larger than life buffalo statue that is black with brown shoulders fills the frame

Louis L’Amour

World’s Largest Buffalo
Jamestown, North Dakota

By Sheila Liming

The most famous writer to ever come out of North Dakota never wrote anything that takes place there. Louis L’Amour often talked about revisiting his home state, which he left at the age of fifteen. But he didn’t succeed in doing that until he was well into his seventies, when his induction into the state’s hall of fame lured him back at last.

Jamestown, North Dakota, is a curious place, and one that delights in making much of its status as L’Amour’s hometown, despite his reluctance about ever seeing it again. Its skyline, so to speak, is dominated by a buffalo — the world’s largest buffalo, to be exact. The twenty-six foot-tall figure, which was commissioned in the 1950s as a ploy to ensnare motorists on I-94, presides over hills that rise so gently, they barely merit use of the word. Further off the highway, and just visible through the buffalo’s anatomically incorrect undercarriage, is the town itself (pop: 15,750). Its squat, brick buildings are intermixed with houses built in the American foursquare, or “cornbelt cube,” style, their hipped roofs designed to keep off the snow. Some of the brick buildings would have been there before L’Amour was, but the cornbelt cubes likely date from right around the time of his birth in 1902.

North Dakota is where the West meets the Midwest. The state is huge and thus big enough to contain the multitudes indicated by both geographical designations. L’Amour, though, was drawn to only one of them in particular — the rugged West of his fantasies, not the Midwest of his experiences. Jamestown sits about an hour west of Fargo, on the eastern side of the state and so has more in common with its neighbor Minnesota, topographically speaking, than with the scorched and mountainous Western landscape that plays such an important role in his fiction. In drawing inspiration for his books and stories, L’Amour set his gaze westward, summoning visions of bloody battles that took place against a backdrop of desert buttes and mesas, land which he termed “Indian country.” He was, as historical photos indicate, compulsively clad in a cowboy hat and oversized silver belt buckle, even after he moved to Los Angeles and settled into a career in Hollywood.

I first visited L’Amour’s hometown in 2014, though not exactly by choice. Rather, I was traveling the state as part of a bus tour for new University of North Dakota faculty. The bus dropped us off at the buffalo; we were given bottles of sarsaparilla and a few hours to poke around the attached tourist facility known as Frontier Village.

Much like Louis L’Amour once did, Frontier Village combines Western identity with Midwestern geography. You can ride a horse-drawn stagecoach there; you can gaze upon a disturbing collection of hollow-eyed stares in its doll museum; and you can wander amongst buildings that have been plucked from their original prairie environs and deposited there for the sake of posterity. Among them is Louis L’Amour’s so-called “Writer’s Shack,” though he never wrote or published anything while living in North Dakota. It’s a one-room, wooden house — structure? cabin? nay, shack is the only word that works here — containing paperback copies of all of his “117 published novels” (the real number is, apparently, 86 though after his death, L’Amour’s son Beau continued to write and publish books under his father’s name, extending his oeuvre considerably). They’re arranged in a plexiglass display case on the far wall, alongside a few of his typewriters and a placard offering a dubiously fact-checked version of his biography.

I had heard of L’Amour before I visited his Frontier Village “Writer’s Shack,” of course; my grandparents’ spare bedroom, located in the basement of their ranch-style home in Snohomish, Washington, was lined with his books. But I can’t say that I was much of a fan, or that visiting his Writer’s Shack in Jamestown succeeded in turning me into one. There is an intriguing bleakness to be found at the site of this makeshift memorial to him in Jamestown, though. Much like the rest of its Frontier Village surroundings, the Writer’s Shack strives to commemorate an authentic vision of Western history via a familiar if rather problematic species of Midwestern fantasy. The Midwest, after all, is not the West; if you take I-94 out of Fargo, away from Minnesota and towards the Montana border, you’ll see what I mean. The flat, level plains of the cornbelt give way to arid grasslands that are only good for grazing, just as the trucker caps of beet truck drivers on the eastern side of the state give way to Stetsons in the west.

L’Amour’s career, it could be argued, was a direct product of the confrontation between the romanticized West he barely knew and the Midwestern prairies he knew all too well. In the same way that the world’s largest buffalo was born as a means of coaxing tourists out of their cars, so might his literary legacy be seen as an attempt to coax the “west” out of the “Midwest” and thus renovate the conditions of culture and geography that he was born into.

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College and the author of three books: What a Library Means to a Woman (2020), Office (2020), and most recently, Hanging Out (2023). Her writing has appeared in venues like The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Globe and Mail. She lives, works, and plays the accordion (and bagpipes) in Burlington, Vermont.