Cowboy Chronicler Writes Again

Bad news for writers: It doesn’t get easier.

David Lavender is sure of it. At 92, he is still toiling over his electric typewriter, trying to turn out yet another volume of Western history.

Even after some 40 books, a slew of prestigious awards and a lifetime poured into the craft of narrative, he joins the lamentation of writers everywhere: “That damn first paragraph!” he says.

Like a literary bounty hunter, Lavender has roamed the West, plucking his subjects from lonely places on the plains, Indian reservations, silver mines, cattle drives, the wilderness camps of the fur trappers, the boardrooms of the railroad barons. Along the way, there were a few novels, although Lavender quips that a frail imagination drew him back to history.

“I have to have my plots ready-made,” he says.

While Lavender’s work has earned him a sizable following, he never has attained the superstar status of such historians as Stephen Ambrose, who has been accused of lifting more than half a dozen of Lavender’s passages nearly word for word.

Last month, Forbes magazine’s Web site, www.forbes.com, added to the charges of plagiarism that have beset the perennially best-selling Ambrose. It noted striking similarities between passages in “Nothing Like It in the World,” Ambrose’s recent book about the transcontinental railroad, and “The Great Persuader,” Lavender’s 1970 biography of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington.

For example, Ambrose wrote: “What interested him were the widely spaced saddles in the ridge line. By weaving in and out of them, the railroad could ascend toward the ultimate crest of the mountains on an even grade not in excess of the capability of the locomotives, or a maximum of a hundred feet per mile.”

Three decades earlier, Lavender had written: “What interested him were those widely spaced saddles in the ridgetop. By weaving in and out of them, his railway ... could ascend toward the ultimate crest of the mountain on an even grade not in excess of the capabilities of the locomotives of his time.”

Harsh Words for Fellow Historian

Ambrose has said he regrets not placing quotation marks around the words of others. However, he also has defended such liberal borrowing, pointing out that his sources are named in footnotes.

From his living-room couch, Lavender says that is no defense at all.

Ambrose “tells a good story but he’s sloppy about it,” Lavender contends, criticizing the author for relying on paid researchers, including some family members. “How the hell can you possibly manage something like that?” he asks.

Lavender is known among academics as much for his careful research as for his ability to spin a yarn.

“I think he’s a treasure,” says Tom Andrews, executive director of the Historical Society of Southern California. “He’s not only a bona fide literary writer in the best sense, but also a first-rate historian. He’s been checked out in a number of ways and never found wanting.”

Martin Ridge, a Western historian and former editor of the Journal of American History, says Lavender has managed to write engagingly about the West without romanticizing it.

“He tells the story and lets the chips fall where they may,” says Ridge. “If you know him personally, you know you’re dealing with someone who takes his work seriously--but not himself.”

In search of source material, Lavender has haunted museums and research libraries. Over the years, he has logged countless miles on his travels through the West, riding horses and rafting rivers to steep himself in the places he writes about.

“Why not?” he asks with a wink. “Is it my fault if the fish bite there?”

Home Full of Treasures From Western Travels

In Ojai, his hilltop home is something like his prose--straightforward, with touches of elegance. An orchid sits in the sunlight on the sill of a window looking out to the Topatopa Mountains. On a wall hang a couple of old rifles--one a pre-Civil War weapon that Lavender found on a trek years ago when he took shelter in a long-abandoned cabin. Black-and-white photographs show his family’s old ranch in southwestern Colorado, an endless stretch of sage and scrub where he would like his ashes scattered.

Lavender grew up 20 miles--a two-day horseback ride, he notes--from the tough mining town of Telluride. Although he came from a prominent family-- his grandfather was a Colorado Supreme Court justice--Lavender was a ranch kid down to his bones and had a difficult time in his late teens when he tried to fit in at Princeton.

“I didn’t talk the same, I didn’t think the same, I didn’t act the same,” he says. “I never learned how to play tennis.”

Even so, he picked up a flair for writing and a passion for history--both utterly useless for his postgraduate life riding the range and laboring in a gold mine back home.

He wrote of those days in his first significant book, “One Man’s West,” a collection of sketches that starts with the memorable line: “Came a day when I wanted to get married and needed a stake.”

“One Man’s West” is packed with the kind of vivid descriptions that would come to spice Lavender’s volumes of history. Of a mule packer in the Colorado mountains, he wrote:

“To keep his ears warm he wore a blue bandanna tied over his head, like a European peasant woman, and on top of this was jammed a wide-brimmed black hat, sparkling with frost rime. As further protection against the weather he had grown a thick, short beard, and out of this his nose stuck red as a cherry and adorned with a glittering pendant of moisture that danced and jiggled as he moved....”

Lavender chuckles over the memory of what he calls his “homesick book.”

When “One Man’s West” came out in 1943, Lavender was teaching English at Ojai’s Thacher School, a boarding school where he would lead camping trips and encourage young writers for the next 27 years.

“One Man’s West” led to “The Big Divide,” a history of the Rockies. The rest, as they say, is history: “Let Me Be Free,” the tragic saga of the Nez Perce Indians; “The Way to the Western Sea,” the story of Lewis and Clark’s epic expedition; and works on the Colorado River, San Francisco banker William Ralston, the colonization of the Southwest, the Northwest fur trade, several histories for younger readers, and on and on.

His current project: a look at misguided government efforts to battle forest fires. “It took them 100 years to learn that what they were doing was completely wrong!” he grouses.

Myths Persist, Despite Historian’s Efforts

These days, Lavender moves slowly and is no longer a fixture at the conclaves of Western scholars. He corresponds with former students--some of them men in their 70s who still adore him. Occasionally he devours a detective novel. With his wife Muriel, he keeps up on news of his extended family; his son David is a fund-raiser who splits his time between Ojai and Telluride, and he has a passel of stepchildren and grandchildren.

That Lavender hasn’t vaulted to celebrity status or seen his books turned into movies doesn’t much concern him. He is more exercised by the persistence of Western myths, despite his efforts to lance them.

Here is Lavender on cowboys: “Although they were slaves to a particularly stupid and unattractive animal, they became symbols of the West’s vaunted freedom....”

Life and death in the saloons was downright depressing, as Lavender shows in his account of the funeral for a man killed in a Telluride bordello brawl:

“Behind the entourage straggled a squad of girls from the honky tonks, clutching their long tight skirts as they waded through the hoof-churned, manure-stained slush of the streets ....The throngs on the sidewalks fell momentarily still, each man bleak with his own secret thoughts.”

But myths go on. Cowboys aimed their guns more at rattlesnakes and sick cows than at each other. Sacajawea, the 16-year-old Indian girl who traveled with Lewis and Clark, was not the invaluable guide of legend, Lavender reminds his readers. “Her knowledge of geography, even that of her own homeland, proved almost nonexistent,” he writes.

And Chief Joseph, the eloquent leader of the Nez Perce, never wrote a famous speech that has been repeatedly attributed to him, even on a plaque at an Oklahoma Indian museum.

“Once upon a time I used to distress over these things,” Lavender says as the logs in his living-room fireplace sputter and pop. “But now, that’s just the way it goes.”