Lonesome Dove Research Articles

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“Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.”—Captain Augustus McCrae, Lonesome Dove

Dancing with Welk: Music, Memory and Prairie Troubadours. By Christopher Vondracek

In 2006, contemporaneous with South Dakotan Christopher Vondracek’s reenactment of Lawrence Welk’s musical journey in the Dakotas and beyond, I returned to Mandan, North Dakota. I came from grueling, but uplifting journeys with Lewis and Clark reenactors from the Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Missouri. While rehabbing my shoulder from paddling 2500lb canoes on the Missouri, Clearwater, and Snake Rivers, my personal trainer, from “Welk Country,” talked of doing therapy for older folks down there. What amazed him was that for all their canes and walkers when the accordion started, they hit the floor youthfully, in perfect time with the beat. That’s definitely dancing with Welk! But so is two-stepping at Mandan’s Lonesome Dove, line dancing in Chicago or Texas, or to “Fishin’ in the Dark” (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) at a karaoke joint with “friends in low places” (Garth Brooks). Or dancing to The Drifters (“Under the Boardwalk”) on February 3rd in honor of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. Or moms in skirts and saddle shoes in Iowa, near the setting of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. Or dancing on an August evening in the twenty-first century to North Dakotan Chuck Suchy’s “Saturday Night at the Hall,” recreating an early twentieth-century scene at St. Anthony’s Bohemian Hall, a few dozen miles from Welk’s farm, across the wide Missouri.

Leaving Archer City: In Memoriam Larry McMurtry

Leaving Archer CityIn Memoriam Larry McMurtry Steven G. Kellman (bio) Larry McMurtry sold more books than any other author in American history. Many of his novels, including Leaving Cheyenne (1963), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Lonesome Dove (1985)—which were in fact repackaged in 1994 as a single volume titled Three Bestselling Novels—earned a place on best-seller lists. It is true that no McMurtry title has come close to outselling To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, or The Great Gatsby. Nevertheless, Harper Lee, J. D. Salinger, and F. Scott Fitzgerald never sat beside a cash register completing transactions, but McMurtry was a bookseller for more than half his life. Like Louise Erdrich in Minneapolis, Garrison Keillor in St. Paul, and Ann Padgett in Nashville, he was the rare case of a writer who also ran a bookshop. Booked Up, his emporium in Washington, DC, and then Archer City, Texas, occupied six buildings and stocked more than 400,000 volumes. When McMurtry decided to auction off two-thirds of his inventory, he was personally vending more books than J. K. Rowling ever has. His private collection was also extraordinary. By his death in 2021 at the age of eighty-four, McMurtry had accumulated 28,000 books in a large house in Archer City. "Forming that library, and reading it," he wrote in a 2008 memoir aptly titled Books, "is surely one of the principal achievements of my life." Readers might disagree. Lonesome Dove was a sufficiently impressive literary achievement to have earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although they probably would not share the author's favorites (he was partial to Duane's Depressed, followed by Loop Group), hundreds of thousands of readers who never bought a book from Larry McMurtry were eager to own a book by him. The McMurtry oeuvre, comprising thirty-two novels, fourteen books of nonfiction, and forty screenplays, began inauspiciously, with Horseman, Pass By, a 1961 work that its author would later dismiss as "a slight, confused, and sentimental first novel." However, when Irving Ravetch happened on a copy in an airport shop during a stopover in Dallas, the screenwriter/producer was [End Page 201] sufficiently impressed to urge director Martin Ritt to adapt it into film. The result, which transferred the focus of the story from young Lonnie Bannon to his scapegrace Uncle Hud, became a hit. McMurtry had nothing to do with the making of Hud, as he had nothing to do with adaptations of other books of his such as Terms of Endearment (1975), Texasville (1987), and Lonesome Dove, but he found himself in demand to make screenplays out of other writers' works. His most notable assignment, an adaptation of Annie Proulx's story "Brokeback Mountain" that he did with Diana Ossana, won them an Oscar. McMurtry grew up in a bookless house on a ranch outside Archer City, which, despite its grandiose name, hardly qualifies as a hamlet. "Simply put," he wrote, "it's not a nice town." With a population that does not exceed two thousand, it is not a large one. But it is where he chose to spend much of his life and where he took his final breaths. His bookishness was not congenital, as his earliest exposure to narrative came not from reading but from listening to his grandfather tell stories of the earliest white settlers in the area. McMurtry fictionalized Archer City as Thalia and made it the site of his first three novels, Horseman, Pass By; Leaving Cheyenne; and The Last Picture Show. Aside from an occasional excursion to Hollywood—(Somebody's Darling [1978]), Las Vegas (The Desert Rose [1983]), or Washington, DC (Cadillac Jack [1982])—almost all of his fiction is set in Texas. He called Houston "the most interesting city in Texas" and set Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), Terms of Endearment, Somebody's Darling (1978), Some Can Whistle (1989), and The Evening Star (1992) in the state's largest city. So it is not surprising that the headline to McMurtry's New York Times obituary announces: "Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84." The author referred...

