Lonesome Dove Summary: Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer-Winning Western Explained
What Lonesome Dove is about
Larry McMurtry published Lonesome Dove in 1985. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986 and became a bestseller. It was the first book of the Lonesome Dove series to appear, though in the internal chronology of the four novels it sits third.
The story begins in the late 1870s in a dusty Texas border town called Lonesome Dove. Two retired Texas Rangers, Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae, run the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium. They are famous men with very little left to do. Then Jake Spoon, a former Ranger who has been gone more than ten years, rides back into town. He is on the run after accidentally shooting a dentist in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and he talks about Montana Territory as if it were Eden.
That talk is enough. Call, restless and bored by retirement, decides to steal a herd of cattle and drive it north to found the first ranch above the Yellowstone River. Gus is unconvinced until he remembers that Clara, the love of his life, now lives on the Platte River near Ogallala, Nebraska, which lies on the route. The outfit rustles thousands of cattle out of Mexico, hires local cowboys and sets off.
Running alongside the drive is a second thread. Back in Fort Smith, the young sheriff July Johnson, brother of the dead dentist, sets out after Jake Spoon with his twelve-year-old stepson Joe. July's wife Elmira, who already regrets the marriage, disappears in search of a former lover. The deputy, Roscoe Brown, is sent to find July and tell him. These journeys and the cattle drive keep crossing.
The main characters
Gus McCrae is the talker. He is funny, lazy by his own account, sentimental about Clara and clear-eyed about almost everything else. Woodrow Call is the opposite, a man who works rather than speaks and who will not say aloud the things that matter most. The friendship between them carries the book.
Around them is the Hat Creek outfit. Joshua Deets is the scout and tracker, superb at his job, who rode with them in the Ranger days. Pea Eye Parker is another former Ranger, illiterate, loyal and dependable. Bolivar, a retired Mexican bandit, cooks. Newt Dobbs is seventeen. His mother was a prostitute named Maggie, and everyone in the outfit assumes Call is his father, though Call has never said so.
Lorena Wood is the only prostitute in Lonesome Dove. Jake Spoon promises to take her to San Francisco, and she follows the drive north behind the herd. Blue Duck is the book's great threat, an Indian bandit and an old enemy of the Rangers, cruel without hesitation. Clara Allen keeps a horse ranch in Nebraska, where her husband Bob lies brain-damaged after a mustang kicked him in the head.
The themes
Friendship is the spine. Gus and Call have spent their lives together and still cannot explain themselves to one another. McMurtry puts them on a journey long enough that the gaps start to show.
Death is constant and arbitrary. Rivers, weather, snakes, bandits and bad luck take people out of the story with very little warning. Nobody gets a death proportionate to their importance, which is part of the point.
Love appears in several forms, almost all of them unfinished. Gus still wants Clara. Lorena wants rescue and is offered promises instead. Elmira wants a man who is not her husband. Call cannot bring himself to claim his own son.
Underneath it all sits a question about adventure itself. Call drives three thousand cattle two thousand miles because he cannot bear to sit still, and the cost of that restlessness is paid by other people.
Spoilers: the darker turns
Jake abandons Lorena in order to gamble in Austin, and she is abducted by Blue Duck. Gus pursues and, with July Johnson's help, destroys the bandit camp and gets her back. Blue Duck has already escaped, having murdered Roscoe, Joe and a girl named Janey. Lorena has been repeatedly raped and afterwards cannot bear anyone's company but Gus.
Jake, meanwhile, drifts north with the Suggs brothers and finds himself riding with murderers he is too frightened to leave. When Gus and Call catch the gang, they find their old friend among them. Jake pleads that he had no choice. They hang him with the rest. Newt, who idolised him, never gets over it.
Why it still matters
Lonesome Dove took the Western, a form widely treated as pulp, and wrote it at the length and seriousness of a literary novel. The Pulitzer confirmed that. The 1989 television miniseries with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall won both critical praise and a large audience, and pushed the book further into common memory. McMurtry returned to the world three times: the sequel Streets of Laredo in 1993, and the prequels Dead Man's Walk in 1995 and Comanche Moon in 1997, all of them adapted for television. Readers who want a long book with real weather, real distance and characters who stay with you tend to be sent here first.
