Brionne by Louis L’Amour (1968)

This is the kind of standalone Western novel I needed this week, especially after my long and disappointing attempt to try and read Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). That story was so melodramatic and sappy, I thought it might turn me off forever to Westerns. But then I read Brionne.

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Brief Sumarry of Brionne

Although the story begins with 7-year-old Mat Brionne, this is not a children’s story. You find that out quickly enough when Mat’s mother Anne chooses to do what she does, rather than be raped by the men who’ve burned her house down.

Mat Brionne is not the star of this story, but rather it’s his father, Major James Brionne, confidante of General Grant in Virginia who’s deciding to bury his sorrow over losing his sweet Anne by taking his boy West—a place to hide, to grow, to be free “where nobody knows and nobody cares.” (9)

West in this case means the foothills of the Uintah range (where my sister has been living for nigh on 20 years, incidentally). Here Brionne meets such characters as Dutton Mowry and Miranda Loften, and here he rescues his new friends from thieves seeking to steal some silver—and to murder Major Brionne while they’re at it.

Another Solid Yarn

Although this book is just a shade over 100 pages, it is thoroughly engaging. As with most L’Amour tales I’ve read thus far, this story is raw, genuine, believable and detailed despite its brevity. Stacked up against Zane Grey, even this one-off tale from L’Amour is a mansion compared to Grey’s little playhouse.

An Incredible Writer, Not Just a Famous Author

Louis L’Amour didn’t become famous for his plotting alone, however. He is genuinely an expert writer, able to draw solid, quotable lines from his characters’ mouths without seemingly any real effort. Need some examples?

Brionne proffers this life-guiding advice to young Mat:

I want you to be whatever it takes to make you happy…and whatever you do, I want you to do it the best way you can, and then try to do it a little better still. … I do want you to be warrior enough to fight, if necessary, for what you believe, and for what is right. (36)

And he again later shares this:

If you listen, you learn. If you learn to really see things and to really listen, half your troubles are over. (51)

Through his characters, L’Amour also voices this opinion about the state of the West in the late 19th century:

We are naked and alone here in the West. We have no law to protect us—only scattered and limited governments in the towns or the territories. The strong have come here because it is a place for the strong; but all of the strong are not good men, and if we are to survive, if we are to become a land of homes and people, evil men must not be allowed to persist in their evil. (81)

And while I acknowledge Zane Grey’s ability to paint a gorgeous landscape with words occasionally, Louis L’Amour tends to do it in every book. I love these two descriptions of the Western geology, which most normal people describe with one word: “desolate.”

A black, shattered cliff towered on his left, the mountain fell away in a steep slide to the timberline below, and there he could see a gray wall of long dead trees, some still standing, some tumbled about, limbs spread out as if in groping, or flung up starkly to the sky, tree trunks like the mummified bodies of some ancient battlefield. A slide had killed them, or a stroke of lightning, leaping along the mountain, ricocheting from peak to peak, cliff-face to boulder to tree. (93)

These peaks, too, would disappear someday. They would be worn down one day, polished and ancient, their hard-shouldered youth as nothing before the timeless patience of wind and water, of heat and cold, of growth and decay. (102)

Conclusion

I’m not by any stretch done with reading Louis L’Amour. Each book I read tends to be better than the last. While I know that ain’t sustainable, I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

So far, my favorite Louis L’Amour novel has been The Last of the Breed (1986). What’s yours?

©2026 E.T.

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