Under the Sweetwater Rim
by Louis L'Amour
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Book Summary Information
Author: Louis L'AmourEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1984-09-01
ISBN: 0553247603
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of Under the Sweetwater Rim
Book Review: A troop of Union soldiers and forty bad men - all eyeballing the gold, the girl, and the rogue cavalry officer
Summary: 4 Stars
In 1988 Louis L'Amour began blazing new trails in that undiscovered country, but he leaves behind a legacy of rugged tales set in the Old West. UNDER THE SWEETWATER RIM was first published in 1971 and it's predictably entertaining stuff, a lean and brisk read. L'Amour always was a voracious researcher and this time he places his western drama two hundred miles west of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and as the story travels, he throws in plenty of details regarding the untamed landscape, the historical landmarks, the hardy people, and such. The novel opens with U.S. Army Major Devereaux and his cavalry patrol grimly surveying the site of an ambushed wagon train. It soon dawns on the soldiers that one wagon is mysteriously unaccounted for, this the ambulance wagon packing sixty thousand dollars of payroll in gold... and transporting the Major's lovely daughter, Mary Devereaux.
Major Devereaux is up against it. Indians on the warpath. Scouts on the take. Somewhere out there, forty violent desperadoes lurk, coveting the gold and the women and they're ramrodded by the murderous outlaw Reuben Kelsey. And Devereaux's patrol, comprising mostly of raw recruits, can expect no help from Fort Laramie. Then there's devilish cavalry officer, Lieutenant Tenadore Brian, who went AWOL and absconded with the missing ambulance wagon and the gold and Mary. Major Devereaux, a very concerned father, doesn't at all trust Brian. But Tenadore Brian may just be the only hope left.
There are several intriguing character dynamics which color the story, and I'm not referring to the romantic sub-plot, something which L'Amour doesn't tend to focus on, anyway, in his novels. Instead we get the probing interactions between Ten Brian and Reuben Kelsey, two capable men who a long time ago may have been friends. And then there's Major Devereaux's ongoing distaste for Brian, whom he feels is a ne'er-do-well drifter and not good enough for his daughter. It's an interesting dichotomy because, deep inside, the Major does realize that Brian is an exceptional soldier.
L'Amour, of course, is synonymous with hard-hitting action and, while most times he lends secondary importance to the romance between the cowboy and the girl, he opens up and waxes loquacious and philosophical with the romance of the Old West. It doesn't matter how rough-hewn and uneducated his main characters are, they all bear a love for the land and a respect for nature, and there's always a passage or two in L'Amour's novels in which the writer speaks his heart thru their mouths. And I did say that there's hard-hitting action here, right? It doesn't get better than when the odds are heavily arranged against a Louis L'Amour protagonist. Because that's when the hands slap leather, the lead blisters the air, and the knuckles bleed and get swoll. This is heaven in the eyes of a modern hombre nostalgic for the perilous American Frontier. Nowadays who do we got to look at? The Marlboro Man? Alan Jackson? Billy Ray Cyrus? C'mon, now...
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