Why Gus McCray Don't Rent Pigs: An Examination of Latin in LONESOME DOVE

In Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, Augustus McCray added the phrase “Uva uvam vivendo varia fit” (91) to the Hat Creek Cattle Company sign because he believed that it ...

Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired by Bill Neal

Reviewed by: Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired by Bill Neal Bob Cavendish Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired. By Bill Neal. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In the summer of 1962 during a visit with some of my grandmother’s friends in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the dinner conversation turned to the city’s surrender to Union general Ulysses Grant in July 1863. From the tone and tenor of their remarks, it seemed Vicksburg had fallen about ten minutes ago and they were still peeved. Some people know how to hold a grudge. And some things just will not go away, as Bill Neal discovered during a lecture in Canadian, Texas, where he encountered a woman who warned him to avoid a “that Isaacs mess,” a notorious local crime still fraught with suspicions and innuendo 115 years later. Fortunately for us, Neal took a closer look instead. Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders begins in 1894 with the clumsy plot to swindle Wells Fargo out of $25,000 (in today’s money, $675,000) with a bogus loss claim, disguising the ruse with a straightforward train robbery. Instead, the train robbery never happened. Two murders, of the local sheriff and of a Wells Fargo undercover agent, are linked, somehow, to the attempted fraud. At the center of the action is George Isaacs, the dull-witted youngest member of a family of brothers moderately successful and presumably unaware of George’s scheme. George and two minor villains were arrested for the murders, and one additional “associate” turned state’s evidence, but trials only provoked more questions. Who was the mysterious, tall, light-skinned man who remained in the background of key events? Who assisted in the jailbreak that nearly put one of the suspects beyond reach? What was compelling enough about three pennyante desperados to create the territory’s best legal defense team, one that included Sam Houston’s son, by now a formidable attorney? The murders in Canadian, Texas, were part of a white-collar fraud conspiracy not usually associated with wild west lawlessness. Whereas tracking horse thieves and bank robbers could mean lengthy pursuit over hostile terrain, this chase involved following a money trail. George Isaacs’s kin had engaged certain impressive (and expensive) courtroom advocates for George and two other defendants. But, Neal asks, why not George only? Was there something else at stake? And how had the brothers Isaacs amassed that kind of fortune in frontier Canadian, Texas? Without making direct accusations, Neal alludes to circumstances—the “old west’s” lack of law enforcement—that made the Isaac’s fortune possible, much as Joe Kennedy later benefited from Canadian booze running during Prohibition. The George Isaacs-Wells Fargo plot intrigued Neal, whose curiosity about a local taboo uncovered a complex affair with a modern ring: a bungled scheme, a mysterious stranger, a fugitive, and covert legal funding. Neal’s wry wit and fascination with this cold case (note the extent and [End Page 399] variety of sources in the bibliography) propel the narrative even as it takes occasional zigs and zags. Skullduggery is not a toss-off western frontier law-and-order tale but an American crime saga more interesting than stagecoach holdups or horse thieves. Television does not look to the old west so much these days (outside of Lonesome Dove and Tombstone) but within this yarn lies a good miniseries that would do HBO proud. Bob Cavendish Buda, Texas Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Dialogic Frontiers: History and Psychology in Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian

Dialogic Frontiers: History and Psychology in Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian

