“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream” -T.K. Whipple, Study Out the Land
Ostensibly the epic, harrowing account of a late 19th century cattle drive from Southern Texas to Northern Montana, Larry McMurtry’s magnum opus Lonesome Dove is far from just another a simple Western story. Unlike other popular depictions of the Old West, Lonesome Dove uniquely is set after all the action has largely died down –the Indians have been mostly driven away, Mexican bandits are increasingly rare, and the once massive buffalo herds stretching across the plains are now dwindling. As Larry McMurtry later said: “Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality… I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.” It is within this context that we meet two aging ex-Texas Rangers: Captain Woodrow “W.F.” Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae, partners and proprietors of a livery stable, the Hat Creek Cattle Company, which trades horses and cattle in the remote Texas border town of Lonesome Dove (a fictional locale Larry McMurtry named after spotting “Lonesome Dove Baptist Church” written on the side of an abandoned church bus on the side of a road in West Texas). It only rains once or twice per year in Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove is a dusty town of rattlesnakes, centipedes, and a single saloon called the Dry Bean (owned by a widower, bowtie-wearing Frenchman named Xavier Wanz whose whole story is recounted including the death of his overbearing wife, despite him being one of many minor characters in the novel). Around the town we meet a colorful cast of vivid characters, from a beautiful blond prostitute named Lorena Wood (referred to as a “whore” throughout the novel) and the one white barber named Dillard Brawley from Tennessee (he reappears again at the end of the novel, albeit with one leg).
Life moves slowly in Lonesome Dove. Occasionally, Mexicans head north of the Rio Grande to steal horses and cattle, while Texans head south to do the same. Gus spends his days drinking, whoring, and playing cards, while Call sits out by the river, keeping vigil for a dangerous threat that is apparently no longer coming. Realizing they are getting older, Gus enjoys the comforts of civilization, while Call longs for adventure, or at least to rekindle the spark of his lost youth and vigor. Both men are haunted by the memories of yesteryear –their wild adventures across Texas, battling Comanches and Kiowas, hanging Mexican bandits, bringing “civilization” to the lawless frontier. But now “Lonesome Dove had long since ceased to need guarding” (27). With their ranger days firmly in the rearview mirror, Call and Gus are troubled by their own moral failings and personal regrets, their battle has turned inward. Much to his shame, Call once fell in love with a prostitute named Maggie who also loved him back, but he always refused to face it. Maggie later gave birth to a son named Newt (whom many, including Gus, consider to be Call’s unacknowledged son). In time, Maggie fell into drinking despite remaining hopeful that Call would one day come around for her, though he never did and always refused to say her name directly. Tragically for Call, Maggie died of a fever and she became “the bitterest memory of his life.” On the day she died, Call solemnly rode out of town by himself and “he knew at once that he had forever lost the chance to right himself, that he would never again be able to feel that he was the man he had wanted to be” (364). Now, Call prefers his own solitude, wracked with guilt over Maggie and plagued by the existence of Newt who is a permanent reminder of Call’s moral failure. Meanwhile Gus is busy lamenting the “one who got away,” a woman named Clara Allen who has since settled down in Nebraska with a dullard named Bob. But Gus cannot let go of what happened between them all those years ago. He has written to Clara several times, but she has never responded. Everywhere he looks, Gus is constantly reminded of her and what could have been.
One day, a pretty-boy ex-ranger named Jake Spoon strolls into Lonesome Dove. He is rumored to be one of the great gunslingers of the Old West, but a few people know his true story (he merely fired a couple lucky shots). Jake is currently fleeing from the law in Fort Smith, Arkansas after accidentally shooting a dentist who was also the mayor of the town. After arriving in Lonesome Dove, he earns the admiration of the young men like Newt and quickly wins the heart of Lorena (the apple of every young man’s eye in Lonesome Dove) especially after he promises to take her to the cooler climate in San Francisco, a destination which has long been her dream. Jake also offhandedly suggests to Call and Gus that they should drive their cattle north and become some of the first settlers in the wild, uninhabited region of Montana where they might also win a fortune. Thus begins a wild adventure northward.
At first Gus is skeptical of traveling to Montana, but Call remains steadfast and stubborn in his assuredness. In some ways, Call is running from his past and fighting the complacency of age. He secretly longs for unknown dangers and untraversed horizons. Some of the men think this hairbrained idea is pure vanity, while others think “this is just fortune hunting” (228). But since no one can say “no” to the captain, the Hat Creek Cattle Company rustles up nearly three thousand cattle (thanks to another midnight raid on vaqueros in Mexico) and the group sallies forth from Lonesome Dove en route to Montana.
The key members of the Hat Creek Cattle Company include:
- Woodrow “W.F.” Call –known as the “Captain,” he is a middle-sized man who seems seemed larger than life. He is austere, headstrong, and he prefers his own isolation from the group. He was born in Scotland and worked for many years as a ranger captain. He rides an unruly horse called “Hell Bitch.” Whereas most men carry a Winchester, the captain carries a big old Henry gun. He is likely the father of Newt, though he has never acknowledged his paternity.
- Augustus “Gus” McCrae –Gus is from Tennessee originally, and once worked as a waiter on a riverboat years ago before becoming a Texas ranger. He is a drinker and a gambler. He was married twice before (one woman died of pleurisy in the second year of marriage, the other died of scarlet fever after the seventh year of marriage) and he was nearly married a third time to Clara Allen, but she decided to marry a boring horse trader instead –an unimpressive man named Bob Allen. They then relocated to Nebraska. Gus has regretted letting her go ever since and he plans to reconnect with her on this adventure. Note: Larry McMurtry apparently used Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as inspiration for the characters Call and Gus.
