Families...

I value family. It's one of my first and core values. So I suppose it's no surprise that I like the writing of Louis L'Amour. Nearly all of his westerns (and there's a bunch) place a priority on family.

Let's be clear... there's a big difference between family and family values. The phrase "family values" has been co-opted by certain groups to mean things very different than what I'm talking about.

Let's use L'Amour's Sackett family as an example. Traced through several hundred years and 17 books, nearly every book and member of the family reminisces about the previous generations and hardships they faced, and how the current family member would like to improve the lot of the overall family. Take Tyrel and Orrin Sackett in The Daybreakers. Brothers moving west in the years after the Civil War, settling in northern Arizona and one of their first priorities is sending for their mother and younger family members to set them up on a ranch. Or Tell Sackett in Mojave Crossing; where he crosses paths with another family member, Nolan Sackett, from a different branch of the family(Cumberland Gap vs. Clinch Mountain... fodder for another post). Tell and Nolan are ostensibly on different sides of the fight... but in the end find that blood truly is thicker than anything else.

In short, when faced with any kind of difficulty, the Sacketts could count on family members backing them up. Not all of the Sacketts were angels, nor always on the right side of the law, but generally they shared a certain rough morality of right and wrong.

That's my take, and this post went in a much different direction than I intended... I'll try again later to write what I actually meant to write.