A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove, by John Spong

A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove, by John Spong

Ride, boldly ride: the evolution of the American Western

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction 1. Diverse Perspectives in Silent Westerns: Landscape, Morality, and the Native American 2. Not at Home on the Range: Women against the Frontier in The Wind 3. He Went That-Away: The Comic Western and Ruggles of Red Gap 4. Landscape and Standard-Setting in the 1930s Western: The Big Trail and Stagecoach 5. Indian- Fighting, Nation-Building, and Homesteading in the A-Western: Northwest Passage and The Westerner 6. Howard Hawks and John Wayne: Red River and El Dorado 7. The Postwar Psychological Western (1946-- 1956): My Darling Clementine to Jubal 8. John Ford's Later Masterpieces: The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 9. The Existential and Revisionist Western: Comanche Station to The Wild Bunch and Beyond 10. Eastwood and the American Western: High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven 11. Coda: From Lonesome Dove (1989) to Cowboys and Aliens (2011) Notes Bibliography Index

Written on the Body: A Third Space Reading of Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo

Written on the Body:A Third Space Reading of Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo Cordelia E. Barrera (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Frank Mechau. FLAGS OVER TEXAS. 1940. Oil on canvas. 5'9"× 3'8". Federal Courthouse, Fort Worth, Texas. Courtesy of the US Postal Service. All images accompanying this essay also appear in Philip Parisi’s The Texas Post Office Murals (2004). The photos here are credited to Wyatt McSpadden. Both artists featured in this essay were commissioned to produce murals for public buildings during the Great Depression as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Most of the work from that time focuses on the iconic cowpunchers, cattle trails, outlaws, and Texas Rangers that mark the Lone Star State as a thoroughly western space. [End Page 232] “Come and sit down beside me and hear my sad story. I’m shot in the breast and I know I must die.” … When thus he had spoken, the hot sun was setting. The Streets of Laredo had grown cold as the clay. —“Streets of Laredo,” song, ca. 1860 Streets of Laredo (1993), the final and darkest installment of Larry McMurtry’s saga of the North American West that began with the publication of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove (1985), is a novel of fragmentation and loss.1 The grave irony in the novel is manifest in the journeys and physical crossings made by major characters. These movements parallel broader ideological shifts to expose a borderlands text that disrupts a traditional frontier mythology. A postmodern work in which McMurtry effectively deconstructs the Western genre by virtue of its many inversions, reversals, and symbolic “cuts,” Streets of Laredo emphasizes a plurality of voices. As subjects transgress existing borders, they expose hybrid spaces of resistance to denote a third space, a meeting point where they may effectively disrupt outmoded ideologies and forge new connections. Throughout the novel, hierarchical frameworks shift; in turn, so do systems of signification. With this in mind, the ethos of Streets of Laredo appears centerless. Metonymic fragmentation is a stylistic feature of the novel that “marks” the bodies of various characters to underscore a continuous whole-to-part association: characters serve as a function of a southwestern setting in flux. The novel opens in the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a period when the bulk of Texas ranchlands was being cleared to make room for farmers and a growing multitude of agricultural workers. The frontier has been pushed to its southern and western limits, the Mexicans have long accepted the Rio Grande as the US-Mexico border, and the Comanche have for the most part been relocated. Rangering and cowboying as ways of life have lost their footings and have given way to farming, ranching, and a more fixed urban structure, as evidenced by [End Page 233] the railroad, which is central to the novel’s action. Bodily mutilations that occur throughout the novel are initially associated with Mexicans, possibly reflecting the fragmentation of a culture, a people disenfranchised by the effects of a westward movement. In time, however, maimings, cuts, defects, and missing body parts equally assault whites, indicating McMurtry’s commitment to chop away at the frontier myth and its accompanying western hero. Such ironic turns are indicative of McMurtry’s ambivalent stance. Streets of Laredo is characterized by the same ambiguity that drives McMurtry personally, and although much has been written about the author’s ambivalence toward his home state of Texas and the myth of the West he grew up both idolizing and disdaining, little has been written about the postmodern elements of his texts.2 This essay will focus on the postmodern nature of the novel to underscore a multivocal discourse. By engaging aspects of border theory, which foregrounds physical and psychological borders and terrains to encourage us to rethink history in ways that are transformative for those who have been excluded from history, I situate Streets of Laredo within broader issues of cultural politics and identity formation. This stance allows me to position the novel as a borderlands text of translation, transformation, and accommodation that overturns traditional frontier mythogenesis to point toward a more inclusive...