- P.E. “Pea Eye” Parker– the wrangler of the group. “Pea Eye was tall and lank, had never been full in his life, and looked so awkward that he appeared to be about to fall down even when he was standing still. He looked totally helpless, but that was another case of looks deceiving. In fact, he was one of the ablest men Augustus had ever known. He had never been an outstanding Indian fighter but if you gave him something he could work at deliberately, like carpentering or blacksmithing, or well-digging or harness repair, Pea was excellent. If he had been a man to do sloppy work, Call would have run him off long before” (17). “He hated Indians, partly because for thirty years’ fear of them had kept him from getting a good night’s sleep. In his years with the Rangers he never closed his eyes without expecting to open them and find some huge Indian getting ready to poke him with something sharp. Most of the Indians he had actually seen had all been scrawny little men, but it didn’t mean the huge one who haunted his sleep wasn’t out there waiting” (32-33). His mother died in Georgia when he was six. He was once hit with a bullet during an Indian battle at Fort Phantom Hill. And like Gus, the one that got away for him is a young woman named Mary Cole.
- Joshua “Josh” Deets – a Black man who has worked with Call and Gus nearly as long as Pea Eye. He handles the company’s money deposits in San Antonio since bandits wouldn’t suspect a Black man to have money. One of his jobs in the company is carrying water, but he also serves as an able scout and tracker. He is a close guardian of Newt.
- Newt – a young man who has been forbidden from participating in raids and the like by the captain. His mother, Maggie, had been a prostitute. She died of fever before he was taken in by the Hat Creek outfit. Like many of the men, he has a sweet spot for Lorena. Newt has always been told his last name is Dobbs, but he wonders if Jake Spoon might be his father (until later in the novel when Gus reveals to Newt that Call is actually his father).
- Old Bolivar, “Bol” the cook – “the old man had been a competent Mexican bandit before he ran out of steam and crossed the river” (16). He is married to a disagreeable woman and has nine daughters. Eventually, he turns back for Lonesome Dove, leaving behind the company. He is then replaced by a new cook named Po Campo, a small man who walks with a donkey, cooks butter with worms, and fries grasshoppers for food.
- Jake Spoon – a former ranger in the days before law and order came to Lonesome Dove, he rode up and down the border with Call and Gus, but when things died down, the settled life didn’t appeal to him so he just up and left. He became a scout for the army and after a minor disagreement accidentally killed a dentist named Benny Johnson who was also the mayor of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Hence why Jake has fled to Lonesome Dove (Sheriff July Johnson is chasing after him). Jake is described as a fancy dresser with an unearned reputation. “All the gunfighter business went back to one lucky shot jake had made when he was a mere boy starting out in the Rangers. It was funny how one shot could make a man’s reputation like that” (71). Jake carries a pearl-handled pistol and once shot a Mexican bandit running at the rangers (but he apparently killed the bandit out of pure, dumb luck). Jake is the one who convinces Call to venture to Montana and make a fortune.
- Lorena Wood: a prostitute who has been abandoned in Lonesome Dove by a gambler who decided she was bad luck. She longs to travel to San Francisco where the weather is cool. Her parents initially got nervous during the Civil War and left Mobile, Alabama when she was twelve. She had a sordid backstory from Gladwater, where a lousy man named Mosby began pimping her out, to San Antonio, where a tall clean man named Tinkersley again started pimping her out and abusing her so she attacked him. She is now twenty years old, and Gus is one of her oldest and longest lasting customers. She often seems to be sad, or at least appears to be disassociating from life, rarely smiling, she finds most men contemptible. “Looking at her, though, was like looking at the hills. The hills stayed as they were. You could go to them, if you had the means, but they extended no greeting” (51). She is sometimes called a “sulky whore” and a “sporting woman” (in the novel, sex with a prostitute is referred to as a “poke”).
The Hat Creek Cattle Company traverses through rough terrain, from lightning storms to barren deserts, and along the way they are joined by a variety of characters: Dish Boggett, “Swift Bill,” Pete Spettle, Joe Rainey, Jasper Fant, Needle Nelson, Bert Borum, Soupy Jones, Lippy the “pianer” player with a hole in his stomach, and a pair of Irishmen named Allen O’Brien and Sean O’Brien (the former of whom sings nightly sad ballads to the cattle, and the latter of whom dies in an accidental run-in with a nest of highly poisonous water moccasin snakes). There are a great many other unpredictable and surprising people they meet along the way. Shortly after they set out, we turn to Sheriff July Johnson from Arkansas who is tracking Jake Spoon to punish him for shooting the dentist named Benny (Benny was actually July Johnson’s brother). He takes a young man named Joe with him. But shortly after they depart, July’s ne’er-do-well wife, Elmira “Ellie,” takes this opportunity to leave her boring husband (whom she finds contemptible) and she decides on a whim to return to her former wild outlaw lover, Dee Boot. She was once a reckless young “sporting girl” but lied to July about it, and she even falsely told him that Dee Boot had died of smallpox. Despite being pregnant with July’s child, she takes a dangerous whiskey boat trip up the Arkansas before saddling herself to an overland wagon with a buffalo hunter named Big Zwey and his scheming compatriot Luke, headed for Nebraska to find Dee Boot. But mere days after she is gone, July’s deputy Roscoe decides he will try to chase down July and inform him that his wife has gone missing.
There are a myriad stories to tell about the many wayward adventures and mishaps these characters encounter along the odyssey –terrifying Comanches, mosquitos, snake bites, wagon accidents, rushing rivers, endless parched days with minimal water, sandstorms, blizzards, bears, robbers, hailstorms, cloud storms containing millions of grasshoppers, Blood Indians, and stampedes. And this is also a brutally violent novel as people are tormented and killed in all manner of gruesome ways –they are hanged, knifed open, heads bashed in, raped, castrated, scalped, and so on. The further north the company goes, the more civilization seems to disappear.
