The genesis of the story that became Last of the Breed dates back decades before the book was written. Over the years Louis told different stories about its origin. In one, he met a Siberian aborigine while working on a ship in the Sea of Japan and became intrigued by the similarities between the man and the many Native Americans he had known. Supposedly they docked briefly at Plastun Bay, and Louis met a number of other Siberians.
In another version, soldier of fortune Frank “One-Arm” Sutton supposedly told him stories of Siberia at the Astor Bar in Shanghai. Sutton had indeed spent some time dredging for gold in Siberia before going on to build weapons for various Chinese warlords.
Although I am suspicious of both these tales, Dad did write several short stories set along the Siberian Coast (“Flight to the North,” “Coast Patrol,” and “Wings over Khabarovsk”) in the 1940s. While it seems like an unlikely setting to feature without there being some personal connection, Louis did fall in love with a number of places just by looking at them on a map.
But there was another event that inspired Last of the Breed. In 1960, American pilot Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying over the Soviet Union, just north of modern-day Kazakhstan. Convinced the pilot could not have survived, the American government began a cover-up. In a dramatic piece of political theater, the Soviets finally trotted Powers out after he’d spent a full year in captivity. He eventually returned home when the United States traded Soviet spy William Fisher, aka Rudolf Abel, for his freedom. The incident set back peace talks between Khruschev and Eisenhower, and ended up being a major propaganda victory for the Communists. The U.S. had violated Soviet airspace just as Cold War tensions were beginning to wane.
In later years, my family came to know Sue Powers, Gary’s second wife. She and Dad were active in a charity that a number of writers supported. There were also others who contributed information relating to the story. One was an elderly gentleman who, in the early 1950s, often ate in Tilford’s restaurant at the same time of day as Louis and who had lived in Siberia for some fifteen years. Dad also had a number of Native American friends who contributed either inspiration or information to Last of the Breed. Connie Lavin and Albert White Hat, a Lakota language expert, suggested the name for the character Joe Makatozi (Joe Mack). Ponca Chief Tug Smith, who had been an actor in Shalako, was also helpful in the earliest stages of planning the story. Additionally, there was Librarian of Congress James Billington, who arranged for Dad to get access to some oddly secret maps of the Soviet Union.
Although Dad planned some stories in a fair amount of detail, more often than not once he started writing he rarely referred to any of those notes, relying instead on his memory and whatever path the story took to direct his writing. Going where the story leads, rather than getting locked into one’s original plans, and diving in with single-minded energy are usually excellent qualities in a writer. But sometimes a good idea can get left by the wayside…especially if you write as much as Louis L’Amour did. In the case of Last of the Breed, a significant element somehow got left behind.
Although I had heard some of Dad’s plans for his “Siberian story” considerably earlier, his first journal entry mentioning it is on March 12, 1985:
“Work plans are to complete PASSIN’ THROUGH, which we decided was a better title than STARVATION CREEK and then what Bantam people call a “thriller”…mine has a working title of THE SKULL AND THE ARROW, a contemp. [contemporary] story of Siberia. I’ve had it in mind for 35 years or more. I recall telling the story to a newspaperman (Dewey Linze was his name, I believe) at a bar downtown, I believe after a meeting of the Adventurer’s Club.
A bit of research suggests that Dewey Linze was an aviation writer for the Los Angeles Times…and given that Joe Mack is a pilot, discussing early plans for this story with Linze would have made a lot of sense.
The most interesting thing about this journal entry, however, is the title of the piece. As you can tell from his mention of Starvation Creek, which became Passin’ Through, Louis was often unsure until the last minute what title he was going to use. Similarly, The Skull and the Arrow would go on to become Last of the Breed. However, the original title is the key to a missing element of the novel.
Maybe twenty or thirty years before, Dad wrote a Western short story called “The Skull and the Arrow.” It was not published until 1997, in the collection End of the Drive. But as you will see, at one point Louis intended to use not only the title but the tale itself as the heart of the novel Last of the Breed.
Here is a copy of the short story:
The Skull and the Arrow
Heavy clouds hung above the iron-colored peaks, and lancets of lightning flashed and probed. Thunder rolled like a distant avalanche in the mountain valleys….The man on the rocky slope was alone.
He stumbled, staggering beneath the driving rain, his face hammered and raw. Upon his skull a wound gaped wide, upon his cheek the white bone showed through. It was the end. He was finished, and so were they all…they were through.
Far-off pines made a dark etching along the skyline, and that horizon marked a crossing. Beyond it was security, a life outside the reach of his enemies, who now believed him dead. Yet, in this storm, he knew he could go no further. Hail laid a volley of musketry against the rock where he leaned, so he started on, falling at times.
