Collection 1999 - Beyond The Great Snow Mountains (v5.0) (24 page)

Afterword

By Beau L’Amour

B
EYOND THE
G
REAT Snow Mountains
is the first in a series of four collections that will cover a broad spectrum of my father’s work. “The Gravel Pit” and “The Money Punch” recall the late forties and early fifties when Louis had just moved to Los Angeles. Although written in the same period, “Sideshow Champion” and “Under the Hanging Wall” draw on his earlier experiences as a carnival boxer and miner. “Meeting at Falmouth” was an early experiment in the historical genre, when Dad was first attempting to break away from the label of being an author of westerns.

Both “By the Waters of San Tadeo” and “Beyond the Great Snow Mountains” are stories that either drew from Louis’s mysterious travels in South America and China or sprang from his encyclopedia like knowledge of geography and obscure cultures. “Coast Patrol” may also be included in this last group and raises the added question of the character of Turk Madden. As represented in several of Louis L’Amour’s early adventure stories, Turk is a fictional character. Some of the inspiration for Louis’s writing about this tramp pilot was Jimmy Angel, the bush pilot for whom Venezuela’s Angel Falls are named. But Dad claimed to have known an adventurer named Turk Madden in the Far East, and if this is true, then Turk is one of the few times when Dad gave a fictional character in the name of one of his friends.

Work on the Louis L’Amour biography continues at its maddeningly slow pace. Information drifts in, sometimes proving, sometimes disproving, stories Louis told or ideas that I have had about what happened at certain times.

I want to extend my thanks to all the people who have written in with information for the book, and I want to apologize in advance because I will no longer be able to answer all of the wonderful fan mail that has come to me through the Biography Project’s P.O. box. My staff and I are swamped with research and simply cannot keep up with all the nonbiography fan letters that keep coming in. We have decided that from now on
we can respond only to those of you who write in about a subject that directly pertains to the biography itself
. I regret this, I appreciate everyone’s interest, but I’m not making enough progress on the story of my father’s life and I must focus on only the things that help me get that into print.

The next book (which will be out in spring of 2000) will be
Off the Mangrove Coast
. It will contain the same eclectic mixture of stories as this collection. However, there will be a few that are like those stories in the
Yondering
collection, tales drawn from Louis’s life or the lives of people that he knew. There will still be a few more westerns, more crime, and more sports stories to come.

B
ELOW ARE THE names of the people whom I would like to contact. If you find your name on the list, I would be very grateful if you would write to me. Some of these people may have known Louis as “Duke” LaMoore or Michael “Micky” Moore, since Louis occasionally used those names. Many of the people on this list may have died. If you are a family member (or were a very good friend) of anyone on the list who has passed away, I would like to hear from you, too. Some of the names I have marked with an asterisk. If there is anyone out there who knows
anything at all
about these people, I would like to hear it. The address to write to is:

Louis L’Amour Biography Project

P.O. Box 41183

Pasadena, CA 91114-9183

Because of the many demands on our time, we will no longer be responding to
fan
mail sent to this address…it is for correspondence regarding biography information only!

Marian Payne
Married a guy named Duane. Louis knew her in Oklahoma in the mid-to late 1930s. She moved to New York for a while; she may have lived in Wichita at some point.

Chaplain Phillips
Louis first met him at Fort Sill, then again in Paris at the Place de Saint Augustine Officers’ Mess. The first meeting was in 1942, the second in 1945.

Anne Mary Bentley
Friend of Louis’s from Oklahoma in the 1930s. Possibly a musician of some sort. Lived in Denver for a time.

Pete Boering
* Born in the late 1890s. Came from Amsterdam, Holland. His father may have been a ship’s captain.

Betty Brown
Woman Louis corresponded with extensively while in Choctaw, Oklahoma, in the late 1930s. Later she moved to New York.

Jacques Chambrun
Louis’s agent from the late 1930s through the late 1950s.

Des
His first name. Chambrun’s assistant in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Joe Friscia
Joined Hagenbeck & Wallace circus in Phoenix in the mid-1920s. Rode freights across Texas and spent a couple of nights in the Star of Hope mission in Houston. May have been from Boston.