The first major incident occurs when Jake Spoon abandons Lorena and she is promptly kidnapped by a notorious, large Comanchero Indian named “Blue Duck,” a real historical outlaw known to the rangers as a horse thief and child stealer. He quietly snatches Lorena in the night and carries her across vast distances back to his band of heavily armed Indians where she is repeatedly raped and abused by the men, and barely kept alive while wishing for her own death. She is not expected to survive long while all the men have their way with her and one night she watches as the Indians scalp and castrate one of their own dying men in their posse, stuffing his bloody severed parts into his throat while he is still alive. The sheer viciousness of this crew cannot be overstated. But Blue Duck is well aware that Gus (with whom he had a previous scuffle) is coming to rescue Lorena. So, he gets a group of Kiowa Indians to attack Gus before he arrives, however Gus plays a clever trick on them wherein he runs away from their bullet fire, stabbing and killing his own horse so that the smell of blood spooks the Indian horses from fifty miles away. He then takes cover and shoots half the Kiowas, sending the rest back to their camp. Gus then happens upon July and Joe with Roscoe and Janey, an abandoned girl who wished to travel alongside Roscoe (they have all recently been reunited as July has learned of his wife’s sudden departure, shortly after Roscoe and Janey were robbed). This is but one of a great many convenient plot contrivances peppered throughout the novel as the characters all seem to happen upon one another at the most opportune moments. At any rate, Gus and July ride into the Kiowa camp and quickly murder the remaining Indians before rescuing Lorena (Gus does all the killing, while July does not fire a single shot). When the fighting dies down, Blue Duck is nowhere to be found. But when they return to Roscoe’s camp, they find that their friends have all been carelessly murdered by Blue Duck and left to rot in the sun.
Gus and July bury the dead (Roscoe, Joe, and Janey) while Lorena develops an unflinching dependency on Gus after he rescues her. It is not necessarily a sexual or romantic bond, but rather a tender bond, one of a vulnerable creature who has been wronged by the world and saved by a selfless caregiver. Gus is shown to be the only man who truly ever cared about her. His heroism shines through in these sections of the book as Lorena grows quiet and fearful, clinging to Gus for protection. Meanwhile, Jake Spoon falls in with a bad lot — Eddie, Roy, and Dan Suggs (“The Suggs Brothers”) who travel with a silent Black man Frog Lip as they rob and murder random farmers along the prairie (Frog is later wounded and they are forced shoot him in the head to put him out of his misery). However, Gus and Call soon catch their trail and confront the foursome in the night while they are drunk. Gus and Call hang all four of them, including their old comrade Jake, though when news reaches Lorena, now she cares very little for Jake.
The third and final section of the book (Part III) turns our attention northward as the disparate traveling groups converge upon Nebraska –Elmira arrives just outside Ogallala where she delivers her baby (and then disregards and abandons him) at the home of Gus’s long-lost lover Clara Allen. Meanwhile, a snake-bitten July Johnson also happens to make his way to the home of Clara Allen where he is shocked to meet his own son for the first time. He travels into Ogallala and finds his wife lying unresponsive on a hospital bed; she is distraught after having only seen her former lover Dee Boot for only a moment inside a jail cell before he was hanged for accidentally killing a boy. When her husband arrives, she refuses to speak to him. Once July leaves her side and heads back to Clara’s home, Ellie quickly arranges for Big Zwey to take her eastward for St. Louis, despite many warnings about the Indian danger (they both are then unsurprisingly killed by Sioux Indians). July decides to remain at Clara’s home where he slowly falls in love with her, and she grows enamored with his son whom she names “Martin” (she previously delivered three sons but they all died young). Clara has two daughters, Betsey and Sally, as well as an old Mexican hand named Cholo, while her husband Bob has been rendered completely incapacitated. He is slowly dying after being struck in the head by a mare. In time, Gus also arrives at Clara’s home and they have a reunion of sorts, even though both Gus and Clara somberly realize they can never be together.
Clara is a sassy and honest character –a no-nonsense woman, who has a habit of cutting right to the matter of things. She is not afraid to chastise and rebuke the people around her, particularly men like Gus and July. Yet she is also a tender woman who has been forced to live like a survivalist along edge of the Nebraska Platte thanks a harsh life filled with great loss and distance from the people she truly loves. She cares very little for the frivolous, roaming habits of men like Gus and Call. She cannot fathom why Call will not acknowledge his own son. In a novel that is constantly bubbling up a wellspring of new, richly imagined characters, Clara Allen stands out as among the best.
At any rate, the Hat Creek Cattle Company finally enters Montana after a lengthy, unforgiving journey. Gus informs young Newt that Call is actually his father, altering the poor boy’s understanding of himself. But shortly thereafter, a dramatic battle with Blood Indians unfolds while Gus and Pea Eye are out scouting one day. It occurs when Gus rides up over a hill and happens upon a pack of Blood Indians who immediately begin raining down arrows and bullets on him. His leg is severely wounded with an arrow while he and Pea Eye remain pinned down, surrounded, and trapped inside a cave. But when a rainstorm strikes, Gus sends Pea Eye out into the night, hoping he will make it back to the herd to inform Call of the dilemma. However, after some time passes, Gus decides he can wait no longer as his left leg is rapidly turning black. He hobbles away and is rescued by an eighty-year-old mountain man named Hugh Auld “Old Hugh” who lends Gus his horse. He ties the wounded Gus down to the horse and heads him off to Miles City where a doctor immediately amputates Gus’s leg to stop the infection from spreading. However, unfortunately the infection does spread to Gus’s right leg, as well, and now it must also be amputated –a request which Gus refuses at gunpoint. Even after Call arrives, Gus still refuses to undergo the procedure, instead preferring death. He writes brief letters to Lorena and Clara (to be delivered by Call), leaves his share of the company to Lorena, and requests to be buried all the way back in Texas in a little clearing beside the Guadalupe River, a place of heavy nostalgia for Gus where he and Clara had once shared youthful joy together before their lives tragically diverged. Amazingly, Call agrees to honor Gus’s last wish. And from his deathbed, Gus returns to a frequent topic he has often chided the captain over: Call’s unacknowledged paternity of Newt:
“‘I admit it’s practically your only sin, but it’s a big one. You ought to better by that boy. He’s the only son you’ll ever have –I’d bet my wad on that—though I guess it’s possible you’ll take to women in your old age… Not naming him is mistreatment,’ Augustus said. ‘Give him your name and you’ll have a son you can be proud of. And Newt will know you’re his pa’” (798).
