Lonesome Dove


Lonesome Dove is a 1985 Western novel by American writer Larry McMurtry. It is the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series but the third installment in the series chronologically.
The story focuses on the relationship among several retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. Set in the closing years of the Old West, the novel explores themes of old age, death, unrequited love, and friendship.
The novel was a bestseller and won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1989, it was adapted as a TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall, which won both critical and popular acclaim. McMurtry went on to write a sequel, Streets of Laredo, and two prequels, Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon, all of which were also adapted as TV series.

Origins

Following the success of The Last Picture Show in 1971, Peter Bogdanovich was keen to collaborate with McMurtry on a Western. Their original script was welcomed by the studio, but disliked by the actors McMurtry and Bogdanovich had in mind: Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne. According to McMurtry, the script languished in development hell for 12 years before he bought the rights back for $35,000, to adapt the story as a novel. He spent several years working on it intermittently, between writing Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose, and eventually submitted it to his publishers in 1984.

Plot

It is the late 1870s. Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae, two famous retired Texas Rangers, run the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium in the small Texas border town of Lonesome Dove. Working with them are Joshua Deets, an excellent black tracker and scout from their Ranger days; Pea Eye Parker, another former Ranger who is reliable but unintelligent; Bolivar, a retired Mexican bandit who works as their cook; and Newt Dobbs, a 17-year-old boy whose mother was a prostitute named Maggie and whose father is widely thought by the outfit to be Call, though Call has never acknowledged this.
Jake Spoon, another former Ranger, arrives in Lonesome Dove after an absence of more than 10 years, during which he has traveled widely across the United States. He is on the run, having accidentally shot a dentist in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The dentist's brother happens to be the sheriff, July Johnson.
Reunited with Gus and Call, Jake's description of Montana inspires Call to gather a herd of cattle and drive them north to begin the first cattle ranch north of the Yellowstone River. Call, who has grown listless in retirement, is attracted to the romantic notion of settling pristine country. Gus is less enthusiastic but changes his mind when reminded that the love of his life, Clara, lives on the Platte River near Ogallala, Nebraska, which would be on the route to Montana. The Hat Creek outfit rustles cattle from across the border in Mexico and recruits local cowboys in preparation for the drive.
Ironically, Jake Spoon decides not to go at all, having made himself comfortable with the town's only prostitute, Lorena Wood, who is smitten with him after he promises to take her to San Francisco. At Lorena's insistence, however, she and Jake ultimately trail along behind the cattle drive.
In Fort Smith, the sheriff July Johnson has departed town on the trail of Jake Spoon, taking his 12-year-old stepson Joe with him. July's wife Elmira, who regrets her recent marriage to him, leaves shortly afterwards to search for her former lover Dee Boot. Inept deputy sheriff Roscoe Brown is sent after July to inform him of her disappearance, and has many misadventures and strange encounters through Arkansas and Texas, assisted by a young girl named Janey who escapes from sexual slavery to accompany him. Roscoe eventually reunites with July and Joe when they rescue him and Janey from bandits in Texas.
As the cattle drive moves north through Texas, Jake tires of Lorena and abandons her to go gambling in Austin. Left alone, she is abducted by an Indian bandit named Blue Duck, an old nemesis of the Texas Rangers. Gus goes in pursuit, and while traveling along the Canadian River he encounters July's group. Gus and July attack Blue Duck's bandit encampment, killing the bandits and rescuing Lorena; however, Blue Duck has already made his escape, having murdered Roscoe, Joe, and Janey in the process.
A devastated July continues his journey in search of Elmira, while Gus and Lorena return to the cattle drive. Lorena has been repeatedly raped and, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, is frightened of interacting with anybody other than Gus. The two of them, still following the cattle drive north, sleep in a tent some distance behind the other cowboys.
Meanwhile, Jake Spoon is in Fort Worth. Hearing that July Johnson has been looking for him, Jake leaves Texas in a hurry in the company of the Suggs brothers, whom he soon realizes are bandits. Jake becomes increasingly alarmed by the brothers' actions as they travel north into Kansas; the gang progresses from robbery to outright murder, but Jake is too frightened and outnumbered to either kill them or escape.
When the gang attacks a trail boss known to Gus and Call, the former Rangers of the Hat Creek outfit go in pursuit of them. The ex-Rangers are dismayed when they apprehend the Suggs brothers and find Jake alongside them. Jake pleads with his former comrades that he had no choice but to go along with things for fear of his own life, but Gus and Call stand firm that he has "crossed a line," and they solemnly hang him alongside the Suggs brothers. Newt, who had idolized Jake as a child, is left deeply upset.
Meanwhile, Elmira, pregnant with July's child, has come into the company of a rough buffalo hunter named Zwey, a simple man who seems to believe he is now "married" to her. Arriving in Nebraska they come across the horse ranch of Clara Allen, Gus's former love, whose husband Bob has become a brain-damaged invalid after being kicked by a mustang. Clara delivers Elmira's baby son, but Elmira and Zwey leave almost immediately afterwards for Ogallala.
Dee Boot is held in the Ogallala jail, scheduled to be hanged for his accidental murder of a young boy; Elmira collapses while speaking to him, and Boot is hanged while she recuperates in a doctor's house, leaving her heartbroken and depressed. July arrives at Clara's ranch, learns what has transpired, and goes to see her, but Elmira refuses to speak to him. Shortly afterwards she orders Zwey to take her east, back towards St. Louis.
July feels compelled to follow her, but at Clara's insistence he remains at the ranch with her family and his son instead,who Clara had named Martin, anguished and heartbroken. Word later reaches them that Elmira and Zwey were killed by Sioux.
The Hat Creek outfit arrives in Nebraska, and Gus takes Lorena, Call, and Newt to visit Clara. She is happy to see him but has no desire to rekindle their romance; however, she takes in Lorena, whose post-traumatic stress is easing and who feels comfortable with Clara and her daughters. Gus, rebuffed by Clara and no longer Lorena's sole carer, decides to go with the cattle drive and see the journey to Montana through to its end.
In Wyoming, several horses are stolen by half-starved Indians. Call, Gus, and Deets chase after them, and Deets is killed in the ensuing confrontation by the group's only remaining brave. Shortly afterwards Gus informs Newt that Call is his father, something Newt has always dreamed of, but he is too upset by Deets' death to give it much thought.
The cattle drive arrives in Montana, which is as lush and beautiful as Jake had described. Scouting ahead of the main herd, Gus and Pea Eye are attacked by Blood Indians, and Gus is badly wounded by two arrows to the leg. Besieged in a makeshift dugout in the bank of the Musselshell River for several days, Gus' wounds become infected, and his health declines. After a heavy rain he sends Pea Eye down the swollen river to seek help, but Pea Eye loses his clothing, boots, gun and food in the river and stumbles naked, and unarmed with no food for a 100 mile walk across the plains. Starving, delirious and suffering from exposure, he returns to the main herd on the verge of death. Call then sets out alone to rescue Gus.
Meanwhile, Gus leaves the river shortly after Pea Eye, feverish and dying, taking his chances and escaping the Indians. He makes it to Miles City, Montana, and collapses unconscious, waking to find that a doctor has sawed off his gangrenous leg. His other leg is also infected, but Gus refuses to let the doctor amputate it. Call arrives in Miles City and fruitlessly tries to convince Gus to have his other leg removed; Gus, however, would rather die than be an invalid. Gus asks Call to bury him next spring in an orchard in Texas where he used to picnic with Clara, and Call begrudgingly agrees. After writing letters to Clara and Lorena, and urging Call to accept Newt as his son, Gus dies of blood poisoning.
Call leaves Gus' body in storage in Miles City, intending to return him to Texas after the winter. He continues north with the cattle drive, despondent over losing his closest friend.
Eventually, he establishes a ranch between the Missouri River and the Milk River. Call suffers from depression all winter, no longer caring about the cattle drive or the ranch, and contemplating what to do about Newt. Before leaving in the spring, he puts Newt in charge of the ranch and gives him his horse, his rifle, and his family watch, but still cannot bring himself to claim the boy as his son. Newt is inwardly upset but accepts the gifts nonetheless. Call, ashamed of himself, leaves the ranch.
Call retrieves Gus' body, packed in a coffin with salt and charcoal, and begins the long journey south. In Nebraska, he gives Gus' letters to Clara and Lorena. Clara considers the journey a whimsical folly typical of Gus and urges Call to bury him on her ranch, but Call refuses, having given Gus his word. Clara tells Call she despises him as a "vain coward" for refusing to claim Newt as his son, and he leaves Nebraska haunted by her condemnation.
The story of the cowboy transporting his dead friend's body spreads across the plains, and Call takes a circuitous route through Colorado and New Mexico to avoid the increasing attention. In Santa Rosa, New Mexico, he discovers that Blue Duck has been captured by a sheriff's deputy and is about to be hanged. Call visits Blue Duck in his jail cell, and the half-breed taunts him, pointing out that he raided, killed, raped, and kidnapped with impunity throughout his life despite the best efforts of the Texas Rangers. On the day of his hanging, Blue Duck jumps out a third-story window on his way to the roof where the gallows were awaiting him, pulling along with him the sheriff's deputy who had caught him, killing them both.
Arriving back in Texas exhausted, despondent, and wounded from a bullet to his side, Call buries Gus by the spring in the orchard in San Antonio, true to his word. He then rides on to Lonesome Dove, where the cook Bolivar, who had abandoned the cattle drive before it left Texas, is delighted to see him again. In town, Call finds that the saloon has burned down; the proprietor, who had been madly in love with Lorena, committed suicide after her departure by burning down his saloon while he remained inside.