Harry “Shorty” Warren
Shipmate of Louis’s in the mid-1920s. Harry may have been an Australian.

Joe Hollinger
Louis met him while with Hagenbeck & Wallace circus, where he ran the “privilege car.” A couple of months later he shipped out with Louis. This was in the mid-1920s.

Joe Hildebrand
Louis met him on the docks in New Orleans in the mid-1920s, then ran into him later in Indonesia. Joe may have been the first mate and Louis second mate on a schooner operated by Captain Douglas. This would have been in the East Indies in the later 1920s or early 1930s. Joe may have been an aircraft pilot and flown for Pan-Am in the early 1930s.

Turk Madden
Louis knew him in Indonesia in the late 1920s or early 1930s. They may have spent some time around the “old” Straits Hotel and the Maypole Bar in Singapore. Later on, in the States, Louis traveled around with him, putting on boxing exhibitions. Madden worked at an airfield near Denver as a mechanic in the early 1930s. Louis eventually used his name for a fictional character.

“
Cockney” Joe Hagen
Louis knew him in Indonesia in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

Richard LaForte
A merchant seaman from the Bay area. Shipped out with Louis in the mid-1920s.

Mason or Milton
Don’t know which was his real name. He was a munitions dealer in Shanghai in the late 1920s or 1930s. He was killed while Louis was there. His head was stuck on a pipe in front of his house as a warning not to double-cross a particular warlord.

Singapore Charlie
Louis knew him in Singapore and served with him on Captain Douglas’s schooner in the East Indies. Louis was second mate and Charlie was bo’sun. He was a stocky man of indeterminate race, and, if I remember correctly, Dad told me he had quite a few tattoos. In the early 1930s Louis helped get him a job on a ship in San Pedro, California, that was owned by a movie studio.

Renée Semich
She was born in Vienna, I think, and was going to a New York art school when Louis met her. This was just before WWII. Her father’s family was from Yugoslavia or Italy, her mother from Austria. They lived in New York; her aunt had an apartment overlooking Central Park. For a while she worked for a company in Waterbury, Connecticut.

Aola Seery
Friend of Louis’s from Oklahoma City in the late 1930s. She was a member of the “Writer’s Club” and I think she had both a brother and a sister.

Enoch Lusk
Owner of Lusk Publishing Company in 1939, original publisher of Louis’s
Smoke from this Altar
. Also associated with the National Printing Company, Oklahoma City.

Helen Turner
* Louis knew her in late 1920s Los Angeles. Once a showgirl with Jack Fine’s Follies.

James “Jimmy” Eades
* Louis knew him in San Pedro in the mid-1920s.

Frank Moran
Louis met him in Ventura, California when Louis was a “club second” for fighters in the later 1920s. They also may have known each other in Los Angeles or Kingman, Arizona, in the mid-1920s. Louis ran into him again on Hollywood Boulevard late in 1946.

Jud
and
Red Rasco
* Brothers or cousins, cowboys, Louis met them in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Also saw them in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. This was in the early to mid-1920s.

Olga Santiago
Friend of Louis’s from late 1940s Los Angeles. Last saw her at a book signing in Thousand Oaks, California.

Jose Craig Berry
* A writer friend of Louis’s from Oklahoma City in the late 1930s. She worked for a paper called the
Black Dispatch
.

Evelyn Smith Colt
She knew him in Kingman at one point, probably the late 1920s. Louis saw her again much later at a Paso Robles book signing.

Kathlyn Beucler Hays
Friend from Choctaw, taught school there in the 1930s. Louis saw her much later at a book signing in San Diego.

Floyd Bolton
* A man from Hollywood who came out to Oklahoma to talk to Louis about a possible trip to Java to make a movie.

Lisa Cohn
Reference librarian in Portland; family owned Cohn Bros. furniture store. Louis knew her in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

Mary Claire Collingsworth
Friend and correspondent from Oklahoma in the 1930s.

C.A. Donnell
Guy in Oklahoma City in the early 1930s who rented Louis a typewriter.

Captain Douglas
* Captain of a ship in Indonesia that Louis served on, a three-masted auxiliary schooner.