Then Gus dies in the night, and suddenly all the momentum for the cattle drive seems to lose its purpose. Call still leads the men onward and builds a ranch in northern Montana, but he no longer wants to be a part of it. In time, he leaves Montana to carry Gus’s remains back to Texas, just as he wished. Before he leaves, he hands over his steed, Hell Bitch, to Newt. He then grabs Newt by the arm and places him in command, though he still cannot muster the inner courage to admit that he is the boy’s father. He then heads back south, stopping at Clara’s home (where Dish has already been living, foolishly hoping Lorena will give him a chance). Call delivers Gus’s notes to the ladies before being roundly reproached by Clara for carrying Gus all the way down to Texas for no reason at all while still refusing to acknowledge Newt as his son.
As Call continues southward, he happens to arrive at the hanging of the notorious Blue Duck outside Denver. A somewhat unsatisfying conclusion to this fearsome warrior, Blue Duck has been captured and imprisoned to be led out for hanging, at which point he merely leaps off his cart, attacks one of the jailers, and lands on his head, instantly killing him. This was a rather bold choice for the demise of the most terrifying villain in the novel –throughout the book, I found myself wondering if Blue Duck might turn up again, lurking in the shadows, waiting for his chance at revenge on the Hat Creek Cattle Company. But instead, he is simply captured and killed elsewhere by other people. At least McMurtry avoids cliché! Anyway, Call travels alone over the remaining rough, barren countryside carrying his best friend’s body, reflecting on life, seeing mistakes, regret, and death everywhere he looks –indeed the whole Hat Creek gang has died since they set out from Lonesome Dove excluding himself, Newt, and Pea Eye –Jake was hanged in Kansas, Deets was killed in Wyoming in a shootout with Comanches, and Gus was killed in Montana amidst a fight with Blood Indians. Call realizes he is the last of a dying breed.
After carrying Gus some three thousand miles, Call lays him to rest in his desired spot under a wooden sign for their livery stable (complete with its ridiculous Latin slogan) and on the back he carves the initials “AM.” And so Lonesome Dove ends right where it began, as Call strolls into Lonesome Dove all alone. There he finds Bolivar still cooking, but the Dry Bean saloon has burned to the ground (Wanz had apparently locked himself inside Lorena’s room and burned the place down after she left with the Hat Creek Cattle Company). Things have changed and Gus remains haunted by the ever-present nearness of his ghostly memories and the people who are now gone.
The following image is a rough map following the Hat Creek Cattle Company’s overland odyssey:
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Thus ends one of the longest and most rewarding Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (and also the one with the largest number of chapters: 102). Lonesome Dove is actually the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy as Larry McMurtry later published two prequels, Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997), as well as a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993). While I have yet to read the rest of the tetralogy (though I fully intend to one day), Lonesome Dove remains McMurtry’s standout novel, the book which vaulted him into the realm of literary stardom. McMurtry later acknowledged that Lonesome Dove was by far his most successful novel which allowed him to enter the realm of “respectable writers” of the American West like Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee among others, while believing he was still just a notch above the pulp writers like the sons and daughters of Max Brand (Frederick Faust), Louis L’Amour, and others.
Lonesome Dove is a tragic, sobering novel about the dismay of the disappearance of the Old West, and the inability of the rugged, independent cowboys to face themselves and their past. What was truly accomplished by bringing law and order to the West? What was achieved by driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana? Why can’t Gus simply settle down with Clara? And, most importantly, why won’t Call simply acknowledge Newt as his son? These questions tragically remain unanswered as the heroes of the American West are shown to be hardly heroes at all, but rather they are characterized as morally bankrupt figures capable of traversing the roughest of terrain, but unable to resolve the most important questions in life. In this way, Lonesome Dove comes to light as a wonderful deconstruction of the mythologizing of the Old West. In quoting The New York Times obituary of Larry McMurtry: “Mr. McMurtry wrote “Lonesome Dove” as an anti-western, a rebuke of sorts to the romantic notions of dime-store novels and an exorcism of the false ghosts in the work of writers like Louis L’Amour. ‘I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboy,’ he told an interviewer in 1988. ‘I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.’”
In my view, Lonesome Dove remains a towering giant of American literature. Its scope and depth reminds me a great deal of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden or Homer’s Odyssey, as each character is explored in rich, expansive detail against the backdrop of an epic, enduring quest. Indeed, there are a thousand minor characters and imagined stories that would be impossible for me to reiterate in this already hefty review –for example, we meet an odd man named Sedgewick who is fascinated with insects and religion; or a man named Wilbarger who pops up from time to time in the novel only to be killed by horse thieves; or an old man named Aus Frank who is seen pushing a wheelbarrow filled with buffalo bones across the endless prairie; or when we learn about the renown of Ranger heroes like Call and Gus after chasing an Indian named Kicking Wolf up to Canada; or the memories of other former rangers like Tobe Walker and Charles Goodnight who make minor cameos (Goodnight was actually a real cattle driver who many observers have suggested might have been a historical inspiration, along with Oliver Loving, for Call and Gus, though McMurtry denied these claims); or an amusing scene of Newt experiencing his first prostitute who turns out to be a large hulking woman named Buffalo “Buf” Heifer; or the pesky cavalry troop that appears a few times attempting to confiscate the cattle company’s horses until Call very nearly kills the cavalry commander Dixon; or the story of the poor but industrious girl Janey whose mother died, pa went crazy and shot himself, and brother was taken by Indians, after which she was bought and sold by a string of nefarious men until she happened upon Roscoe who was struggling with a wasp’s nest that had fallen into his lap, and so on. These and a thousand other stories are reiterated in the pages of Lonesome Dove, and if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain all the books that should be written.
