To the person who reads with a slightly less abandoned mind, and to the critic who does not dismiss L'Amour with ridicule and contempt, L'Amour's novels are not just the same old story with the hero of each new volume given a different name and a different colored horse. His books have changed over the years, independently of story lines or plot formulas, according to an apparent change in moral and historical purpose. L'Amour's career can be divided into three phases—early, middle, and recent—and the novels from each phase reflect a change in his use of historical detail accompanied by a change in moral focus. (p. 150)
The novels of [the] early phase are entertaining in their unbridled violence, their directness of moral utterance, and their frequent (if pedantic) tidbits of Western lore and trivia…. Two of the novels from this period, Utah Blaine … and Showdown at Yellow Butte …, reflect L'Amour's simplest use of history and his most direct statement of morality…. In both of these books, history is the setting but not the subject. Historical range wars such as the Lincoln County War and the Mason County War, and mention of contemporary gunfighters such as Clay Allison and Wild Bill Hickok, constitute the backdrop of the land wars of these two novels. In addition, we are treated to details about pistols, rifles, and shotguns that were used during that period of time. But neither of these books attempts to articulate or depict history itself; they are, as Henry James said of romantic fiction, "at large and unrelated," isolated excursions into a fictional and stylized Wild West. Out of these two conventional stories of the struggle for land come the expected moral conclusions: it is wrong to defraud the government of land, it is wrong to grab land from honest homesteaders, and it is wrong to settle the land without having reverence for it. It is right to love the land, to care for one's horse, and to give up the driftin' life in favor of settling down to married life and ranching. And along the way we learn a little lore as well, such as "Man freezes mightly quick, drinkin' whisky," and that a man can boil water in a cup made of birch bark. All in all, the lore, the trivia, the historical detail, and the morality, along with the numerous shootings and fistfights, add up to pretty light material—even for L'Amour.
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