Down the Long Hills

Rating:
Summary: ONE OF L'AMOUR'S BEST
Review: DOWN THE LONG HILLS is a story of courage, passion and drive and who cares if the hero in question is but seven years old. Good literature was never about strict adherence to historical or physical fact. We usually call those history or science, respectively.

No, in this book L'Amour seems to let his confident writing skills and his imagination run free. He asks the reader to imagine what would happen if a frontier-trained lad, Hardy Collins, was forced to make his way cross country with nothing more than a three-year-old girl, Betty Sue Powell, a wonderful, almost magical horse, Big Red and a head filled with the knowledge gained from working side-by-side with a loving but tough western father, Scott Collins.

Together, Hardy, Betty Sue and Big Red brave everything from the weather to a grizzly to scummy horse thieves, all the while being tracked by a Cheyenne brave who wants this horse of horses. The story flows extremely well culminating in a classic L'Amour showdown.

A great western for the entire family.

And if you ever get a chance to see the movie of the same title you'll love it too. It's about as faithful an adaptation to an original book as I have ever seen.

Douglas McAllister

Rating:
Summary: My All Time Favorite Luis L'Amour!
Review: Down the Long Hills is as far as I know, the only book Louis L'Amour wrote where the main characters are kids, little kids at that.
I have now read perhaps a hundred books by L'Amour and I have enjoyed every single one of them, even if I did find a few of them to be not nearly as good as most of them. This one though, Down The Long Hills, it is my favorite! After I'd read it I gave a copy to my sister, who is a second grade teacher. She read it and loved it too, and I doubt if she had ever read any Westerns before. She was so impressed on how tough the little boy and little girl in the story were...at how much they knew, compared to children now who have things so much easier. My sister is now reading Down the Long Hills to her own classes, a few pages each day, and the kids are all captivated by it.
I fully expect that if this book were promoted as a kids' book, or as a young adult book, that it would become a huge, smash it. But don't think that the book is just for kids because it isn't at all. Adults will love this book too, for sure.
I am a writer myself with five published books to my credit and I know and understand how difficult it is to write a book where the action just jumps off the page. No writer of Westerns was more a master of the craft than Luis L'Amour, and this little book may well be his finest.
All of Louis L'Amour's books are fun to read and action packed but this story really gets to you. The first few pages of Down the Long Hills are as well crafted as any novel I've ever read. The reader is immediately tossed head over heels right into the action and the fast paced adventure never lets up for a second. Down the Long Hills is a wonderful, marvelous tall tale, an all around terrific read. I recommend it highly!



Rating:
Summary: 5 Golden Spurs as little boy lost makes his way
Review: Having seen a number of movies and TV shows based on Louis L'Amour's novels, and having listened to a number of his stories on audiotape, I thought I would read some of his stories that won Golden Spur awards. To my surprise Down the Long Hills was the only one I could find. It is an excellent tale and a winner on all accounts.

Down the Long Hills is really a novella. The paperback version is only 150 pages long and a quick read. I almost gave up on it because I thought it was a children's story. While it is written simply enough such that a juvenile reader could enjoy it, it is written for adults. The reader can identify what it is like to be a child in the wilderness, abandoned and without parents. A parent can identify with the fear of losing a child.

The story features a 7-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl who follows him escaping an Indian massacre. The boy, appropriately named Hardy, must try and find his father while being tracked by Indians and 2 crooks. Hardy uses every trick he has learned in his short life to throw the bad guys off his trail yet leave signs for his father. Eventually all parties converge for a rip-snorting climax.

This is a great western, if not politically correct, in this day and age. The only problem that I had with it is that some of the dates don't work. Hardy's father was supposed to be over 15 when the Royal Navy pressed him. Yet the story is set in 1848. Given that the Napoleonic wars ended 33 years before the story and that the Royal Navy had to downsize decommissioning sailors not pressing them, Hardy's father is either a lot older than he seems in the story or L'Amour has an anachronism. However, this is a minor point.

Down the Long Hills is a great story and shows why L'Amour should have received more critical acclaim than he did.

Rating:
Summary: HISTORIAN MY FOOT
Review: I don't buy Comanches on the Oregon Trail. I don't buy two kids as the lone survivors of a Comanche massacre of a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, who have to travel west for hundreds of miles from the scene alone to make it with a big stud horse to find the boy's Pa at Ft. Bridger. I don't buy the boy's father trying to find them and following tracks of a horse where the horse hasn't yet trod. I don't buy the two kids not finding a soul on the deserted Oregon Trail because it's late in the year. Someone rode that trail often, day and night every day of the year, over every foot of the trail, from the time it was opened, either Army, or civilian travel was constant. This is malarkey by a man who had a reputation as a historian based on reader ignorance, not his own knowledge. That and PR hype.

Sorry, this is baloney and so are most of his other books and stories. For example, Hondo, where his reputation as a "historian" was first born in a PR conference. In Hondo it is obvious that Looie first wrote just a book, set roughly in the never-never land of traditional Westerns. When his promoting geniuses tried to make it over into a historial tour de force, they fell on their faces, and did him no favor so far as reputation went. Bank account is something else.

I recall standing in my back yard while my horse shoer stopped and spit tobacco juice and said, "I was readin' Hondo last night. It's fairly obvious that when he said "there was no water between Lordsburg and the Fort, he meant Ft. Huachuca over there. What did he think that is over there behind me?" He motioned toward the nearby San Pedro River. "It's sure as hell between Lordsburg and the fort. And get this: this clown is carryin' a forty pound saddle across the supposedly waterless desert. What the hell for? You wouldn't make a mile with a saddle. But is sure looked good in the picture on the cover of the book. If they called this guy Looie Manure they'd come closer to the truth. I threw the damn book in the wastebasket."

Looie was a good old boy who wrote an interesting story, and I don't begrudge him his readership any more tahn I begrudge fast good joints their customers who may not even know what a five star restaurant is, or care, but let's not take that historian" business too seriously.

Rating:
Summary: ONE OF L'AMOUR'S BEST
Review: I have read all of L'Amour's books, and this is one of the first ones I read (at the same age Hardy is in the book - 7).

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that I only read Westerns - I'm a voracious reader and if it's good literature, I'll read it!

I would recommend this book to an adult or to a child. The action may not be as fast-paced as some of the other Louis L'Amour books, but the attention to detail and the explanation of the survival decisions that the children make are excellent. It was definitely a fun read.

I'd recommend it for any child who likes the outdoors or is interested in history -- and also to those who are looking for a good book for a child who may not have found a 'reason' to love reading yet. This book might do it for them!

Rating:
Summary: Golden Spur!
Review: L'amour gets his spur with this short novel. Seven year old ,aptly named, Hardy survives a Wagon train massacre along with a three year old girl Betty Sue. He has to keep both of them alive as they undertake a long prairie journey to find his father. Descriptive and fast paced this story is told from several different perspectives, Hardy's, The Indian trailing them to steal their horse, the worried father out looking for his son, and a couple of bad men the kids unfortunately run across. We even get a Grizzly bear's perspective for a few lines. I wondered what the title "Down the Long Hills" could mean since they travel over prairie. Well it turns out that the prairie out west is really in a slow gradient and not perfectly flat thus the "long hills" of the title. "Down the Long Hills" won best Western novel of the year in 1968 and was awarded the Golden Spur.