Notable Quotations
“When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake –not a very big one” (opening line).
“Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was comfort” (13).
“Of course, real scouting skills were superfluous in a place as tame as Lonesome Dove, but Call still liked to get out at night, sniff the breeze and let the country talk. The country talked quiet; one human voice could drown it out… There was really little in the way of a threat to be looked for, either. A coyote might sneak in and snatch a chicken, but that was about the worst that was likely to happen. The mere fact that he and Augusts were there had long since discouraged the local horsethieves” (26).
“If the Comanches ever came again, it stood to reason they would make for their old crossing, but Call knew well enough that the Comanches weren’t going to come again. They were all but whipped, hardly enough warriors left free to terrorize the upper Brazos, much less the Rio Grane” (27).
“Call was not a man to daydream –that was Gus’s department—but then it wasn’t really daydreaming he did, alone on the bluff at night. It was just thinking back to the years when a man who presumed to stake out a Comanche trail would do well to keep his rifle cocked. Yet the fact that he had taken to thinking back annoyed him, too: he didn’t want to start working over his memories, like an old man. Sometimes he would force himself to get up and walk two or three miles up the river and back, just to get the memories out of his head. Not until he felt alert again –felt that he could still captain if the need arose—would he return to Lonesome Dove” (28).
“He [Call] had run with Jake Spoon off and on for twenty years, and liked him well; but the man had always worried him a little, underneath. There was no more likable man in the west, and no better rider, either; but riding wasn’t everything, and neither was likableness. Something in Jake didn’t quite stick. Something wasn’t quite consistent. He could be the coolest man in the company in one fight, and in the next be practically worthless” (65).
“For years Call had looked at life as if it were essentially over. Call had never been a man who could think of much reason for acting happy, but then he had always been one who knew his purpose. His purpose was to get done what needed to be done, and what needed to be done was simple, if not easy. The settlers of Texas needed protection, from Indians on the north and bandits on the south. As a Ranger, Call had had a job that fit him, and he had gone about the work with a vigor that would have passed for happiness in another man… but the job wore out. In the south it became mainly a matter of protecting the cattle herds of rich men like Captain King or Shanghai Pierce, both of whom had more cattle than any one man needed. In the north, the Army had finally taken the fight against the Comanches away from the Rangers, and hd nearly finished it. He [Gus] and Call, who had no military rank or standing, weren’t welcomed by the Army; with forts all across the northwestern frontier of free-roving Rangers found that they were always interfering with the Army, or else being interfered with. When the Civil War came, the Governor himself called them in and asked them not to go –with so many men gone they needed at least one reliable troop of Rangers to keep the peace on the border… It was that assignment that brought them to Lonesome Dove. After the war, the cattle market came into existence and all the big landowners in south Texas began to make up herds and trail them north, to the Kansas railheads. Once cattle became the game and the brush country filled up with cowboys and cattle traders, he and Call finally stopped rangering. It was no trouble for them to cross the river and bring back a few hundred head at a time to sell to the traders who were too lazy to go into Mexico themselves. They prospered in a small way; there was enough money in their account in San Antonio that they could have considered themselves rich, had that notion interested them. But it didn’t; Augustus knew that nothing about the life they were living interested Call, particularly. They had enough money that they could have bought land, but they hadn’t, although plenty of land could still be had wonderfully cheap… It was that they had roved too long, Augustus concluded, when his mind turned to such matters. They were people of the horse, not of the town; in that they were more like Comanche than Call would ever have admitted. They had been in Lonesome Dove nearly ten years, and yet what little property they had acquired was so worthless that neither of them would have felt bad about just saddling up and riding off from it” (82-83).
“Newt took the gun and slipped it out of its holster. It smelled faintly of oil –the Captain must have oiled it that day. It was not the first time he had held a pistol, of course. Mr. Gus had given him thorough training in pistol shooting and had even complimented him on his skill. But holding one and actually having one of your own were two different things. He turned the cylinder of the Colt and listened to the small, clear clicks it made, the grip was wood, the barrel cool and blue; the holster had kept a faint smell of saddle soap. He slipped the gun back in its holster, put the gun belt around his waist and felt the gun’s solid weight against his hip. When he walked out into the lots to catch his horse, he felt grown for the and complete for the first time in his life” (110).
“Then, coming over a little rise in the ground, he saw something that gave him heart: a thin silver ribbon to the northwest that could only be the river. The fading moon hung just above it. Across it, Texas was in sight, no less dark than Mexico, but there. The deep relief Newt felt at the sight of it washed away most of his fear. He even recognized the curve of the river –it was the old Comanche crossing, only a mile above Lonesome Dove. Whoever he was with had brought him home… To his dismay, the sight of such a safe, familiar place made him want to cry. It seemed to him that the night had lasted days –days during which he had been worried every moment that he would never come back to Lonesome Dove, or else come back disgraced” (132, Newt upon returning to Lonesome Dove after the midnight horse raid in Mexico).
