Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove

First edition
Author Larry McMurtry
Country United States
Language English
Series Lonesome Dove series
Genre Western
Published 1985 Simon & Schuster
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 843 p.
ISBN 0-671-50420-7
OCLC 11812426
813/.54 19
LC Class PS3563.O8749
Followed by Streets of Laredo, Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon

Lonesome Dove is a 1985 western novel written by Larry McMurtry. It is the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series, but is the third installment in the series chronologically. The story focuses on the relationship of several retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana.

McMurtry originally developed the tale in 1972 for a feature film entitled The Streets of Laredo (a title later used for the sequel), which would have been directed by Peter Bogdanovich and would have starred James Stewart as Augustus McCrae, John Wayne as W.F. Call, and Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon. But plans fell through when Wayne turned it down, leading Stewart to back out, and the project was eventually shelved. Ten years later McMurtry resurrected the 75-page screenplay by purchasing it from the studio that owned it, then expanded it into a full-length novel. The resulting novel, Lonesome Dove, became a bestseller and won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[1]

After the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, the idea of turning the novel into film came up again. Both John Milius and John Huston each attempted to adapt the novel into a feature film before Suzanne De Passe and Bill Wittliff decided to adapt the novel as a mini-series. It was then made into the four-part TV miniseries, which won seven Emmy Awards and was nominated for twelve others.[2] It spawned four follow-up miniseries, Return to Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Dead Man's Walk, and Comanche Moon, and two television series, Lonesome Dove: The Series and Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years.[3]

Origins

The original Lonesome Dove story had been written as a movie script for a 1970s film to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich and star John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Wayne turned down the part on John Ford's advice and Stewart backed out as a result, so the movie was abandoned. McMurtry later purchased the screenplay back from the studio that owned it, then turned the script into a full-length novel. The novel was then developed by McMurtry as a television miniseries with Tommy Lee Jones in the Wayne role, Robert Duvall in the Stewart part, and Robert Urich filling in for Fonda. James Garner had been offered the role of Augustus McCrae in the original miniseries but had to turn it down for health reasons. Garner later played Woodrow Call in the sequel, "The Streets of Laredo".[4]

The basic story is a fictionalized account of Charles Goodnight's and Oliver Loving's cattle drive. In particular, Loving (Gus) was attacked by Indians, and died several weeks later of blood poisoning with Goodnight (Call) at his side. Goodnight honored Loving's dying request to be taken back to Texas for burial.

Plot

It is the late 1870s.[5] 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 ten years, during which he has travelled 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 travelling 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, murdering 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 is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, frightened of interacting with anybody other than Gus; the two of them sleep in a tent some distance behind the other cowboys, still following the cattle drive north.

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 progressing from robbery to outright murder, but is too frightened and outnumbered to 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, and 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 are 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 Ogallala jail, scheduled to be hanged for his accidental murder of a settler; 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, 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 PTSD is easing and 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 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's death to give it much thought.

The cattle drive arrives in Montana, which is as lush and beautiful as Jake said. 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 heavy rain he sends Pea Eye down the swollen river to seek help, but Pea Eye loses his clothing in the river and stumbles naked across the plains. Starving, delirious and suffering from exposure, he returns to the main herd on the verge of death; Call 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 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 by the spring in Texas where he used to picnic with Clara, and Call begrudgingly agrees. After writing letters for Clara and Lorena and urging Call to accept Newt as his son, Gus dies of blood poisoning.

Call leaves Gus's body in storage in Miles City, intending to return him to Texas after the winter. He continues north with cattle drive, despondent over the loss of 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, departs the ranch.

Call retrieves Gus's body, packed in a coffin with salt and charcoal, and begins the long journey south. In Nebraska he gives Gus's 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,[6] and he leaves Nebraska haunted by her condemnation.[7]

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. Call visits Blue Duck in his jail cell and the Indian 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 tackles the sheriff's deputy who caught him through an upper-story courthouse window, killing them both.

Arriving back in Texas exhausted and despondent, Call buries Gus by the spring in Austin, true to his word. He rides on to Lonesome Dove, where the cook Bolivar, who abandoned the cattle drive before it left Texas, is delighted to see him again. In the town itself, Call finds that the saloon has burned down; the proprietor was in love with Lorena and committed suicide after her departure.

Characters

Historical references

According to McMurtry, Gus and Call were not modeled after historical characters, but there are similarities with real-life cattle drivers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight. When Goodnight and Loving's 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. (Goodnight himself appears as a minor but generally sympathetic character in this novel, and more so in the sequel, Streets of Laredo, and the prequels Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon.)