Leonard Duks
* I think that this was probably a shortened version of the original family name. A first mate in the mid-1920s. I think that he was a U.S. citizen but he was originally a Russian.

Maudee Harris
My aunt Chynne’s sister.

Parker LaMoore
and
Chynne Harris LaMoore
* Louis’s eldest brother and his wife. Parker was secretary to the governor of Oklahoma for a while, then he worked for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. He also worked with Ambassador Pat Hurley. He died in the early 1950s. Chynne outlived him, but I don’t know where she lived after his death.

Mrs. Brown
Worked for Parker LaMoore in the 1930s to the 1950s.

Haig
* First name unknown. Louis described him as a Scotsman, once an officer in the British-India army. Louis said he was “an officer in one of the Scottish regiments.” Louis knew him in Shanghai in the 1930s, and we don’t know how old he would have been at the time. He may have been involved in some kind of intelligence work. He and Louis shared an apartment for a while, which seems to have been located just off Avenue King Edward VII.

Lola LaCorne
Along with her sister and mother, she was a friend of Louis’s in Paris during World War II. She later taught literature at the Sorbonne and had (hopefully still has) a husband named Christopher.

Dean Kirby
A pal from Oklahoma City in the late 1930s who seems to have been a copywriter or something of the sort. Might have worked for Lusk Publishing.

Bunny Yeager
Girlfriend of Dean Kirby’s from Oklahoma City. Not the famous photographer for
Playboy
.

Virginia McElroy
Girl with whom Louis went to school in Jamestown, North Dakota.

Guardsman Penwill
A British boxer in the period between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s.

Arleen Weston Sherman
A friend of Louis’s from Jamestown, when he was thirteen or fourteen. I think her family visited the LaMoores in Choctaw in the 1930s. Her older sister’s name is Mary; parents’ names are Ralph and Lil.

Harry Bigelow
Louis knew him in Ventura. He had a picture taken with Louis’s mother, Emily LaMoore, at a place named Berkeley Springs around 1929. Louis may have known him at the Katherine mine, near Kingman, Arizona, or in Oregon.

Tommy Pinto
Boxer from Portland; got Louis a job at Portland Manufacturing.

Nancy Carroll
An actress as of 1933. She may have been in the chorus of a show at the Winter Garden in New York and a cabaret in New Jersey where she and her sister danced occasionally, probably during the mid-to late 1920s.

Judith Wood
Actress. Louis knew her in Hollywood in the late 1920s.

Stanley George
The George family relocated from Kingman, Arizona, to Ventura, California, possibly in the late 1920s.

Francis Lederer
* Actor whom Louis knew in late 1920s Los Angeles. I’m looking for anyone who knew him in
Hollywood
between 1926 and 1931.

Lieutenant Rix
Served in the 3622 Quartermaster Truck Co. in Europe in 1944–45.

Pablo De Gantes
* Ex-soldier of fortune who occasionally wrote magazine articles for
Lands of Romance
in the 1930s. This man used several names, and I believe he was actually a Belgian. He lived in Mexico at one time.

Lieutenant King
Traveled to England with Louis when he was shipped overseas in early 1944.

K. C. Gibson or his two nephews
In October 1924, they were crossing New Mexico and Arizona, bound for Brawley, California.

Wilma Anderson
A friend of Louis’s from Oklahoma who worked in the Key campaign headquarters in 1938.

Johnny Annette
A boxer Louis fought a bout with in Woodward, Oklahoma (or Kansas) in the 1930s.

Harry Bell
A boxing promoter Louis worked with in Oklahoma City in the 1930s.

Joe Bickerstaff
* An occasional boxing promoter, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, in the late 1920s.

Pat Chaney
Friend of Louis’s from Choctaw, Oklahoma, in the late 1930s.

Mr. Lettsinger
* An older man whom Louis knew in Klamath Falls in the late 1920s. I think he was from the Midwest or the South.

Tommy Danforth
* A boxing promoter from Prescott, Arizona, in the mid-1920s. Was using the V.A. hospital at Fort Whipple.

Ned DeWitt
* Knew Louis in Oklahoma in the 1930s, also a friend of Jim Thompson.

Austin Fullerton
Sold tickets for athletic events in Oklahoma City in the late 1930s.