“There was something different about her [Lorie], Jake had to admit. She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met in a woman. Certain mountains were that way, like the Bighorns. The air around them was so clear you could ride yoward them for days without seeming to get any closer. And yet, if you kept riding, you would get to the mountains. He was not so sure he would ever get to Lorie. Even when she took him, there was distance between them. And yet she would not let him leave” (200).
“As they passed out of town, Lippy suddenly turned sentimental. Under the blazing sun the town looked white –the only things active in it were the widow and her goats. There were only about ten buildings, hardly enough to make a town, but Lippy got sentimental anyway. He remembered when there had been another saloon, one that kept five Mexican whores. He had gone there often and had great fun in the days before he got the wound in his belly. He had never forgotten the merry whores –they were always sitting on his lap. One of them, a girl named Maria, would sleep with him merely because she liked the way he played the piano. Those had been the years… At the thought of them his eyes teared up, making his last look at Lonesome Dove a watery one. The dusty street wavered in his vision as if under a heavy rain” (218-219).
“Everyone had been dreading the next river, which was the San Antonio. There was much controversy about how far north moccasin could live –were they in Cimarron, the Arkansas, the Platte? No one knew for sure, but everyone knew there were plenty in the San Antonio River” (311).
“‘If I’d have wanted civilization I’d have stayed in Tennessee and wrote poetry for a living,’ Augustus said. ‘Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with’” (323).
“’It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living,’ Augustus said. ‘I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live’” (359).
“He [Augustus] remembered when he had first come to the high plains, years before. For two days he and Call and the Rangers had ridden parallel to the great southern buffalo herd –hundreds of thousands of animals, slowly grazing north. It had been difficult to sleep at night because the horses were nervous around so many animals, and the sounds of the herd were constant. They had ridden for nearly a hundred miles and seldom been out of sight of buffalo… Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it in Lonesome Dove they had decided that the reports must exaggerated –thinned out, maybe, but not wiped out. Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed… Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting, unused, occupied only by remnants –of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters. Augustus thought they were crazed remnants, mostly, like the old mountain man who worked night and day gathering bones to no purpose” (434).
“…life’s a twisting stream” (450).
“‘Son this is a sad thing,’ Augustus said. ‘Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don’t you go attempting vengeance. You’ve got more urgent business. If I ever run into Blue Duck I’ll kill him. But if I don’t, somebody else will. Or a snake will bite him or a horse will fall on him, or he’ll get hung, or one of his renegades will shoot him in the back. Or he’ll just get old and die’” (464).
“Then it seemed like sleep was one of the most wonderful things in life… July wondered if perhaps the sleep of death would be as good, as comforting and warming, as his boyhood slumber. He had a rifle and a pistol –one pull of the trigger would bring him all the sleep he wanted. In his five years as a lawman he had never shot anyone, though he had a reputation as a dangerous fighter. It would be a joke on everyone if the only person he ever killed was himself. He had always assumed that people who killed themselves were cowards.”
“‘It’s mostly bones we’re riding over, anyway. Why, think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains. Buffalo and other critters too. And the Indians have been here forever; their bones are down there in the earth. I’m told that over in the Old Country you dig six feet without uncovering skulls and leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kinda filled up the ground. It’s interesting to think about, all the bones in the ground. But it’s just fellow creatures, it’s nothing to shy from’” (567).
“‘Ride with an outlaw, die with him’” (581).
“Sometimes she dreamed of Xavier, standing with his dishrag in the Dry Bean… She remembered how he had cried in the morning she left, how he’d offered to take her to Galveston… But she didn’t remember Jake particularly. He had faded into all the other men who had come and gone. He had got a thorn in his hand, she remembered that, but she didn’t remember much else. She didn’t much care that he was dead –he wasn’t a good man, like Gus… What scared her was all the death. Now that she had found Gus, it was very frightening to her to think that he might die. she didn’t want to be without him. Yet that very night she dreamed that he had died and she couldn’t find the body. When she came out of the dream and heard him breathing, she clung so tightly to him that he woke up. It was very hot and her clinging made them sweaty” (628).
“It was the same old Clara, so far as spirit went, though her body had changed. She was fuller in the bosom, thinner in the face. The real change was in her hands. As a girl she had delicate hands, with long fingers and tiny wrists. Now it was her hands that drew his eye: the work she had done had swollen and strengthened them; they seemed as large at the joints as a man’s. she was peeling potatoes with them and handled a knife as deftly as a trapper. Her hands were no longer as beautiful, but they were arresting: the hands of a formidable woman, perhaps too formidable” (693).
“‘We’ve heard Montana’s the last place that ain’t settled,’ Augustus said. ‘I’d like to see one more place that ain’t settled before I get decrepit and have to take up the rocking chair’” (710).
“What was approaching now was death, he knew. He had faced it before and overridden its motion with his own. To sit and wait for it gave it too many advantages. He had seen many men die of wounds, and had watched the turning of their spirits from active desire to live to indifference. With a bad wound, the moment indifference took over, life began to subside. Few men rose out of it: most lost all impulse toward activity and ended by offering death at least a halfhearted welcome” (787).
“‘A promise is words –a son is a life,’ Clara said. ‘A life, Mr. Call. I was better fit to raise boys than you’ve ever been, and yet I lost three. I tell you no promise is worth leaving that boy up there, as you have. Does he know he’s your son?’… ‘I’ll write him [Newt],’ she said. ‘I’ll see he gets your name if I have to carry the letter to Montana myself. And I’ll tell you another thing: I’m sorry you and Gus McCrae ever met. All you two done was ruin one another, not to mention those close to you. Another reason I didn’t marry him was because I didn’t want to fight you for him every day of my life. You men and your promises: they’re just excuses to do what you plan to do anyway, which is leave. You think you’ve always done right –that’s your ugly pride, Mr. Call. But you never did right and it would be a sad woman that needed anything from you. You’re a vain coward, for all your fighting, I despised you then, for what you were, and I despise you now, for what you’re doing’” (845-846).
