The warrior's path

The Warrior's Path is a novel by the American writer Louis L'Amour, published by Bantam Books in 1980. It belongs to the Sackett novels, a family chronicle that follows one clan from the colonial frontier across the American west.

The book belongs to the earliest part of the Sackett story. Yance and Kin Sackett are brothers living on the edge of settlement in Carolina, and the kidnapping of Yance's sister-in-law sets them on a journey north through territory where the law is distant and the people they meet have their own arrangements with the slave trade, with the Native nations whose lands they cross, and with the men who traffic in both. The two brothers travel with little more than their rifles and their knowledge of the country, and the novel keeps close to the practicalities of frontier travel: horses, food, shelter and the question of who can be trusted at a fire.

L'Amour wrote the Sackett books over several decades and in more than one period of the family's history, and this one belongs to the generation that had to make its way in a country that had not yet been mapped.