkenny isn’t the only one whose pulse is pounding and muscles are trembling. It is merely a scholarly interest, and not a prurient one, that requires us to dwell on the breast reference, a rare one for L’Amour. Though Louis usually keeps it pretty chaste, this is the second time he has made reference to this part of Nita’s anatomy. He went there in Kilkenny, too (“He watched her lips, the rise of her high breasts as she spoke, the wetness of her lips."), and we were happy to follow.
The Mountain Valley War does clear up one question from the earlier Kilkenny stories. In The Rider of Lost Creek, Cain Brockman was a great brute of a fellow, who tried to kill Kilkenny in a barroom brawl to avenge Kilkenny’s killing of his brother, Abel. Yet a few years later, in Kilkenny, Brockman had become a Kilkenny ally and an employee on Nita’s ranch. Wherefore the change of heart? L’Amour left this mystery hanging for twenty-four years, between the publication of Kilkenny in 1954 and The Mountain Valley War in 1978, and L’Amour tweaks the suspense for much of The Mountain Valley War. On page 9 we hear that Brockman is hunting Kilkenny with murder and vengeance on his mind, and for the next 135 pages we get multiple reminders of this looming threat. Yet when Kilkenny and Brockman finally square off across the barroom in Nita’s saloon, neither draws. Instead, Kilkenny talks Brockman down off of the ledge, starting with “You’re a good man, Cain, and I’m not going to draw on you, and you’re too good a man to shoot a man who won’t fight.” This rubbish goes on for a couple of pages as the air slowly leaks out of the balloon, until Brockman finally says “Well I’ll be . . . I’ll be eternally damned!” and walks away into the night. Whether Kilkenny has convinced him, or Brockman is just tired of the touchy-feely mumbo-jumbo, that’s the end of the feud. Fortunately, Kilkenny has plenty of other opportunities to dole out violence in The Mountain Valley War. By my count, fourteen men die over the course of the novel, but I might have missed a few. That’s actually on the low side for Kilkenny, but still pretty high.
L’Amour also gives us two big fist fights in The Mountain Valley War. The first is a barroom brawl between Kilkenny and King Bill Hale. It’s entertaining, but indistinguishable from any number of similar brawls in other L’Amour novels. L’Amour telegraphs that the fight is coming by telling us a few pages earlier that King Bill has killed two men with his fists, and considers himself invincible. Hale knocks Kilkenny to the floor four times, but there is never any doubt about how it will end.
More satisfying is the fight in Chapter 17, in which Kilkenny wins a prize fight against a professional boxer with the great name of Tombull Turner. L’Amour gives this fight a big build-up. It’s not enough that Turner outweighs Kilkenny by a good thirty pounds. This is David versus Goliath, St. George versus the Dragon. Tombull Turner is introduced on page 79 as “big and strong and mean,” the best prize-fighter west of the Mississippi and this side of San Francisco. For the next 115 pages L’Amour adds to Turner's fearsome reputation. We hear about “the bullet head, the knotted cauliflower ears, the flat nose, and the hard, battered face of the man.” Turner is “a mountain of muscle with a jaw like a chunk of granite, deeply set small eyes, his nose flattened by punches, his lips rather thick. He could hit with terrific force and could take a punch and keep coming.” Nita gets in on the description, too: “I have seen him bend silver dollars in his fingers, and the other evening he squatted beside one of the tables, with dishes and food on it, and he took the corner of the table in his teeth and lifted all four legs off the floor.” Are we scared yet? When the fight finally comes, L’Amour (who had done some prize fighting himself) does not disappoint, and as a fillip we get a primer on how London prize fight rules work in practice. (Here’s a question for Louis L’Amour fans: How many of L’Amour’s novels include a prize fight? In addition to The Mountain Valley War, I can think of Lando (1962) and The Man from Skibbereen (1973). There must be more.)
Kilkenny’s allies in his war against Hale include a family of hardscrabble farmers and ranchers named Hatfield, whose patriarch is known as “Parson.” The Hatfields represent everything L’Amour likes about the American spirit. These worthy yoemen have scraped and scrapped their way out of the Appalachians to make their homestead in the mountains of Idaho. L’Amour repeatedly refers to the Hatfields’ fighting prowess, always mentioning their long Kentucky rifles. “Long Kentucky rifle” has a wonderfully elegiac sound, but it also has a specific meaning. An internet search tells us that it’s a common name for the long-bore rifle that was a staple of the American army and frontier life for more than a hundred years.
Speaking of guns, L’Amour gives us quite a disquisition on the use and importance of firearms, through Kilkenny’s voice. Here he is, on page 15, giving a rifle to a fourteen-year-old, and throwing in a bit of Second Amendment psuedo-history to boot.
I’m giving you this Sharps. She’s an old gun, but she shoots straight. I’m not giving this gun to a boy, but to a man, and a man doesn’t ever use a gun unless he has to. He never wastes lead shooting carelessly. He shoots only when he has to and when he can see what it is he’s shootin’ at. This gun is a present with no strings attached except that any man who takes up a gun accepts responsibility for what he does with it. Use it to hunt game, for target practice, or in defense of your home or those you love. Keep it loaded always. A gun’s no good to a man when it’s empty, and if it is settin’ around, people aren’t liable to handle it carelessly. They’ll say, ‘That’s Jack Moffat’s gun and it is always loaded.’ It is the guns people think are empty that cause accidents. There’s a clause in the Constitution that says the right of an American to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged. The man who put that clause there had just completed a war that they won simply because seven out of every ten Americans had their own rifles and knew how to use them. They wanted a man to always be armed to defend his home or his country.