He had never been a man to quit, but now he had. They had beaten him, not man to man but a dozen to one. With fists and clubs and gun barrels they had beaten him…and now he was through. Yes, he would quit. They had taught him how to quit.
The clouds hung like dark, blowing tapestries in the gaps of the hills. The man went on until he saw the dark opening of a cave. He turned to it for shelter then, as men have always done. Though there are tents and wickiups, halls and palaces, in his direst need man always returns to the cave.
He was out of the rain but it was cold within. Shivering, he gathered sticks and some blown leaves. Among the rags of his wet and muddy clothing, he found a match, and from the match, a flame. The leaves caught, the blaze stretched tentative, exploring fingers and found food to its liking.
He added fuel; the fire took hold, crackled, and gave off heat. The man moved closer, feeling the warmth upon his hands, his body. Firelight played shadow games upon the blackened walls where the smoke from many fires had etched their memories…for how many generations of men?
This time he was finished. There was no use going back. His enemies were sure he was dead, and his friends would accept it as true. So he was free. He had done his best, so now a little rest, a little healing, and then over the pine-clad ridge and into the sunlight. Yet in freedom there is not always contentment.
He found fuel again, and came upon a piece of ancient pottery. Dipping water from a pool, he rinsed the pot, then filled it and brought it back to heat. He squeezed rain from the folds of his garments, then huddled between the fire and the cave wall, holding tight against the cold.
There was no end to the rain…gusts of wind whipped at the cave mouth and dimmed the fire. It was insanity to think of returning. He had been beaten beyond limit. When he was down they had taken turns kicking him. They had broken ribs…he could feel them under the cold, a raw pain in his side.
Long after he had lain inert and helpless, they had bruised and battered and worried at him. Yet he was a tough man, and he could not even find the relief of unconsciousness. He felt every blow, every kick. When they were tired from beating him, they went away.
He had not moved for hours, and only the coming of night and the rain revived him. He moved, agony in every muscle, anguish in his side, a mighty throbbing inside his skull, but somehow he managed distance. He crawled, walked, staggered, fell. He fainted, then revived, lay for a time mouth open to the rain, eyes blank and empty.
By now his friends believed him dead….Well, he was not dead, but he was not going back. After all, it was their fight, had always been their fight. Each of them fought for a home, perhaps for a wife, children, parents. He had fought for a principle, and because it was his nature to fight.
With the hot water he bathed his head and face, eased the pain of his bruises, washed the blood from his hair, bathed possible poison from his cuts. He felt better then, and the cave grew warmer. He leaned against the wall and relaxed. Peace came to his muscles. After a while he heated more water and drank some of it.
Lightning revealed the frayed trees outside the cave, revealed the gray rain before the cave mouth. He would need more fuel. He got up and rummaged in the further darkness of the cave. He found more sticks and carried them back to his fire. And then he found the skull.
He believed its whiteness to be a stick, imbedded as it was in the sandy floor. He tugged to get it loose, becoming more curious as its enormous size became obvious. It was the skull of a gigantic bear, without doubt from prehistoric times. From the size of the skull, the creature must have weighed well over a ton.
Crouching by the firelight he examined it. Wedged in an eye socket was a bit of flint. He broke it free, needing all his strength. It was a finely chipped arrowhead.
The arrow could not have killed the bear. Blinded him, yes, enraged him, but not killed him. Yet the bear had been killed. Probably by a blow from a stone ax, for there was a crack in the skull, and at another place, a spot near the ear where the bone was crushed.
Using a bit of stick he dug around, finding more bones. One was a shattered foreleg of the monster, the bone fractured by a blow. And then he found the head of a stone ax. But nowhere did he find the bones of the man.
Despite the throbbing in his skull and the raw pain in his side, he was excited. Within the cave, thousands of years ago, a lone man fought a battle to the death against impossible odds…and won.
Fought for what? Surely there was easier game? And with the bear half blinded the man could have escaped, for the cave mouth was wide. In the whirling fury of the fight there must have been opportunities. Yet he had not fled. He had fought on against the overwhelming strength of the wounded beast, pitting against it only his lesser strength, his primitive weapons, and his man-cunning.
Venturing outside the cave for more fuel, he dragged a log within, although the effort made him gasp with agony. He drew the log along the back edge of his fire so that it was at once fuel and reflector of heat.
Burrowing a little in the now warm sand of the cave floor, he was soon asleep.
For three weeks he lived in the cave, finding berries and nuts, snaring small game, always conscious of the presence of the pine-clad ridge, yet also aware of the skull and the arrowhead. In all that time he saw no man, either near or far…there was, then, no search for him.
