Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry published Lonesome Dove in 1985, and the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and transformed its author’s reputation overnight. McMurtry had spent the previous two decades writing about modern Texas – small towns, pickup trucks, the death of the frontier – and many of his readers were surprised to find him writing an epic Western. The surprise resolved quickly: Lonesome Dove is the Western novel that most fully achieves what the form promises and most honestly reckons with what it costs.

Gus and Call

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are retired Texas Rangers living in the border town of Lonesome Dove, running a small cattle operation that barely sustains them. Gus talks; Call works. Gus finds reasons to enjoy life; Call finds reasons to continue. They have been partners for decades, and their friendship – contentious, devoted, utterly without sentimentality – is the novel’s spine and its greatest achievement.

When their old partner Jake Spoon arrives with news of good grazing land in Montana, Call decides to drive a cattle herd north – 2,500 miles through unsettled territory, hostile weather, and men who will kill you for your horses. Gus goes because Call is going, and because he cannot quite bring himself to sit still even when sitting still would be wiser. The drive begins, and the novel – all 945 pages of it – earns its length.

The Drive North

The cattle drive is the novel’s engine, and McMurtry uses it to move a large cast of characters through a landscape that changes character as they travel: the Texas plains, the Red River crossing, the plains of Kansas, the Dakotas, the Montana high country. Each stretch of the journey produces its own dangers and its own revelations. River crossings kill. Indians kill. Disease kills. Accidents kill. The random violence of the frontier is not romanticized; it accumulates, and the reader feels its weight.

The supporting cast is among the richest in American fiction: Newt, the young cowhand who may be Call’s illegitimate son; Elmira, who runs away from a bad marriage and walks into worse; July Johnson, the sheriff who pursues her; Roscoe, the deputy; Dish Boggett, who is hopelessly in love with a prostitute named Lorena; and Deets, the Black scout whose competence and decency the novel presents without commentary as simply what they are.

Women in the Novel

The women in Lonesome Dove – Elmira, Lorena, Clara Allen – are among McMurtry’s finest creations, and the novel is more interested in them than the Western genre typically is. Elmira’s disastrous journey north is given its full weight: she is not punished for leaving an unsatisfying marriage, but the world she moves into is not better than the one she left. Lorena survives things that the genre usually kills its female characters for experiencing. Clara, in Montana, is the novel’s most fully realized woman – intelligent, practical, and undeceived about what the men around her are and are not.

McMurtry does not sentimentalize these women or make them victims. They act, they endure, and they judge the men around them with clarity that the men often lack for themselves.

The Western and Its Myths

McMurtry grew up on a Texas ranch and spent his career interrogating the myths of the West he inhabited. Lonesome Dove does not debunk the Western – it is too in love with the landscape and the life for that – but it refuses the genre’s usual comforts. The violence is not clean. The heroes are not heroic by any measure the genre usually deploys. Gus and Call are skilled at a way of life that is already ending when the novel begins, and both of them know it, in different ways, and with different responses.

The novel’s elegiac note – the sense of something passing that was magnificent and brutal and will not come again – gives it a weight that the Western genre rarely achieves. McMurtry mourns the frontier without pretending it was good, which is a more difficult and more honest thing than mourning it as a simple loss.

McMurtry’s Prose

McMurtry writes with the confidence of a novelist who has been doing it long enough to trust the sentence. The prose is direct, fast-moving, and capable of great tenderness without becoming sentimental. He moves between perspectives with ease, and each character’s section carries that character’s voice without becoming pastiche. The novel’s pacing over 945 pages is a genuine achievement – it never lags, never feels bloated, and the ending, when it comes, carries the weight of everything that precedes it.

A Place in American Literature

Lonesome Dove occupies a singular position in American fiction: it is a genre novel that transcends its genre, a long novel that earns its length, and a book about masculinity that is genuinely honest about what masculinity costs the people inside it and around it. Readers who approach it skeptically – it is a big Western, after all – typically emerge convinced. The characters stay. The landscape stays. The friendship between Gus and Call stays longer than almost anything in American fiction.

Is Lonesome Dove part of a series?

Yes. McMurtry wrote three companion novels: Streets of Laredo (1993), a sequel following an aged Woodrow Call; Dead Man’s Walk (1995), a prequel about young Gus and Call; and Comanche Moon (1997), another prequel set between Dead Man’s Walk and Lonesome Dove. The original novel stands completely alone and is the best of the four; the sequels and prequels are rewarding for readers who want more of the characters but are not essential.

What makes Gus and Call’s friendship work?

They are complementary in ways that run deeper than personality. Gus provides the language for their shared experience – the reflection, the comedy, the acknowledgment of feeling – while Call provides the action and the refusal to acknowledge feeling. Each requires the other to function; neither would be the same person alone. The friendship works because it does not require either of them to become someone else, and because both of them know, without saying so, that the other is the most important person in their life.

Why is the novel so long?

The length is the novel. Lonesome Dove is a journey narrative covering 2,500 miles of frontier territory with a large cast of characters, and the accumulation of incident, landscape, and character over the journey is what produces the novel’s emotional weight. A shorter version would not have the same impact; the ending works because of the distance traveled to reach it.

How does the novel handle race?

With more complexity than the genre usually manages, though not without its period limitations. Deets, the Black scout, is depicted with full respect for his competence, intelligence, and moral seriousness, and his death is treated as a genuine loss rather than a genre casualty. The novel’s treatment of Native Americans is more complicated: the Comanche and other peoples appear primarily as a threat, and the perspective remains largely that of the white frontiersmen.

Is Jake Spoon a villain?

Jake Spoon is one of American fiction’s most carefully rendered failures – a man who is not evil by intention but who drifts into evil through a series of choices that each seem individually defensible and cumulatively become unforgivable. His execution – carried out by Gus and Call, who were once his friends – is the novel’s most morally demanding scene.

What is the relationship between the novel and Western history?

McMurtry researched the cattle drive era carefully and set the novel in the 1870s. The route from Texas to Montana was actually traveled by cattle drives in this period, and many of the novel’s geographical and historical details are accurate. The characters are fictional composites drawn from McMurtry’s family history and his research.

How does the TV miniseries compare to the novel?

The 1989 CBS miniseries, starring Robert Duvall as Gus and Tommy Lee Jones as Call, is widely considered one of the finest television adaptations of an American novel. Duvall and Jones are so well cast that many readers find the actors difficult to separate from the characters on subsequent readings. The miniseries necessarily compresses and omits, but it captures the novel’s spirit and its central friendship with unusual fidelity.

What does the ending mean?

The ending – Call’s long journey to return Gus’s body to Texas, as Gus requested as a dying wish – is the novel’s final demonstration of both men’s characters. Call has never been able to say what his friendship with Gus means to him; the journey south, which is harder and longer and more painful than anyone expects, is his way of saying it. That is the novel’s elegy and its answer.