The Strater Hotel and Louis L'Amour's Room Two Twenty Two
Near Durango, Colorado
The Strater Hotel on Main Avenue in Durango was built in eighteen eighty seven by Henry Strater, a young pharmacist who saw that the booming railroad town needed better accommodations. Strater hired architect Paul Geier to design a four-story building in an Italian Romanesque style, and furnished it throughout with Victorian walnut antiques that today make up a notable collection of American Victorian walnut furniture. Below the hotel lobby sits the Diamond Belle Saloon, a period recreation of a nineteenth century frontier bar with a honky-tonk piano that has been playing since the hotel's early years.
The hotel survived a bankruptcy during the financial panic of the eighteen nineties and changed ownership several times before a local group stabilized it in the nineteen twenties. Its most famous literary guest was the novelist Louis L'Amour, who regularly rented Room Two Twenty Two above the saloon. L'Amour wrote western novels that sold in the hundreds of millions of copies worldwide, and he returned to Room Two Twenty Two specifically to work on his Sackett series, a multigenerational saga of a frontier family set in the mountains of the Southwest.
He found the room's atmosphere and its setting in a Victorian western town helped him think his way into the world he was writing. The Strater became a designated national literary landmark in two thousand twelve. Among the hotel's other recorded guests are President Gerald Ford, the entertainer Will Rogers, and the band the Grateful Dead.