Finally it was time to move. Now he could go over the ridge to safety. Much of his natural strength had returned; he felt better. It was a relief to know that his fight was over.
At noon of the following day he stood in the middle of a heat-baked street and faced his enemies again. Behind him were silent ranks of simple men.
“We’ve come back,” he said quietly. “We’re going to stay. You had me beaten a few weeks ago. You may beat us today, but some of you will die. And we’ll be back. We’ll always be back.”
There was silence in the dusty street, and then the line before them wavered, and from behind it a man was walking away, and then another, and their leader looked at him and said, “You’re insane. Completely insane!” And then he, too, turned away and the street before them was empty.
And the quiet men stood in the street with the light of victory in their eyes, and the man with the battered face tossed something and caught it again, something that gleamed for a moment in the sun.
“What was that?” someone asked.
“An arrowhead,” the man said. “Only an arrowhead.”
The following is an outline that shows how Louis planned to incorporate “The Skull and the Arrow” into the plot of Last of the Breed. In these early notes, Joe Mack is referred to as “Warfeather”:
The foregoing is the beginning of the story and merely serves to establish the characters and the opening of the story. Warfeather does escape, and is pursued into the taiga, that vast forest 2,200 miles long and 600 miles wide that is largely virgin timber. Here it becomes a chase with Warfeather, the man who is still at heart a Sioux Indian, using all his skill, training and ingenuity to escape, and the Yakut using all his to score a capture. Yet the latter has behind him the strength and power of the Soviet government and the MVD. Zamatev directs much of the chase, and time and again as they seem about to capture Warfeather, he eludes them.
In the taiga he comes upon a small settlement of escapees from the prison camps. One of these is a Czech girl, young, blonde, and lovely. Actually, he is taken to the settlement when badly wounded, and there he is nursed back to health, and stays with them until strong again.
When he is again able to start out, the girl goes with him part of the way to set him upon his path, and then they part with the plan, naturally a plan with many ifs, to meet on the coast of Siberia near Plastun Bay, opposite northern Japan. There he will pick her up with a plane. This is if he can escape, and if she can make it.
He starts on, and soon they are once more on his trail. He is trapped, captured, tortured and horribly beaten, but when half dead, and they are sure he cannot move let alone escape, he does escape. Bloody and beaten, he staggered on, gets into the forest, and fights his way toward the high, lonely peaks. There, at last, in a driving rain storm that is turning to sleet, still only half conscious and weak from loss of blood, he gets into a cave.
Shivering with chill, he starts a fire, and looking for wood, pulls from the sandy floor of the cave, the skull of a huge cave bear. Wedged in the corner of the eye-socket is the head of an arrow.
Until this point he has been ready to quit. No man can be expected to do more than he has done. His body had been terribly beaten, his strength drained away, and he is starving, weaponless, and seemingly without any resource. Even his driving will, his determination to be free, even these are gone.
Yet huddled beside his fire, he stares at the arrowhead and thinks of what it must mean. Here, within this cave, some feeble man had fought for his life against that bear! Suddenly he is obsessed with the need to know if the man survived. He digs and digs, searching for human bones, but he finds none…A feeble human being, with his pitifully small weapons, fought for survival with a cave bear that might have weighed 3,000 lbs! (The Kodiak grizzlies weighed better than 1,600 lbs, and in the older days it is claimed many were killed that weigh over 2,000. The cave bear was larger.)
This realization gives him courage to try again, and so, with the arrowhead for a pocket piece, he does. He is at this point on the edge of the timber country, and before him is the tundra, and beyond that, somewhere, the Arctic Ocean.
He goes on, following the ancient migration route of his people, and here and there he finds the remains of old campfires and he goes on until there is, at last, a showdown with Alekhin.
The two meet when Alekhin is alone, and there is a fight near a crevasse in the ice. They roll far down a snowy mountainside fighting like two primeval savages. The end of the fight is not shown.
The story reverts to the opening scene. Colonel Zamatev sits alone in his office, and from the package he takes a human scalp, marked with a distinctive blaze of white that shows it to be Alekhin’s scalp. Enclosed with it is a bit of birch bark on which is written:
“This was once a custom of my people, in my life time I shall take two. This is the first.”
The only notes I can find on the creation of “The Skull and the Arrow” read like this:
He is beaten—left for dead—He gets up and away—he decides to leave—over the border there is escape—then he finds the skull and he returns—
The discovery of the skull and the reconstruction of the fight in the cave is a wonderful mechanism to motivate Joe Mack/Warfeather to go on. That this inspiration comes by way of what was possibly one of Joe’s ancient ancestors is equally terrific. The bear, being a symbol of Russia, is just the icing on the cake.