The Essential West: Collected Essays by Elliott West Richard White

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 4 The Essential West: Collected Essays by Elliott West foreword by Richard White University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2012. Illustrations . 328 pages. $29.95 cloth. Everyone with an interest in the history of the American West should read this collection of essays by Elliott West, one of the very finest scholars and writers in the field. All fourteen essays sparkle with delightful turns of phrase, surprising perspectives, and penetrating insights. The book’s opening essay, for example, is intriguingly titled “Lewis and Park; Or Why It Matters that theWest’s Most Famous Explorers Didn’t Get Sick (or at Least Not Really Sick).” What or who could Park be? It turns out that Park is Mungo Park, a Scot naturalist who led an exploring expedition not unlike Lewis and Clark’s through the interior of West Africa during the same time. There was one major difference between the two expeditions: most of Park’s men succumbed to yellow fever, but despite concerns that the Corps of Discovery might contract yellow fever or malaria, the Corps’ route kept it beyond the reach of those diseases. All of this, West explains, illustrates how microbes “have shaped profoundly the history of imperialism” and invites reflection on “how differently things would have gone in western and national history if Lewis and Clark had found themselves facing the kind of menace” encountered by Park (p. 19, 37). The “Lewis and Park” essay is included with others on the theme of “Conquest” that explore the effect of the Colorado and California gold rushes on the nation’s self-perception, the experience of the Cheyennes as a“frontier people” of “imaginative courage” (p. 57), the hidden history of the telegraph in creating the West and binding it to the nation, and the creation of a distinctive racial hierarchy in the West during the period of what the author terms the “Greater Reconstruction” (p. 119). The second section of the book, “Families,” brings together essays on the region’s social history and reveals West’s unusual commitment and talent for recovering voices and stories that historians rarely hear or tell, such as those of a Missouri Indian woman (her name is unknown) who traveled with a French coureur de bois to Paris in the early eighteenth century, or children growing up Mormon in Missouri and Utah. Essays in the last section of the book, on “Myth,” take up well-known topics but in wholly new light.In“Bison R Us,” for example, West considers how buffalo has become a “mythic food,” a “supermeat, high in protein but with barely a whiff of cholesterol or fat” (p. 227). Other essays explore the shifting image of Jesse James in the context of sectional politics and nation-building during and after the CivilWar,the place of trails in the American imagination, the balance between “myth and anti-myth” (p. 277) in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove,and the paradox of the West as a “land demanding to be made over, and of country forever wild” (p. 295). The Essential West is the product of an original mind with an extraordinary range and erudition. It is rare to find a historian who has so much to say on so many subjects and who says it with such wit and grace. Jeffrey Ostler University of Oregon Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory by R. Gregory Nokes Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2013. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 240 pages. $19.95 paper. Until recently, historians have paid little attention to slavery in the Far West. The myth that the West’s geography imposed “natural limits ” on slavery and kept the institution from ...