“He rode the dun into Lonesome Dove late on a day in August, only to startled by the harsh clanging of the dinner bell, the one Bolivar had loved to beat with the broken crowbar. The sound made him feel that he rode through a land of ghosts. He felt lost in his mind and wondered if all the boys would be there when he got home” (856).
The 1986 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1986 Fiction Jury consisted of the following three members:
- Chair: N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024) was the 1969 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel House Made of Dawn. See my Pulitzer Prize review which includes my brief biography of N. Scott Momaday here.
- Michiko Kakutani (1955-present) is the former chief book critic at the New York Times from 1983-2017. Previously, she was a reporter at The Washington Post and Time magazine. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998. While her reviews were often biting in their criticism, she was also credited with boosting the careers of George Saunders, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. Her name was sometimes used as a verb, and publishers have referred to her negative reviews as “getting Kakutani’ed.” She is Japanese-American, the only child of Yale mathematician Shizuo Kakutani and Keiko “Kay” Uchida, an alumna of Yale University (1976), and as far as I can tell, she is unmarried and has no children.
- Philip F. O’Connor (1932-2008) was born in San Francisco, CA. He graduated from St. Ignatius Preparatory School, and the University of San Francisco. He served in the army and was stationed in England before returning to San Francisco to work as a journalist for the San Francisco News and teach high school English and work a variety of odd jobs while he earned a master’s degree in English from San Francisco State College. He earned an M.F.A. from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1963 before teaching English Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York and then Bowling Green State University where he established the Creative Writing Program and served as a professor and writer in residence for many years. He served on two Pulitzer Juries, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1890, published two short story collections, in addition to a string of novels. He retired from teaching in the 1990s and passed away in 2008.
The runners up this year were Continental Drift by Russell Banks, a novel about globalization and geologic continental drift as two characters travel to Florida for different reasons, and The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, which is about a curmudgeonly travel writer who is given a new lease on life. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985 and the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986. Anne Tyler had previously been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
N. Scott Momaday sent the final jury report to Robin Kuzen, assistant administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, on December 13, 1985. Of the selection of Lonesome Dove, he wrote: “Lonesome Dove is an American epic. It is surely one of the most nearly complete western novels ever written. Not only does it comprehend such traditional expressions as the dime novel, the ballad, and the folktale; it incorporates these into a sum that is greater than its parts. This is a monumental work of action, vision, and irony. It is among other things a magnificent parody of myths, tales, and stock characters of the so-called “western.” In Lonesome Dove the cattle drive from Texas to Montana becomes a pilgrimage in which we Americans are enabled to se what is truly unique in our national experience, in our national character, and in our national spirit. It is a work that is already prominent in American literature.”
Who is Larry McMurtry?
Larry Jeff McMurtry (1936-2021) was born in Wichita Falls, Texas (according to his birth certificate) to Hazel Ruth and William Jefferson McMurtry (a rancher). He grew up on his parents’ ranch outside Archer City, Texas (two hours outside Dallas), which he later called a “bookless ranch house” located in a “bookless city.” The city was the model for the town of Thalia which serves as the setting for much of his fiction. He would always regard Texas as his true home; he had the same postal box for nearly 70 years. In his memoir, Larry McMurtry later said that during his first five or six years in his grandfather’s ranch house, there were no books, but his extended family would sit on the front porch every night and tell stories for hours. In 1942, McMurtry’s cousin Robert Hilburn stopped by the ranch house on his way to enlist for World War II, and left a box containing 19 boys’ adventure books from the 1930s. The first book young Larry read was Sergeant Silk: The Prairie Scout.
He earned a BA from the University of North Texas in 1958 and was married to an an English professor, Jo Ballard Scot, the following year (they later had a son before divorcing). He then earned an MA in English from Rice University in 1960. During the 1960–1961 academic year, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he studied the craft of fiction under Frank O’Connor and Malcolm Cowley, alongside other aspiring writers, including Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle and Gurney Norman. Note: Wallace Stegner was on sabbatical in Europe during McMurtry’s fellowship year, but McMurtry remained friends with Ken Kesey after leaving, in fact, in 1964, Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters launched their noted cross-country trip in the painted school bus and stopped at McMurtry’s home in Houston. The incident was amusingly chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) as one stark naked woman hopped off the bus and promptly snatched McMurtry’s baby boy out of his hands while McMurtry awkwardly tried to get her hand back his child.
Larry McMurtry was also one of the biggest antiquarian book collectors and dealers in the country. He opened his first used and rare bookstore in 1970-1971 in Georgetown Washington DC (with two partners and called it “Booked Up”). He later opened more stores in Dallas, Houston, and Tucson. He opened another “Booked Up” in his hometown of Archer City, attempting to turn it into a book town. In a 1976 profile of McMurtry in The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin observed of his book-buying skills. “Larry knows which shade of blue cover on a copy of ‘Native Son’ indicates a first printing and which one doesn’t… He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing.” The store “Booked Up” once occupied six buildings and contained some 400,000 volumes. By 2012, McMurtry auctioned off two-thirds of those books and planned to consolidate his businesses, not wishing to leave the burdens of the business to his heirs. Meanwhile, McMurtry’s private library alone held some 30,000 books and was spread over three houses. He called compiling his collection a life’s work, “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.”
