Storyteller’s Sanctuary
by Amy Laughinghouse
An 1880 s cabin in Colorado became just the place to sooth the restless, rambling spirit of Louis L’Amour and begin a lasting L’Amour family legacy.

“Cold was the night, and bitter the wind, and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain.”

So begins “Here Ends the Trail,” a short story by one of America’s most prolific and popular writers, the late Louis L’Amour. The author of more than 100 novels, including such classic westerns as Hondo and How the West Was Won, he brought to life some unforgettable protagonists, many of them lonely men with hard pasts, searching for shelter or more than that—a home.

L’Amour eventually found his own peace in an historic log cabin nestled in the La Plata Mountains outside Durango, Colo., where he immersed himself in the solace of nature with his wife Kathy and their children, Beau and Angelique. “He liked to go there to be in the elements—to hike, to chop up the oak brush, to examine the terrain, and see what lived there,” recalls Kathy, whose husband was 75 when they bought the ranch in 1983.

Though the cabin was ostensibly a getaway from their main residence in Los Angeles, L’Amour still rose at 5:30 every morning and pecked away at his IBM Selectric for six or more hours a day. “He loved sitting at the old pine table in the bedroom that he used for a desk, looking out at the meadow, the pond, the weeping willow, and the peony patch I planted,” she says. In fact, L’Amour wrote several novels here before his death in 1988, including Passin’ Through, which is set on the ranch itself.

Though he did finally put down roots, L’Amour knew what it was to be a wandering soul, for, like his heroes, he had taken the long road home. Born in Jamestown, N.D., in 1908, L’Amour left school in the tenth grade, striking out on his own to make a living just as the devastating stranglehold of the Great Depression began to grip the Midwest.

“ He had a tough life,” recalls Kathy, who married L’Amour in 1956. “He had gone to sea, worked in mines, worked on ranches, worked in the lumber country. He never had a home because his family was gone early on. He was alone for a lot of his life.”

During those hard, lean years, L’Amour’s job description ranged from longshoreman to professional boxer to elephant handler. But his wide-ranging travels brought him in contact with larger-than-life characters—legendary lawmen and outlaws, real-life cowboys, and Native Americans—whose tales, coupled with his grandfather’s first-hand recollections of life on the Western Frontier, fueled L’Amour’s imagination.

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