“man’s meat ain’t proper meat”: The Big Sky , Cannibalism, and the Clap

“man’s meat ain’t proper meat”: The Big Sky, Cannibalism, and the Clap Brady Harrison (bio) There is a fair amount of sexual contact among the older males in Western rural areas. It is a type of homosexuality which was probably common among pioneers and outdoor men in general. Today it is found among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general—among groups that are virile and physically active. These are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild. They live on realities and on minimum of theory. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey et al. It is our custom to consume the person we love. “The Cannibal’s Canción,” Gloria Anzaldúa And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Oscar Wilde Although A. B. Guthrie, Jr.’s readership and literary reputation have no doubt waned since his commercial and critical heyday of the late 1940s and early 1950s—in 1949, the University of Montana (then called Montana State) mistakenly awarded him [End Page 63] an Honorary Doctorate of Literature (they had intended to award him the less prestigious Honorary Doctorate of Letters but realized their error too late); in 1950, The Way West, the sequel to his most enduring novel, The Big Sky, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; in 1953, his screenplay for Shane was nominated for an Academy Award (the prize ultimately went to Daniel Taradash for From Here to Eternity)—his oeuvre has continued to hold the attention of a small, yet loyal and evidently admiring cadre of general and scholarly readers. In 1999, for example, the Western Writers of America convened a fifty-five person panel of Western writers and scholars from across the U.S. (and one from Canada) to rank what they considered the greatest Western films, novels, authors, and more of the twentieth century (Moulton). Guthrie ranked third on their list of the “Best Western Authors” (behind Elmer Kelton and Willa Cather), and The Big Sky placed third in the category of “Best Western Novels” (behind Jack Schaefer’s Shane and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove). Further, Shane was rated first among the “Best Western Films.” The Big Sky has also been the focus of William E. Farr and William W. Bevis’s collection of scholarly essays, Fifty Years After The Big Sky: New Perspectives on the Fiction and Films of A.B. Guthrie, Jr. (2001) and Guthrie has been the subject of a recent biography by Jackson J. Benson, Under the Big Sky (2009). If Guthrie no longer enjoys the popular acclaim he once did, his life and work continue to attract a dedicated, albeit critically conservative following; perhaps little read outside of Montana and the West (and doubtlessly even less by scholars outside of Western Studies), he nevertheless retains an honored place in the canon of Western U.S. writing. While Guthrie has received some critical attention over the years, and while many scholars have taken steadfastly New Critical, biographical, and historicist approaches to his work, relatively little consideration has been given to what must be one of the most striking aspects of his best-known novel: The Big Sky (1947) may be one of the more highly sexualized tales of westward expansionism. At the beginning of the novel, for example, Guthrie rewrites—in an homage replete with what Harold Bloom long ago dubbed The Anxiety of Influence (1973)—the opening scenes of Huckleberry Finn and enacts Boone’s oedipal crisis. Like Huck, Guthrie’s anti-hero struggles with his “Pap,” but where Huck must be content with dodging his old man whenever possible, Boone lays his father out with a club to the head and wrests the phallus—here [End Page 64] taking the form of Pap’s beloved rifle, “Old Sure Shot”—from his drunk, abusive begetter. As he prepares to leave home following...

Branding Texas: Performing Culture in the Lone Star State (review)

Reviewed by: Branding Texas: Performing Culture in the Lone Star State Matthew McMahan Branding Texas: Performing Culture in the Lone Star State. By Leigh Clemons. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008; pp. 202. In her book Branding Texas: Performing Culture in the Lone Star State, Leigh Clemons puns on the cowboy's mark, or "brand," by drawing implicitly on the Marxist critical concept of "branding" to illustrate how the "Texan has now emerged as a brand, a commodity, which can be constructed, maintained, and sold to the public" (5). Citing Judith Butler's notion of performativity, Clemons argues that a preferred narrative, or brand, of Texanness as "unilaterally white and male" (5) has been performed persistently over the past 200 years to marginalize the history, culture, and identity of female, Mexican, and Native American peoples, who have shared in modeling the state's history. Clemons's treatment of branding in a performative sense is both unique and important for illustrating how the act of branding can hegemonically suppress certain cultural narratives through the buying and selling of a preferred performance. The underlying assumptions of the book are that Texas has set itself up as distinct from the other forty-nine states in the Union, and that, while every state claims and defends its own individuality, Texas maintains that it is "more other" than everyone else. [End Page 668] In essence, this otherness is propagated through a performance of the prototypical Texan (or, at least, the idea of the prototypical Texan): the straight-talking cowboy, that lonesome dove, the white man full of backbone, bravery, and bravado. Such traits are emblematized in the Lone Star, the Texas flag, and the Alamo. While the book's assumptions are apparent throughout the text, Clemons does not state them explicitly until the final chapter. She relies on an implied understanding of Texas, as seen and spread through popular culture. Clemons begins the book by describing the "architectural landscapes" of Texan culture, notably battlegrounds, museums, historical markers, and even natural spaces. She describes these landscapes as places of memory, "archives in which past events can be stored, visited, and, when necessary, revisited for purposes of reinforcing or revising the social constructions they help maintain" (15). Her detailed descriptions of key locations, such as the Alamo, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, and Palo Duro Canyon State Park, are useful to gain an understanding of how these architectural landscapes are used to codify and reinforce images of Texas drawn from its cultural history. Clemons then analyzes the role the Texas Revolution has played in creating the image of the Texan. More specifically, she is concerned with how (re)presentations of the revolution, notably through pageantry, historical dramas, and battle reenactments, have reified a particular reading of the events that led to the institution of Texas as a republic. Her analysis of pageantry as a cultural phenomenon is one of the key strengths of the book, deftly elucidating the pedagogic purpose of Texas pageantry to propagate a jingoistic narrative of evil Mexicans, helpless women, and brave heroes who are unyielding in the face of insurmountable odds. She argues that, even though these historical dramas are largely based on apocryphal stories and myth (and rarely on historical fact), through repetition and exposure they performatively create the appearance of a truth that, when questioned or doubted by others, is defended vigorously by historical vanguards like the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. After illustrating how the Texas Revolution has been used to brand the history of the state, Clemons analyzes several interpretations of small-town Texas life found in popular entertainment, such as television shows, films, and stage plays. Typically, these outlets present a less-than-idyllic image of contemporary small-town life, seemingly filled with corruption, racism, and sexism. Yet, Clemons maintains, these portrayals also bolster the predominant brand of the Texan: the white male who "still manages to do the right thing" (90). In its conclusion, the book discusses the larger implications of the Texas brand, mostly with regard to how it is marketed to the country and to the world at large. Aptly titled "Selling Texas," the final chapter indicates how Texas icons, such as...

