McMurtry’s Cowboy-God in Lonesome Dove

Abstract

E R N E S T I N E P. S E W E L L Commerce, Texas McMurtry’s Cowboy-Godin Lonesome Dove A panoply of big sky, the surging of mighty waters, vast expanses of grassland, a cattle drive studded by adventure and misadventure: these— with or without a camp cook for comic relief, a soiled dove for romance, a thundering herd of horses, and some Indians—will fulfill the expecta­ tions of those readers who judge western fiction by the use of conventions set to a formula. For that audience, Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove proves eminently satisfying. The story line is simple: McMurtry places Captains Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, aging Texas Rangers, at Lonesome Dove, where they had set up the Hat Creek Cattle Company, a ranch close to the Rio Grande, within easy raiding distance of Mexico. For ten years they have dealt in cattle and horses, a dull way of life after resplendent careers marked by triumphant battles against frontier hell-raisers, Indians, Comancheros, and border Mexicans. Jake Spoon, who also held a captaincy with the Rangers and had ridden with Call and Gus in their glory days, comes to the ranch unexpect­ edly—on the run. He entertains his friends with tales of his wanderings, stirring up Call’s yearning for the old life when he suggests a cattle drive to Montana, a Garden of Eden where a man can have all the land he wants just for the taking. Call springs into action to make ready for the drive. He and his men rustle up cattle and horses on both sides of the river, and he gathers together several local cowboys, one top hand, two Irishmen, and some inexperi­ enced youths for drovers. McMurtry losesno time putting them into motion and then assails them with an omnium-gatherum of the accidents of weather, wild creatures, and man. Sandstorms, hailstorms, lightning, floods, drought, heat, and snow. Grasshoppers, mosquitoes, snakes, and bears. Horsethieves, Indians, bandits, and eccentrics. Nevertheless, they reach Montana just as winter storms set in—not without losing horses and cattle and men. 220 Western American Literature Even a naive reader, however, is aware soon that this Western offers more than action. There is clearly a focus on the Texas Rangers, not with­ out reason it would seem. McMurtry had accused Walter Prescott Webb of failing to be true to his commitment to write as a historian in TheTexas Rangers (In A Narrow Grave 43). Though Webb had published his tome in 1935, no one had faulted his glorification of the Rangers. The public gullibly accepted the “glaring whitewash” until McMurtry’s critique in In A Narrow Grave in 1965 (40). Nor did that publication really set the record straight. Instead, McMurtry was labeled the enfant terrible of Texas letters for attacking Webb and his fellows of the literary triumvirate —J. Frank Dobie and Roy Bedichek. The fact is that only now are aca­ demicians interested in an unbiased picture of the Rangers. True, they served Texas in her hour of need, but they were violent, ruthless men who thought all non-whites to be subhuman. Should one look on Call and Gus and Jake as a composite of the Texas Ranger, he emerges as a man capable on the one hand of rustling, murder, hanging, atrocity, and injustice; and on the other of sentiment, gentleness, and heroism. In other words, the Rangers were men with feet of clay, not deities to be sanctified by a his­ torian practicing “symbolic frontiersmanship” (Narrow Grave 43). History, however, is not McMurtry’s territory: storytelling is. About his technique, he has written: “My first concern has commonly been with texture, not structures” (Narrow Grave 142). As the trail drive, which gives the novel structure, moves along, so the texturing process, which gives the novel depth, develops. McMurtry’s texturing may be thought of as interlarding, enriching the whole. The search motif is major. Each of the characters is a seeker after something. As they pursue their separate dreams, their stories are inter­ larded into the texture of the whole. Call’s dream is for a life of adventure and excitement where he can...