Because this section is so rich in thematic and character development potential, I have assumed that Louis simply got so caught up in the process of writing Last of the Breed that he forgot to include it. Perhaps neglecting it was a conscious choice, but I have my doubts.
His journal shows us the speed with which he could write a story when he was primed and ready to go:
October 1, 1985—Two months in which to do the Siberia story. Not enough, but it has been in my thoughts for 30 yrs.
October 15, 1985—Working on Siberia story. No title as yet.
December 14, 1985—I am drawing to the close of the Siberian book, no title as yet, and not at all sure if I have done it well enough. In fact I’m sure I haven’t. Next I shall do two books, the long delayed HAUNTED MESA and…THE EDUCATION OF A WANDERING MAN.
Earlier on the same page he wrote:
“Every bit of blank paper is a challenge, and the worst of it is, at 77, almost 78 I am just learning to write, and only beginning to learn. There is so much more I want to know, so many books to read.”
And then:
December 26, 1985—Tomorrow we leave for Colo. For 10 days or so. Bantam wants a pic of me in the snow for the Siberia book, just finished. My tentative title is SWIFTLY, INTO THE NIGHT. I imagine it will be published as something else….
As you can see, he is still playing around with titles, even at this late date.
December 28, 1985—May get some static from the Siberian book but one must accept new challenges or at least, the challenge of new trails.
Jan. 9—Nancy Ellison here to take pics for the LAST OF THE BREED, my Siberian book. Not happy with that title but did not come up with anything better. This their suggestion. However, it does fit.
Within a month or two of Last of the Breed’s release, a number of movie companies were competing to purchase the rights. Fairly quickly (film contracts are always very complicated), a sale was arranged with Columbia Tri Star.
It is strangely common in Hollywood for odd and often counterproductive myths to become associated with a project. These stories stick like glue and seem to be accepted throughout the motion picture industry even though it’s often impossible to tell how they are even being relayed from one person to another.
The myth related to Last of the Breed was that it had to be a big-budget production and had to be made as a fairly superficial summer action film. From the little I was able to gather, it was always seen as a melding of Top Gun and Rambo, and Joe Mack was required to become the sort of character commonly played by many of the overly slick action stars of the era.
However, the project never really gelled, and over the years more and more expensive screenwriters were thrown at it, to the point where I imagine the production finally racked up so much in expenses that it was no longer seen as potentially profitable.
Around 2000, Last of the Breed was picked up in what is called “turnaround” by Miramax, but it didn’t have any luck at that studio either. It remained stuck in development, with all of those silly myths from fifteen years earlier still attached. When Disney sold off Miramax in 2010, the rights seem to have been lost in the shuffle. While I have spoken to many of the original players, none give the impression that the project has any chance of being recovered.
During the two years it took to produce the art for the graphic novel Law of the Desert Born, I worked, off and on, writing a comic book adaptation of Last of the Breed. It was a great learning experience, and I recognized many of the reasons why adapting the screenplay for Last of the Breed had been so difficult…at least if you wanted to do it well.
In the novel, establishing how Joe Mack got to Siberia takes only a few sentences. But the nature of movies, which rely much less on the audience’s imagination, would require that subject to be a larger part of any film. The book begins and ends with Zamatev. This is an indication that he and Joe are equally important characters. Thus the story is both an adventure-escape thriller, about an American trying to flee Siberia, and a tale about the downfall of Colonel Arkady Zamatev. To do the novel justice and to make a good film, the two story lines must be interwoven. I’m not sure that idea was ever considered by the studios. Big stars don’t like sharing too much screen time, and the idea was always that the picture was going to be a star vehicle.
In a novel, Joe’s backstory could be wonderfully vague, left to the reader’s imagination after just a few suggestive passages. In a film or graphic novel, the audience would need to see, rather than simply be told, how Joe became the sort of man who could walk out of Siberia. Letting audiences know more about who Joe was before he came to Siberia or even entered the air force is probably essential, but the necessary details would also have been quite time-consuming to establish.
The wonderful thing about flashing back to reveal Joe’s past is that it would give us some relief from the wilderness and allow for some interactions with other characters. The equally wonderful thing about being able to use the material from the short story “The Skull and the Arrow” is that the scenes in the cave would perfectly set up the moment when Joe makes the transformation from jet pilot to ancient Indian. When he emerges, he can be a different man. Whether that material is necessary to the novel is an open question. For a film, however, it would have been vital.
As we finished the Law of the Desert Born graphic novel, I discovered we would not be able to go on to a larger and more ambitious project, so Last of the Breed was shelved. Since Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a forum for unfinished work, however, you can find a good deal of the first draft of the Last of the Breed comic book script and some further commentary at louislamourslosttreasures.com.
Beau L’Amour
July 2019