If you saw Maggie Rock in a movie, or read about it in a novel by Louis L'Amour, you would recognize it as the kind of craggy butte where hostile Indians might gather before descending on a wagon train in the valley below. But late one recent afternoon, there were just a couple of casual explorers on the ridge, one of them Kathy L'Amour, the novelist's widow, who goes up there a lot.
A fit, lively woman in her 60s who favors embroidered western shirts and lizard boots, she owns Maggie Rock, along with 1,800 acres of spectacular ranchland near this mountain town in the southwest corner of the state. She and her husband bought most of the ranch in 1983 after nearly 20 years of looking for one in the region where he set some 40 of his 116 books, which have sold an astounding 250 million copies."This was a research place for Louis," L'Amour said. "There are three Indian tribes - the Utes, the Navajos and the Apaches - in the area. It's cattle country, sheep country, horse country, mining country."
Just before the wind and the darkening sky (nothing to fool around with at 9,000 feet) chased her back down the precipitous ridge slope, L'Amour remarked on the view - the magnificent valley 1,000 feet below, the 19th-century ranch house and barn the size of matchboxes from this height - and the life of her husband, a self-educated man who died 10 years ago at 80.
"Can you imagine what it was like for him, to go from having nothing to having this?" she said. The ranch is a fine symbol of the empire of Louis (pronounced Louie) L'Amour, the most prolific and beloved writer of westerns - "frontier fiction" in publishing parlance - in American history, though he actually lived most of the year in Los Angeles.
It represents not only the territory he described in his books but also a piece of the world that was earned by his labor after spending the first half of his life in wandering adventures, often in search of work.
In sheer size, the ranch suggests the dimensions of L'Amour's readership: it would take a mammoth basin like this one to hold all the books he's sold, and maybe they wouldn't fit.
The numbers defy belief. The 116 books by Louis L'Amour, most of them paperback originals, are all in print - in print! - from Bantam Books, his publisher for four decades, the last 16 of them published since his death. They include 90 novels, 21 short-story collections, four works of nonfiction and one book of poems, "Smoke From This Altar," which was published first by a tiny press in Oklahoma in 1939 and reprinted by Bantam in 1990. That is his least-selling book, with a mere 107,000 copies in print.
The best-selling book is "Last of the Breed," a contemporary novel about an American Indian pilot shot down in Siberia. (L'Amour never felt constrained by the western genre, and he wrote several books toward the end of his life that were huge crossover successes, appealing both to his longtime fans and other readers who never went near a western.) It reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in 1986 and has 3.75 million copies in print.
"Everything he's written on the fiction side has at least 1 million copies in print," said Stuart Apple-baum, a Bantam vice president who has been L'Amour's publicist since 1975. That does not include "Monument Rock," a just-published hardcover short-story collection that had a first printing of 207,000.
There are 190 million copies of L'Amour's novels out there and 28 million copies of his short-story collections, which probably makes him the best-selling short-story writer of all time. Perhaps most remarkable is that although his work has been published in 26 languages over the years, the vast majority of the books, 223 million, have been sold in the United States and Canada. He has sold close to 40 million books since his death.