David Lavender - Writing Career

Writing Career

In 1938, after the cattle ranch failed, Lavender moved to Ojai, California, where he took a teaching job. During this period of his life, he wrote three novels for young people. He also began to write about the American West he had experienced growing up – wanting to record a way of life that was slowly fading away. He began to write about his days working in the Camp Bird Mine near Ouray, Colorado, as a miner. The result was a memoir, One Man's West, which was published in 1943. That year, Lavender began teaching English at The Thacher School—a boarding school in Ojai, California—where he encouraged and supported many young writers. Lavender kept his teaching position at the Thacher School until 1970.

The American West of Lavender's early years was still a place of ranchers, miners, cowboys, prospectors, and mountaineers—and for most men, a world of backbreaking, lonely, and dangerous work. But in One Man's West, Lavender remembered "not the cold and the cruel fatigue, but rather the multitude of tiny things which in their sum make up the elemental poetry of rock and ice and snow." Lavender felt compelled to document his experiences in rugged southwest Colorado to preserve this rapidly disappearing way of life. The book is filled with charming memorable characters and personal stories that are captivating and incredible, yet told in a warm conversational style.

In 1948, Lavender followed up his successful memoir with The Big Divide, a history of the Rocky Mountain region that established his reputation as a serious historian. The critical and commercial success of these two books launched Lavender's literary career.

In 1954, Lavender published Bent's Fort, a major historic landmark of the American West on the upper Arkansas River in present-day southeastern Colorado. Built by Charles and William Bent, Bent's Fort was a massive private fort that stood until 1849 as the center of trade with the Indians of the central plains. Lavender's history of these men and their role in opening up the southwestern region of North America has been compared to the works of eminent historians such as Francis Parkman and William H. Prescott.

In 1958, Lavender wrote The Trail to Santa Fe, about Zebulon Pike and his exploration of the American Southwest in present-day Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. The book captures the turbulent adventures of the explorers, traders, and fighters who opened up this new country, and the hardships they faced during their westward expansion into unchartered land along the Santa Fe Trail, which ran from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Lavender wrote a series of highly acclaimed histories of the American West, including Red Mountain in 1963, Westward Vision: The Story of the Oregon Trail in 1963, The Rockies in 1968 (Harper & Row), and The American West in 1969.

In the 1980s, Lavender expanded his focus as an historian, writing about the Pacific Northwest in Fort Vancouver (1981), Wyoming in Fort Laramie (1984), Utah and Arizona in Colorado River Country (1982) and River Runners of the Grand Canyon (1985), California in California: A Place, a People, a Dream (1986) and California: Land of New Beginnings (1987), and Colorado in The Telluride Story (1987). He also produced impressive general histories of the American West in Overland Migrations (1981), Colorado River Country (1982), The Great West (1985), The Way to the Western Sea (1988), and the American Heritage History Of The West (1988).

In 1992, Lavender published Let Me Be Free: The Nez Percé Tragedy (1992), the tragic story of the Nez Percé Indians' flight from their homeland to Canada to escape the United States cavalry. The clash between European-Americans and the American Indians was a subject Lavender covered in many of his previous works.

This goes back to The Big Divide. I always travel to the places I write about, so while I was researching The Big Divide I went to Santa Fé for the first time. I arrived in September, and found myself in the midst of the Fiesta and the burning of Zozobra, old man gloom. That was quite a time. Well, on that trip I got to meet a few Indians. I journeyed to Taos and Acoma Pueblos, and got interested in Canyon de Chelly. This was my first fascination with Indians. There were none around the ranch when I was growing up. That was just the beginning, and my research deepened my fascination.

In the last decade of his life, Lavender's focus turned toward the American Southwest. His books De Soto, Coronado, Cabrillo: Explorers of the Northern Mystery (1992), The Santa Fe Trail (1995), Pipe Spring and the Arizona Strip (1997), Mother Earth, Father Sky: Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest (1998), and Climax at Buena Vista: The Decisive Battle of the Mexican-American War (2003) were significant contributions to documenting the history of the American Southwest.

David Lavender's first wife, Martha, died in 1959. He was married to his second wide, Martha Moreland, for 25 years before she too died. On his 80th birthday he married his third wife, Muriel Sharkey, whom he first got to know on a river trip through the Grand Canyon. In 2003, Lavender's health began to fail.

David Lavender died of natural causes at his home in Ojai, California on April 26, 2003, at the age of 93.