Discourses of Frontier Violence and the Trauma of National Emergence in Larry McMurtry'sLonesome DoveQuartet

This essay offers a revision of frontier mythologizing by engaging issues of gender, race, and nation from the perspective of trauma theory. Crucial questions about the relationship between dominant frontier values, on the one hand, and violence against women and non-Anglo groups (particularly Mexicans and Native Americans), on the other, are explored in a close reading of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet. The analysis focuses upon the “symbolic economy” of violence represented by McMurtry's use of the captivity motif and his representation of violent mestizo or mixed-blood characters who symbolize the conservative racial politics of his reappropriation of the western genre. This reading of the contemporary neo-western reveals larger implications for the ways in which we might reread the U S frontier as a national trauma narrative.

Discourses of Frontier Violence and the Trauma of National Emergence in Larry McMurtry's <i>Lonesome Dove</i> Quartet

Abstract This essay offers a revision of frontier mythologizing by engaging issues of gender, race, and nation from the perspective of trauma theory. Crucial questions about the relationship between dominant frontier values, on the one hand, and violence against women and non-Anglo groups (particularly Mexicans and Native Americans), on the other, are explored in a close reading of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet. The analysis focuses upon the “symbolic economy” of violence represented by McMurtry's use of the captivity motif and his representation of violent mestizo or mixed-blood characters who symbolize the conservative racial politics of his reappropriation of the western genre. This reading of the contemporary neo-western reveals larger implications for the ways in which we might reread the U S frontier as a national trauma narrative.

“They live in Lonesome Dove”: Media and contemporary Western Apache place-naming practices

This article treats a place-naming genre among residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation in which people use English-language mass media discourse to name newly constructed neighborhoods on the reservation, usually with humorous effect. It is argued that these names do not represent simple assimilation to mainstream discursive norms. Instead, they represent the deployment of media discourse according to locally defined speech genres and language ideology to comment on social changes brought about by the new housing developments. As a strategy for engaging with the dominant society, these names are acts of community self-definition that confound mainstream expectations for place names generally, and for Native American place names in particular. They celebrate participation in media discourse, but in terms that privilege reservation insiders. Use of these names constitutes the reservation as an interpretive community in which participation is defined not along nationalistic models of citizenship, but in terms of locally established idioms of sociality.I gratefully acknowledge financial support for this research provided by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Phillips Fund for Native American Research of the American Philosophical Society, and the Jacobs Research Fund of the Whatcom Museum. I thank Eva Lupe, Everett Lupe, Leo Cruz, Cline Griggs, Arlene Lupe, Annette Tenejieth, Gary Lupe, and John Welsh for helping me understand the meaning and use of the names. Particular thanks are due to Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society for suggesting revisions that substantially improved the argument of this article and its articulation with other work in linguistic anthropology. Earlier versions of this article were presented in a session organized by David Samuels at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, to the anthropology departments at Hamilton College and the University of Nevada, Reno; and to the University of Virginia Linguistic Anthropology Seminar. I am grateful for the critical contributions of Dell Hymes, Thomas J. Nevins, David Samuels, Margaret Field, Allexandra Jaffe, Ellen Contini-Morava, Eve Danziger, Phillip Greenfeld, Bonnie Urciuoli, and Charles Kaut. Any shortcomings, of course, are my own.