McMurtry taught at Texas Christian University, Rice University, George Mason Colege, and American University, though he apparently did not enjoy teaching and pursued his love of writing instead. He penned more than thirty novels: his first novel Horseman, Pass By (1961), which was later made into made into the film Hud (1963), directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. McMurtry’s humorous coming-of-age novel The Last Picture Show (1966) was made into a film of the same title in 1971 starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie of his 1975 novel Terms of Endearment directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, and Jack Nicholson (it won the Academy Award for best picture of 1983). He also published a collection of essays, memoirs, and histories, in addition to more than thirty screenplays. including “Brokeback Mountain” (co-written along with Diana Ossana, based on the short story of the same name by Annie Proulx), for which McMurtry won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award in 2006. He accepted his Oscar while wearing a dinner jacket over jeans and cowboy boots (he claimed to have forgotten his suit). Ever a sarcastic funny man, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, McMurtry liked to tweak his critics by wearing a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist.” He won countless awards throughout his career: including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, and of course the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Lonesome Dove in 1986. In his memoir Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2009), McMurtry wrote that Lonesome Dove was akin to the “Gone With the Wind of the West … a pretty good book; it’s not a towering masterpiece.”
For two years in the early 1990s he was the president of PEN and was a fierce defender of free speech, opposing immigration restrictions on speech at the time, and supporting Salman Rushdie during the fatwa controversy. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote on topics relating to the American West. McMurtry was known to be a friend of many 20th century American literary lights, including Susan Sontag (he apparently once took her out to a stock car race event).
However, after completing his novel Terms of Endearment, McMurtry entered a period he later described as “a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983,” wherein he came to dislike his own prose. He suffered a heart attack in 1991, followed by quadruple-bypass surgery. In the wake of surgery, he fell into a long depression during which, he told a reporter, he did little more than lie on the couch of his collaborator Diana Ossana for more than a year. They had met in the 1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson and then began living together, and collaborating shortly afterward, with Mr. McMurtry writing on a typewriter and Ossana editing his work and entering it into a computer (since McMurtry never owned a computer). He wrote his novel Streets of Laredo at her kitchen counter.
Throughout his career, McMurtry published his works for the same editor, Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster, for more than three decades before eventually moving to Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, toward the end of his career in 2014. McMurtry described his method for writing in his first autobiography Books: A Memoir. He said that from his first novel on, he would get up early in the morning and dash off five pages of narrative. In later years, he was writing ten pages per day. He was committed to his craft, writing every day, ignoring holidays and weekends.
In 2011, he married Norma Faye Kesey, Ken Kesey’s widow (they had a ceremony held in Archer City held at McMurtry’s antiquarian bookstore “Booked Up”) before she moved into the two homes Mr. McMurtry shared with Ms. Ossana in Tucson and Archer City. Prior to this, McMurtry was known to have numerous girlfriends around the country –he had once reportedly completed a draft of a memoir titled “62 Women,” about some of the many women he knew and admired. It’s fair to say, he had an unusual arrangement during the last years of his life.
McMurtry died of congestive heart failure on March 25, 2021, at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He was 84 years old. He was survived by his son James McMurtry, a songwriter, and grandson Curtis McMurtry, also a songwriter. In 2023, Larry McMurtry’s personal property, including his massive book collection, was sold at auction.
Film Adaptations
- Lonesome Dove (1989), a popular CBS television miniseries
- Director: Simon Wincer
- Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Danny Glover, Diane Lane, and Anjelica Huston
Further Reading
The Lonesome Dove tetralogy in publication order:
- Lonesome Dove (1985) 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner
- Streets of Laredo (1993)
- Dead Man’s Walk (1995)
- Comanche Moon (1997)
The Lonesome Dove tetralogy in chronological order:
- Dead Man’s Walk (1995)
- Comanche Moon (1997)
- Lonesome Dove (1985) 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner
- Streets of Laredo (1993)
Other notable books by Larry McMurtry:
- The Last Picture Show (1966), part of the “Duane Moore” and “Thalia” series
- Terms of Endearment (1975), part of the “Houston” series
- Books: A Memoir (2008)
- Literary Life: A Second memoir (2009)
- Hollywood: A Third Memoir (2011)
- Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty (2023)
Literary Context 1985-1986
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1985): awarded to Claude Simon (1913-2005) “who in his novel combines the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition.”
- National Book Award (1985): White Noise by Don DeLillo.
- Booker Prize Winner (1985): The Bone People by Keri Hulme.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1985 was The Mammoth Hunters by Jean M. Auel. Other notable bestsellers that year were: Texas by James A. Michener (Michener had previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific in 1948), Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor, Skeleton Crew by Stephen King, and Contact by Carl Sagan.
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood was published.
- Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov was published.
- Walking on Glass by Iain Banks was published.
- Eon and Blood Music were published by Greg Bear.
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card was published.
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez was published.
- The Tenth Man by Graham Greene was published.
- Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert was published.
- The Cider House Rules by John Irving was published.
- Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin was published.
- The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing was published.
- At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels by H.P. Lovecraft was published.
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
This was a monumental year for the Western novel (or perhaps the anti-Western novel) as Larry McMurtry published his magnum opus Lonesome Done and Cormac McCarthy published perhaps his greatest novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, either one of which would have been a fitting selection for the Pulitzer Prize, though thankfully Cormac McCarthy would later go on to win the prize a couple decades later in 2007 for his post-apocalyptic novel The Road. Other novels the Pulitzer Prize overlooked in 1986 were John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, but regardless, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove stands out as a uniquely brilliant American odyssey. It is that rare example of the Great American Novel, a book that was rightly elevated by the Pulitzer Prize at the time of its publication, and an enduring work that has managed to win both the praise of critics as well as the general public alike. Today, Lonesome Dove has experienced something of a popular resurgence, especially after Stephen King declared it his favorite novel.
McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, New York, 2010 (originally published in 1985). It was dedicated to journalist Maureen Orth, a long-time close platonic friend of McMurtry, and in memory of the nine McMurtry boys (1878-1983) “Once in the saddle they used to go dashing…”
Fantastic novel!
Perhaps my all time favorite novel, the charectures are memorable and vivid. 🤠