Sackett (The Sacketts, No 6) [Mass Market Paperback]

Louis L'Amour (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Sacketts | Publication Date: January 1, 1981

In Sackett, Louis L’Amour introduces readers to a wandering man with a desire to settle down and build a good life.

Hard circumstances have made William Tell Sackett a drifter, but now he hungers for a place he can’t name yet knows he has to find. South of the Tetons he comes upon a ghost of a trail that leads him through a keyhole pass into a lonely, alien, yet beautiful valley—a valley that holds a fortune in gold.

Then he finds an even greater treasure: beautiful Ange Kerry, a courageous and resourceful woman. Yet the harsh ways it takes to preserve his claim and his life could be the one thing that drives Ange away forever.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Tell Sackett is a drifter longing to settle down, but after shooting one of the infamous Bigelow brothers, he figures it's time to mosey on down the trail once more. As he wanders into the Sangre de Cristos, he goes through a keyhole pass that leads him into a cave that has not been entered in many years. In this lonely spot, with winter rapidly approaching, Tell Sackett discovers gold...and something else he does not expect. Unfortunately, the Bigelow brothers are not far behind him, so in the tradition of L'Amour, a humdinger of a showdown ensues. How Tell meets his destiny makes for a rousing tale, and David Strathairn's narration is perfect. He sounds so gravelly and Western that this reviewer is reminded of a line from Blazing Saddles that hails a speech at a town meeting as "authentic Western gibberish"! Sackett is like that, filled with "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" philosophy so intrinsic to Western adventure novels. L'Amour was a visual writer, and the bygone world of the Western frontier is painted so exquisitely that even listeners who normally turn up their noses at the genre will enjoy this one. Highly recommended. Barbara Perkins, Irving P.L., TX

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

William Tell Sackett had followed a different path from his younger brothers, but his name, like theirs, was spoken with respect and just a little fear. Where Orrin had brought law and order from New Mexico to the plains of Montana, backed up by the gunfighting talents of his brother Tye, Tell Sackett's destiny drew him to Texas after he had to kill a man. There, in the high, lonesome country, he came upon a vein of pure gold. All he'd wanted was enough to buy a ranch, but he soon learned that gold had ways of its own with men.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (January 1, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553276840
• ISBN-13: 978-0553276848
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.5 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #130,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"I think of myself in the oral tradition--as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of a campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--as a storyteller. A good storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour could trace his own in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, "always on the frontier." As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs, including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, and miner, and was an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. During his "yondering" days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could talk." After developing a widespread following for his many frontiers and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

The recipient of many great honor and awards, in 1983 Mr. L'Amour became the first novelist to ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis L'Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour publishing tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not THE Sackett, just SACKETT!, July 27, 2000

By 

Denny Smith - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sackett (The Sacketts, No 6) (Mass Market Paperback)

The title of this book is simply SACKETT, and it is the best of the series, even better than The Daybreakers and To the Far Blue Mountauns. Tell is my favorite of the Sackett brothers. He is the easiest to identify with, and I enjoyed reading this book, which introduces you to one of L'Amour's best characters. Sackett is a good book for anyone just starting to read L'Amour and is a good lead-in to the rest of the Sackett Series.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cantering across the stereotypic West, September 21, 2010

By 

Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Sackett (The Sacketts, No 6) (Mass Market Paperback)

"... if the folks who believe in law, justice and a decent life for folks are to be shot down by those who believe in violence, nothing makes much sense. I believe in justice, I believe in being tolerating of other folks, but I pack a big pistol ... and will use it when needed." - Tell Sackett in SACKETT (while making a promo sound bite for the NRA)

"I'm just a man tries to do the right thing as well as he knows. Only, the way I figure, no man has the right to be ignorant. In a country like this, ignorance is a crime. If a man is going to vote, if he's going to take part in his country and it government, then it's up to him to understand." - Tell Sackett in SACKETT (while espousing, perhaps, English literacy as a prerequisite for voter registration)

Last Sunday, I found myself in an unusual (for me) and precarious situation. I was left with nothing to read while waiting for my wife to conclude her gym session. (I'm not an unmitigated lump; I'd just completed my 45-minute workout. I'm just not as driven.) For all I knew, I might be lingering for a seeming eternity if she'd gotten up a good head of steam on the treadmill. Luckily, the YMCA facility we frequent has a book exchange corner where members can donate used volumes. Pawing through the inordinately large number of bodice-ripper romance novels, I discovered a dilapidated copy of SACKETT, one in a series by Louis L'Amour about the fictional Sackett family of the American Old West.

Mind you, though my Mom discovered L'Amour several years ago and I, as a dutiful son, acquired for her all of this author's books I could find - dozens upon dozens, I've never read one of his sagebrush operas myself. The novelized Old West is rarely visited by me, though Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry was magnificent, especially the incomparable TV miniseries adaptation Lonesome Dove with Robert Duvall.

I read the first twenty pages of this 150-page paperback before my wife emerged sweaty but triumphant. Surprisingly, I found the book engaging enough to take home and finish before continuing with Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever.

Here, William Tell Sackett, the oldest of three Sackett sons, is in his third decade of a hard, wandering life. While his younger brothers got themselves some book learnin', he rode the Mississippi flatboats, prospected the Nevada Comstock, fought Johnny Reb with Grant, tussled with Injuns in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Texas, and drove doggies to Montana. The reader initially finds a homesick Tell as he's on his way to New Mexico to visit Ma and his siblings and as he stumbles across an isolated gold mine first excavated by long-dead Spanish conquistadors who'd presumably gotten themselves lost in the wilderness. And where there's gold, a heap of trouble is sure to follow.

SACKETT is, I gather, Western pulp fiction at its most formulaic. The plot contains the standard elements: the square-jawed, noble (and singing!) cowboy, the faithful horse, contemptible scoundrels, weather inclement enough to kill city dudes and the otherwise foolhardy, close-run escapes, desperate shootouts, spectacularly wild terrain, lost treasure re-discovered, and, since a cowpoke's horse can provide only so much companionship and can't cook up a mess of sourdough biscuits over the campfire, the girl of the hero's fevered dreams. (There are no marauding redskins. Perhaps they'd already been slaughtered or confined to a reservation to run a gambling hall.) LONESOME DOVE is just as predictable, of course, but SACKETT's much shorter length only accentuates the recipe for the creation of such in the genre while keeping plot subtleties to a minimum; it's a very fast read. No wonder Mom went through them so quickly and kept me on the rummage for more.

I ordinarily wouldn't give SACKETT more than three stars since I suspect there's not much to distinguish it one way or another from its numerous sister L'Amour Westerns on the bookshelf. But, since the book (and probably any one its siblings) is the absolutely perfect, mindless diversion should you find yourself in the slow line at the postal orifice or immovable on a freeway stopped dead by an overturned farm produce truck, I'll gift four.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This book is good, April 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Sackett (The Sacketts, No 6) (Mass Market Paperback)

The novel SACKETT is about a young man named Tell Sackett. He fled to Texas where he discovers a vein of gold. After the locals find out some of them begin to get greedy. They try to do a number of things to Tell but nothing can discourage him. In the end Tell gats the gold and gets the ranch he always wanted. This book was very good just because of the fact that he puts so much great detail into the novel everything seems so real. It was an excellent book.