High Country: A Novel by Willard Wyman

3 3 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 Rio’s Robert Laxalt: La voz de los vascos en la literatura norteamericana (2002) is the first book-length study of Laxalt’s writing, recently translated into English and published in the United States to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Sweet Promised Land. Only two of Laxalt’s books are available in Basque-language editions, and only a few have been translated into Spanish. Hence, Rio’s study is of necessity descriptive, offering plot summaries, literary analyses, and biographical infor­ mation. Particular strengths include Rio’s extensive research, which includes the Robert Laxalt papers at the University of Nevada, Reno; English-, Spanish-, and Basque-language articles and reviews; and interviews that Rio conducted in the 1990s with Laxalt, his family members, and close colleagues. Rio’s readings are sensitive and skillful, adept at interpreting motifs of initiation, contextualizing immigrant identity, and revealing the aesthetics of some of Laxalt’s more kaleidoscopic texts. At the same time, Rio’s willingness to be critical has to overcome his friendship with Laxalt, and his focus on the role played by Basques in Laxalt’s stories inevitably obscures other elements of Laxalt’s multi­ faceted work, including his critically acclaimed novel A Man in the Wheatfield (1964), a book centered on a community of Italian immigrants in Nevada. Rio thus brings overdue, critical attention to Robert Laxalt and offers a valuable survey of his work, opening up rewarding terrain for future critics. High Country: A Novel. By Willard Wyman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 362 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Stephen Tatum University of Utah, Salt Lake City The “high country” referred to in the title of this 2005 award-winning novel, now available in paperback, is both that of Montana’s Swan Range and that por­ tion of the Sierra Nevada Range marked by Mt. Whitney and the headwaters of the Kern River. Here in this mountain topography, Willard Wyman’s engaging first novel chronicles, over approximately a fifty-year period, the adventures and romances of central character Ty Hardin, whom we first encounter as a deter­ mined fifteen-year-old on horseback rescuing a half-frozen calf on the family ranch that had been taken over by “the big outfit” during the Great Depression. With the exception of a long chapter that flashes back a decade to describe the background of Hardin’s packer mentor, “Book One: The Swan”—which occu­ pies nearly three-fourths of the novel’s pages— centers on Hardin’s initiation into the high country’s packer culture after he leaves his family’s hardscrabble life in the Bitterroot Valley, his eventual military service in World War II, and, finally, a short-lived marriage that ends in tragedy during childbirth. “Book Two: The Sierra (1950-1984)” details Hardin’s adult years as a packer explor­ ing the Sierras much as he had earlier learned to “read” the Swan Range can­ yons and trails; this section’s growing elegiac tone and subject confirmed by a climactic moment centering on another Hardin search-and-rescue attempt. B o o k R e v ie w s 3 3 1 As a historical novel of formation that some reviewers have compared to the ambition of Lonesome Dove (1985), High Country details in serial fashion Hardin’s intuitive skills with working horses and mules; the expansion of his social, cultural, and sexual horizons; and his haunted maturity as he encounters the sorrowful complexities of love and death. He also witnesses the changes in the high-country tenain due to technology and recreational tourism. The nov­ el’s central tension is thus both geographical and historical. The plot oscillates between events in the mountains and in the rural valley towns. The novel’s repetition of the rescue motif, its allusions to popular music and dance, and its staging of various human and animal deaths mark the novel’s great theme of relentless change and transformation. The geographical and historical tension converges in the wake of one of the...