According to McMurtry's memoir, Books: A Memoir, the ultimate source for Gus and Call were Don and Sancho from Don Quixote—the crazy old knight and the peasant pragmatist. On his reading of Don Quixote, "What is important that, early on, I read some version of Don Quixote and pondered the grave differences (comically cast) between Sancho and the Don. Between the two is where fiction, as I've mostly read and written it, lives." [11]

Other books of the Lonesome Dove series feature more-prominent historical events and locations such as the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, Great Raid of 1840 and the King Ranch, and characters such as Buffalo Hump, John Wesley Hardin, and Judge Roy Bean.

With regard to naming the series, McMurtry provides some background in his second memoir book. In Literary Life: A Second Memoir[12] (2009), McMurtry calls that early 1980s day “a gift from the Muse if there ever was one”: “There is a fine steakhouse called the Ranchman’s, in a tiny town called Ponder, Texas, near Denton and not far from Fort Worth. I have eaten at the Ranchman’s with some regularity for about 55 years. It was summer and I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I ate there again, emerging, well-fed, at about dusk. A few miles south of Ponder, with the lights of Fort Worth just ahead, I happened to notice an old church bus parked beside the road, and on its side was written: ‘Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.’ If ever I had an epiphany it was at that moment: I had, at last, found a title for the trail driving book.”[13]

McMurtry went on to explain that his “lonesome dove” in the story is Capt. Woodrow F. Call’s unacknowledged son, Newt Dobbs. As it turns out, the actual Lonesome Dove is the church itself.

When the church (now located within Southlake, Texas) was founded on the Texas frontier in February 1846, only two months after Texas combined with the U.S. and with only a few settlements and a fort nearby, the pioneers chose a fitting name. “The church’s name came from the fact that there was no Baptist church nearer than Red River County to the north and Huntsville to the south,” The Dallas Morning News reported in a 1936 Texas Centennial story on Texas Baptists’ history. The church’s own history describes it more poetically: “At the time of its founding, there were no other [Baptist] churches … between the Dove and the Pacific Ocean.”[13]

The sidearm Gus McCrae carries in the book is a Colt Dragoon, while in the Miniseries he carries a Walker Colt, designed by Texas Ranger Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker and Connecticut gun-maker Samuel Colt, and produced by Eli Whitney Jr. at his armory in 1847. It was first issued to the Texas Rangers, who praised the pistol for its durability as well as its accuracy and dependability. It was the most powerful black powder revolver ever made, and became as much of a legend as the early Rangers who carried it.

The sign for Gus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call's Hat Creek Cattle Company includes a Latin motto, "Uva Uvam Vivendo Varia Fit," which appears to be a reference to a proverb first attributed to Juvenal.

Reception

Lonesome Dove was the winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for 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." [14]

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."[15]

Adaptations

A television miniseries adaptation, produced by Motown Productions, was broadcast on CBS in 1989. It starred Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae, Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow F. Call, Robert Urich as Jake Spoon, Rick Schroder as Newt, Diane Lane as Lorena Wood, Danny Glover as Joshua Deets, and Chris Cooper as July Johnson.

There was also a syndicated spin-off series Lonesome Dove: The Series centering on Newt (Scott Bairstow) taking up residence in the fictional town of Curtis Wells, Montana, having adopted his father's family name of Call. Starting out as a fairly romanticized interpretation of the West, it was heavily revamped for its second season, gaining a much grittier feel and the new title Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years. Filming took place in Calgary, Alberta, and a total of 43 episodes were produced, airing between 1994 and 1996.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "The Pulitzer Prizes - Fiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2009-06-17.
  2. ↑ ""Lonesome Dove" (1989) - Awards". imdb.com. The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2009-06-17.
  3. ↑ ""Lonesome Dove" (1989) - Movie Connections". imdb.com. The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2009-06-17.
  4. ↑ ""Lonesome Dove" (1989)". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2008-08-05.
  5. ↑ The 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn has already occurred; chapter 93.
  6. ↑ Chapter 101.
  7. ↑ "He found that he could not easily forget a word Clara said... her words stinging in his heart and head," chapter 102.
  8. ↑ McMurtry, Larry (2010). Lonesome Dove. Simon & Schuster. p. Preface.
  9. ↑ McMurtry, Larry (2010). Lonesome Dove. Simon & Schuster. p. Preface.
  10. ↑ McMurtry, Larry (2010). Lonesome Dove. Simon & Schuster. p. Preface.
  11. ↑ McMurtry, Larry (2008). Books: A Memoir. pp. 10–11.
  12. ↑ McMurtry, Larry (2009). Literary Life: A Second Memoir.
  13. 1 2 http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article69634787.html. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  14. ↑ Lemann, Nicholas (June 9, 1985). "Tall in the Saddle". New York Times. Retrieved 25 July 2017.
  15. ↑ McMurtry, Larry (2000). Lonesome Dove. Simon & Schuster. p. Preface.

Bibliography

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