I didn’t play “Cowboys and Indians” as a kid. I never had a cowboy hat or cowboy boots. I grew up in a city, not the countryside. Other than a few Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns—“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “High Plains Drifter”—I paid little attention to the genre.
So when Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his epic western novel “Lonesome Dove,” I barely noticed. At the time, I was discovering myself as a writer, and I was reading Milan Kundera, Marguerite Duras, Charles Bukowski, and the like. And when “Lonesome Dove” became a television miniseries and McMurtry wrote prequels and sequels to keep his popular story chugging along, all of this passed me by.
I’ve always been turned off by the cowboy myth and its exaggerated role in American identity. Its message of rugged individualism, traditional values, and the self-made man rings so false to me: the whole “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality, as if luck and circumstance play no role in personal character and economic outcomes. Plus, to me, the glorification of conservative values and the downplaying of the struggles of marginalized communities represents a typical whitewashing of history.
All that aside, Owen, who is a connoisseur of good fiction, told me I should read “Lonesome Dove.” I trust his judgment and have been wanting to read a big book, so I took his suggestion and cracked open the novel, a nine-hundred-page epic of the American West after the Civil War and during a time when the U.S. Army was methodically wiping out native populations.
I was more than pleasantly surprised reading this novel. The story is simple on its surface, centering around two former Texas Rangers, Gus and Call, and their crew, who drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, battling nature and man along the way, and with several subplots threaded in. Despite the simplicity of the plot, both Gus and Call are complex characters, and McMurtry delves deep into their hearts. All of the characters—from the youngest hand, to the dumbest man, to the toughest among them—were lonely and lovelorn.
Gus, in particular, was a ladies’ man, in love with two women, and for part of the journey he has Lorena along with him, one of his favorite whores. Here’s Gus, typifying the mentality of this group of cowboys:
“At night, when she finally slept, he would sit in the tent, pondering it all. He could see the campfire. Whatever boys weren’t night herding would be standing around it, swapping jokes. Probably all of them envied him, for he had a woman and they didn’t. He envied them back, for they were carefree and he wasn’t. Once started, love couldn’t easily be swapped. He had started with Lorie, and it might never be stopped. He would be lucky to get again such easy pleasures as the men enjoyed, sitting around a campfire swapping jokes. Though he felt deeply fond of Lorena, he could also feel a yearning to be loose again and have nothing to do but win at cards.”
McMurtry also shines in his descriptions of the environment:
“The cowboys had lived for months under the great bowl of the sky, and yet the Montana skies seemed deeper than the skies of Texas or Nebraska. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force—it seemed smaller, in the vastness, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had in the lower plains. Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white clouds floating in it like petals in a pond.”
Disappointing, but perhaps fitting within the genre, was that there are only three women characters of any substance: Lorena is a whore, Elmira is a former whore and now a runaway wife, and Clara, who is Gus’s former love, is capable and as hardened as the men. There is one black cowboy, who is an expert scout, and one Mexican, who is a cook. There is a big, brutal Indian antagonist called Blue Duck.
It took me almost three weeks to read this novel. Each day, I would pick up the book and live in its world. I would travel with the crew, chase down wayward cattle, contemplate with Gus, take charge with Call, and contend with the fear and violence and danger and loneliness that dominated the everyday existence of these cowboys. It’s all a testament to McMurtry’s skill as a writer that I became so absorbed in what has held little interest to me until this book.
I can see why the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and why the entire series and all of the screen adaptations have been so popular and successful. But now it’s over. There’s a quote on the back cover of the book from USA Today: “If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove.” Done.