Lone star justice: the first century of the Texas Rangers

From The Lone Ranger to Lonesome Dove, the Texas Rangers have been celebrated in fact and fiction for their daring exploits in bringing justice to the Old West. In Lone Star Justice, best-selling author Robert M. Utley captures the first hundred years of Ranger history, in a narrative packed with adventures worthy of Zane Grey or Larry McMurtry. The Rangers began in the 1820s as loose groups of citizen soldiers, banding together to chase Indians and Mexicans on the raw Texas frontier. Utley shows how, under the leadership of men like Jack Hays and Ben McCulloch, these fiercely independent fighters were transformed into a well-trained, cohesive team. Armed with a revolutionary new weapon, Samuel Colt's repeating revolver, they became a deadly fighting force, whether battling Comanches on the plains or storming the city of Monterey in the Mexican-American War. As the Rangers evolved from part-time warriors to full-time lawmen by 1874, they learned to face new dangers, including homicidal feuds, labor strikes, and vigilantes turned mobs. They battled train robbers, cattle thieves and other outlaws-it was Rangers, for example, who captured John Wesley Hardin, the most feared gunman in the West. Based on exhaustive research in Texas archives, this is the most authoritative history of the Texas Rangers in over half a century. It will stand alongside other classics of Western history by Robert M. Utley-a vivid portrait of the Old West and of the legendary men who kept the law on the lawless frontier.

New Westers: The West in Contemporary American Culture

Yeeeeehaaah! Nightly that raucous cry breezes out from beneath the broad-brimmed Stetsons of boot-scootin line dancers at boisterous bars called Cadillac Ranch, Cactus Moon, or Stallions & Stars. And that, Michael Johnson tells us, is just one of the many signs that Americans have rekindled and refashioned their love affair with the American West. These New Westers, Johnson reveals, line-dance and two-step, listen to Garth Brooks and George Strait, drink beer from long-neck bottles, wear clothes ordered from Sheplers, watch rodeo on ESPN, play Wild West arcade games, eat fajitas and tacos in stucco-style Mexican cafes, collect Western art and Native American crafts, and vacation in and move to the West. New Westers rewrite the history and biography of the West. They reimagine the West in cowboy sagas and poetry, Native American novels, Mexican-American drama, nature writing, revisionist films, eclectic visual artwork, and neo-traditional music. They flock to movies like Thelma and Louise, Unforgiven, and Dances with Wolves or mini-series like Lonesome Dove and read bestsellers like The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses. New Westers are men and women who may or may not have ever hitched up a horse but who want a West. At the end of an urbanized century adrift in confusing change, they seek a more natural home, a fuller and wider sense of place, and a deeper and more colorful personal identity. They also want, Johnson shows, to revive the dream of the mythic West-but on new and different terms. They overrun the Old West and yet strive to preserve it, raising troubling new concerns about the differences between the mythic and the real, between traditional and contemporary cultural influences. Infused with true grit and true affection, Johnson's immensely entertaining book takes us on a lively jaunt through a colorful and amazing landscape. His celebration of things Western will be treasured by all armchair cowpokes or anyone who's ever dreamed of riding the high country.

Earth as Mother, Earth as Other in Novels by Silko and Hogan

Larry McMurtry's epic novel of the American West Lonesome Dove pits a ragtag, horse-rustling, Montana-bound outfit of former Texas Rangers against evil incarnate in a renegade Comanche named Blue Duck. The characters act out a life-or-death struggle against the backdrop of a relentlessly harsh, indifferent landscape.

Interpretation and judgment: A reading ofLonesome Dove

Defending the importance for media study of a descriptive and evaluative scholarship grounded in old‐humanist perspectives, this essay argues for distinguishing between “cultural” and “aesthetic” interpretation. In the latter, the text is valued not as a mere carrier of cultural meanings but intrinsically, as an intellectually coherent exploration of its subject matter. The current widespread suspicion of evaluation as a form of ideological mystification impoverishes scholarship, especially that devoted to non‐canonical materials, by refusing to recognize and to value excellence. Using the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove as a case study, the essay argues that media texts, like literary works, can and should be evaluated according to the criteria of “formal mastery” and “intellectual coherence.”