Characters

Lonesome Dove was the winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
The novel received favorable reviews. In the New York Times, Nicholas Lemann praised the novel as "thrilling and almost perfectly realized," calling it "the great cowboy novel."
McMurtry himself eventually expressed dissatisfaction with the popularity of the novel, particularly after the miniseries adaptation. In the preface to the 2000 edition he wrote: "It's hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man's Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I'll be mulling over for a long, long time."

Adaptations

A television miniseries adaptation produced by Motown Productions was broadcast on CBS in 1989, starring Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae and Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow F. Call. The series was a commercial and critical success, eventually garnering a cult following.

Historical references

According to McMurtry, Gus and Call were not modeled after historical characters, but there are similarities with real-life cattle drivers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. When Goodnight and Loving's African American guide Bose Ikard died, Goodnight carved a wooden grave marker for him, just as Call does for Deets. Upon Loving's death, Goodnight brought him home to be buried in Texas, as Call does for Augustus.
According to McMurtry's memoir, Books: A Memoir, the ultimate sources for Gus and Call were Quixote, the crazy old knight, and Sancho, the peasant pragmatist, from Don Quixote. He stated: "What is important that, early on, I read some version of Don Quixote and pondered the grave differences between Sancho and the Don. Between the two is where fiction, as I've mostly read and written it, lives."
Other books of the Lonesome Dove series feature more-prominent historical events and locations such as the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, the Great Raid of 1840, and the King Ranch, and characters such as Buffalo Hump, John Wesley Hardin, and Judge Roy Bean.