Little did Louis L'Amour realize back in 1960 when he published The Daybreakers, a novel about two brothers who came west after the Civil War, that he had begun creating what would become perhaps North America's most widely followed literary family: the Sacketts. The stories of ten generations of Sackett men and women as they forged westward from tyranny-wracked seventeenth-century England across the American continent have captivated readers for three decades through seventeen novels with nearly forty millions copies in print. The traditions and adventures of this family of rugged individualists who stand indomitably united when any Sackett is in trouble have inspired country songs, a popular television miniseries starring Tom Selleck (as Orrin Sackett) and Sam Elliot (as Tell Sackett), thousands of reader queries—and now, a rare full-length work of non-fiction by the worlds' all-time best-selling frontier novelist. In a 60 Minutes profile in which he hailed Louis L'Amour as "our professor emeritus of how the West was won," correspondent Morley Safer observed that "his plots may be fiction but the details therein are fact." The Sackett Companion is the author's long-savored opportunity to present the research and probe the factors behind his Sackett fiction—novel by novel—and to elaborate on their real and fictional characters, their geography and locales, and their historical eras in encyclopedia-like detail. In this book, subtitled A Personal Guide To The Sackett Novels, L'Amour takes us on a guided tour of his imagination to introduce us to the never-before-told sources and inspirations for these stories and the people and places that populate them. He retraces some of his travels in which he has walked the land the Sacketts walk, reliving such personal memories as the street fight he had on a hot dusty morning in New Mexico that ultimately led to the birth of the Sacketts.

Explains the background and sources of L'Amour's best-selling Sackett novels, with a detailed account of the people, places, and eras depicted, plus maps, photographs, and a Sackett family tree and genealogy

In Jubal Sackett, the second generation of Louis L’Amour’s great American family pursues a destiny in the wilderness of a sprawling new land. Jubal Sackett’s urge to explore drove him westward, and when a Natchez priest asks him to undertake a nearly impossible quest, Sackett ventures into the endless grassy plains the Indians call the Far Seeing Lands. He seeks a Natchez exploration party and its leader, Itchakomi. It is she who will rule her people when their aging chief dies, but first she must vanquish her rival, the arrogant warrior Kapata. Sackett’s quest will bring him danger from an implacable enemy . . . and show him a life—and a woman—worth dying for.

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.

Tell Sackett meets the beautiful Dorinda Robiseau, traveling lady of wit and nerve. Tell is carrying thirty pounds of gold. The young man raised in the mountains begins to wonder if their meeting is a coincidence, especially when the woman convinces him to guide her across the desert to Los Angeles. Tell knows a lot about the desert, but a woman can make him forget what he knows. The trail is strewn with bad men and natural obstacles. One of the men he must face is Nolan Sackett, one of the so-called outlaw Sacketts, a descendant of Yance who settled in the Clinch Mountains. Sackett must meet Sackett. Time period: 1875.

Tyrel and Orrin Sackett hit the trail west and fight to tame the West.