Book review: “Guns from Thunder Mountain” by Clair Huffaker

At the start of Clair Huffaker’s 1958 Guns from Thunder Mountain, Larimer is riding with some of his new gold-mining partners and approaching a small log cabin on horseback when he sees a scared old man run out of the cabin.

He was about twenty feet from the cabin when a gun boomed from the doorway behind him.  He threw his hands up and slammed forward on his face.  The gun roared twice more, and his body jerked under the impact of the slugs, then lay still.

“What the hell!” yells Larimer as he jumps from his horse and kneels next to the dead man.  Looking up, he sees Henry Coffin, one of his partners, with a Joslyn revolver aimed directly at him.

“An old man running, unarmed.  You shot him in the back!  Why?”

“Just a little misunderstandin’.”

The “misunderstanding” is that Coffin wanted the old man, named Arthur, and his longtime partner Lehi Smith to lead his crew to the spot on Thunder Mountain where they have been finding gold. Arthur didn’t want to.

Now it’s Lehi who doesn’t want to but who knows enough not to run at this moment from the five men: Coffin and his two allies, his brother Tronco and his friend Ed MacIntyre; Larimer, a former Indian scout for the U.S. Cavalry; and Kamas Griffin, a young and somewhat naive Civil War veteran with a year of education at Columbia University.

And Larimer, who just met the others a few hours earlier, knows he’s in an awkward spot.

“You with us, Larimer?” [Tronco] asked, his close-set, small eyes hostile.

“This ain’t the innocent prospecting I had in mind.  It’s robbery, claim jumping and murder.”

Coffin and the others want Larimer because he knows his way around Indian country, but they’ll kill him right now if he won’t re-commit to their partnership.  “I’m as loco about gold as the next man.  But I always favored looking for it alone, or with men I trusted,” the former scout says.

Still, what choice does Larimer have?  He agrees to go along.

 

An ambiguous position

Larimer’s ambiguous position is one of many genre-busting aspects of Guns from Thunder Mountain (which has also been published as Rider from Thunder Mountain and as Thunder Mountain).

Three of his partners are definitely bad guys — Coffin, a cold-blooded killer; Tronco, someone who enjoys inflicting cruelty and pain; and MacIntyre, who isn’t above thieving.  Yet, over the next few weeks, Larimer has to work with them and trust them —indeed, rely on them — if, together, they are to find the gold that will give each one a fortune.

After wasting five years looking for gold on his own, Larimer is hungry to obtain the fortune that Coffin promises.  So, he puts up with the bad guys, but he covers his bets by developing a quiet alliance with Kamas.  The young man attached himself to the crew almost by happenstance and is unsure of himself and more than a little fearful.

Their unwilling guide Lehi has his own ambiguities. It turns out that he and Arthur got their gold claim by killing the man who found it first.

And the interpersonal dynamics among the five become much more complicated when, with Kiowas threatening, Larimer saves a young red-haired Mormon woman named Lorna and a large, clumsy man who is pressuring her to marry him named Jud.

The Kiowas, who hold Thunder Mountain as sacred and want to kill the Coffin crew for trespassing there, are led by Holes-In-The-Chest.  He got his name because, years earlier, he was dragged half a mile across the prairie by a cavalry man.

However, when Larimer meets him under a white flag, he recognizes the chief, telling him that his original name was Kicking Pony.  It turns out that Larimer was the one who cut the cavalry man’s rope to save the Indian from worse injuries.

The Kiowas are clearly the enemies of the gold-diggers, but it’s also clear the Holes-In-The-Chest and Larimer honor and respect each other.

 

“It’s gone”

That might seem like too many characters for a novel that’s only 173 pages long, but Huffaker pulls it off with subtle assurance.

A subplot of the novel is the pleasant romance that develops between Larimer and Lorna.  Given the standards of the genre in the 1950s, the two never kiss, much less go any further.

Nonetheless, Huffaker is still able to provide a bit of erotic charge to his story.  When Lorna is taking a bath in a lake with Larimer standing guard, she’s startled by an old mountain lion at the shore and runs out of the water into Larimer’s arms. “It’s gone,” he tells her, and she turns red with embarrassment.

And so does Larimer.

Later, to help her travel better, Larimer gives Lorna his spare shirt and buckskin breeches to wear — which is a nicely subtle way of linking the two physically.

 

Fifty gold bullets

It may seem that I’m giving the story away by providing so much detail above, but I don’t think so.

The story isn’t just these characters, but how they interact and how they react as the story makes its twists and turns — such as when they start to find gold dust, and when they find themselves near the main Kiowa camp, and when the Kiowas first discover them.

One odd aspect to Huffaker’s story is how Coffin and Jud become almost cartoonish — Coffin, as someone whose greed for gold seems to overwhelm him, and Jud, as a strong but ineffectual guy who’s irritated that he can’t get the girl and acts stupidly at almost every turn.  Yet, Coffin’s greed and Jud’s stupidity have direct impacts on how the story turns out.

So, there’s a lot in this fairly thin book, and I haven’t even mentioned the huge crack in Thunder Mountain, and Tronco’s cruelty to an orphaned fawn, and Kamas’s heroism, and 50 gold bullets that play an important role.

Guns from Thunder Mountain is a meaty story, well-told.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.16.25