The reference to the Constitution is just the start of it. L’Amour’s weakness for historical references and name-dropping is on full display in The Mountain Valley War. Indeed, he might set a personal record for such asides in the novel. Have your search engine ready.
— We hear of famous gunfighters, a long list that includes John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, Billy Brooks, Farmer Peel, John Bull, Ben Thompson, Cullen Baker, Bill Longley, Luke Short, Long-Haired Jim Courtright, the Earps, and John Ringo.
— We are told of the famous prize fighters of the day, including Jem Mace, Joe Goss, and Paddy Ryan.
— L’Amour tells us about famous duelists throughout history, often with a great deal of embellishment, including the Chevalier d’Andrieux (who killed, per the legends, seventy-two men), and old Andy Jackson himself, who killed Charles Dickinson in a duel in 1806. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr are noted, of course, but also, more improbably, the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. Then there is Alexander Keith McClung, a nephew of former Chief Justice Marshall, the so-called Black Knight of the South. L’Amour writes that “it had been rumored that [he] had killed over a hundred men,” but in fact McClung was a drunk, a gambler, and a boor whose tally was probably more like fourteen, and who died by suicide at 44.
— Ranging farther afield, L’Amour mentions Ethan Allen, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and the Green Mountain Boys. We get the chance to look up Major Patrick Ferguson, of the British Army in the War of Independence, who was defeated by American irregulars at the Battle of King Mountain. The rifle he invented, which had a remarkably high rate of fire for its day but suffered from technical problems, is featured in, and lends its name to, L’Amour’s novel from 1973, The Ferguson Rifle.
As with all of L’Amour’s westerns, The Mountain Valley War has a steeply lopsided ratio of men to women, but L’Amour is a bit more generous than usual in doling out women’s parts. Besides the alluring Nita Riordan, there are nice little turns by Ma Hatfield and the young and fetching Sally Crane, who takes to Kilkenny as a surrogate father until she gets married off in Chapter 18. We also get a true rarity in the L’Amour oeuvre, a lengthy and substantial conversation between two women. Ma Hatfield goes to visit Nita Riordan in Chapter 11, and their conversation occupies six pages. I cannot identify another example of a Louis L’Amour novel which passes the Bechdel-Wallace test, which asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. It’s a moment to savor, even though the description of their tete-a-tete includes the following, jarring passage: “The tea arrived, carried by an old Chinese. He placed it on the table between them, and some small wafers. Ma looked at them warily. She had heard all sorts of things about such places as this, and that furriner, too. That yellow one. She’d heard about them.” Ouch. I don’t know if it helps or hurts to note that, as far as I know, this is the only appearance of someone of Asian descent in all of L’Amour’s westerns.
Besides the hopeless confusion L’Amour creates with the larger Kilkenny timeline, The Mountain Valley War has it’s share of other problems with continuity and consistency. That’s typical of L'Amour's books, of course, and finding these little treasures is one of the reasons we read him so closely. For example, at the end of Chapter 2, we get this great interior monologue from one of the Hatfield boys: “It was going to be one of those white-moon nights when the trees stood black against the sky and there was darkness in the hollows of the hills. A good night for coon hunting or feudin’, and a good night to be hunting them Haleses.” Good stuff, and we can be sure that L’Amour had fun writing it. Too bad, then, that just two nights later we are told that “There was no moon.”
Then there’s Parson Hatfield’s back story. In Chapter 6, he recognizes Kilkenny by way of recounting his Civil War service. “Once I was a sharpshooter and I rode with Jeb Stuart. One time ol’ Jeb he sent us off on a special detail, and we’d been sent like this often, because we always got the job done. Well this last time we got our socks whupped off us by a youngster Union officer. He only had half as many men as us, but he surely out-maneuvered us an’ whupped us. Point that I’m makin’ is that that young Union officer who whupped us so bad was Trent here.” That’s classic L’Amour, a compressed and entertaining yarn, salted into the main plot for flavoring. We are being petty, I suppose, if we point out that Stuart was cavalry, so why would he have an impoverished sharpshooter like Hatfield with him? If that was all, we could let it go, but then we read, in Chapter 11, that Parson was simultaneously home in Kansas with Ma Hatfield during the war, fighting off “the Jayhawkers, Quantrill and them.”
Then there’s the geography. As a general matter, L’Amour doesn’t hesitate to exaggerate the epic landscape of the West to match the sweep of his imagination. But when he writes that in the deserts of Idaho “There were places where a reasonably strong man could pitch a rock across a canyon that was two thousand feet deep,” we just have to call bullshit. There ain’t no such place, not even close. Idaho has the Snake River Canyon, which Evel Knievel famously tried to jump across on a jet-propelled motorcycle in 1974, but its maximum depth is only about 500 feet, and the bridge that spans it is 1,500 feet long, which is way too far for even a major league outfielder to throw across. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison River is over two thousand feet deep, but it’s way down in Colorado, and its narrowest width at the rim is 1,100 feet—again, far beyond the reach of any rock-thrower.
Ah, well, we love you anyway, Louis. In fact, we love you even more for these flaws, if flaws they be. The Mountain Valley War is comfort food for the Louis L’Amour fan, so tuck in. And, as you enjoy it, don’t forget to savor the usual smattering of L’Amour’s trademark colloquialisms, including:
— “[B]efore this is over, a lot of [Hale’s men] will be pushing up the daisies.”
— “I’d fork that horse and light a shuck.”
— “He’’ll be sore as a boiled owl.”
— And, of course, L’Amour’s favorite feline analogy, which he throws in on three separate occasions. “Did you watch Kilkenny move? He’s like a big cat.” “[Cain Brockman] was alone, and although big he may be, he could move like a cat.” “On cat feet, [Kilkenny] moved after him.”
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