Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)

Lonesome Dove
The Lonesome Dove series, Book 1
Larry McMurtry
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, Western
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Once, the American West was a vast, unbroken wilderness, full of buffalo and natives and not a trace of so-called "civilization". For a time after, it was a place of savagery, awash in criminals and butchery and warring cultures. As the nineteenth century nears its end, the wild days are also waning... and, for men like Augustus McCrae and Captain Woodrow Call, so is their sense of duty and purpose. As Texas Rangers, they hunted down countless horsethieves and murderers and rapists, putting down rebel Indians like putting down rabid dogs, and helped open up the land to white settlers, but now they struggle to know what to do with themselves. They run a small livery out of the flyspeck of a Texas border town called Lonesome Dove, but the old restlessness is always in them, an urge toward one last grand adventure before time and old age overtake them. When a former friend of theirs, Jake Spoon, turns up, he spins wonderful tales of the Montana wilderness - perfect cattle country, should anyone be audacious enough to go. Though Jake isn't above embroidering the truth and hiding ulterior motives, Gus and Call figure this may be their last real chance to be the men they were in their youth, setting forth into the unspoiled wilds and making names for themselves... but it's a long, long way from Lonesome Dove to the Yellowstone River and beyond, and the lands they're crossing - and the men they're crossing it with - are still harsh, unpredictable, and full of frontier spirit that defies taming.

REVIEW: There's some confusion on the timeline of the Lonesome Dove series, as McMurtry wrote one sequel and two prequels, but this was the first book written and the one whose name is practically synonymous with epic Westerns. Though it inevitably shows its age around the edges, the tale remains a classic, an epic story of lives made and broken (mostly broken) on an unforgiving landscape.
From the start, there's an air of restless desperation about the aging Rangers Gus and Call, for all that the story takes its time getting off the ground. Lonesome Dove seems less a home of settlers dreaming of a better life and more a bend in the road where broken people wash up and get stuck. Most notable among them, aside from the handful of ex-Rangers working for Call and Gus at the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium, are the local working girl Lorena and the teenaged Newt, offspring of a previous saloon girl and one of the Hat Creek Livery men. Lorena never set out to be a saloon girl, but managed to hold on to her independent spirit and her dreams, with more agency than one might expect... at least, at first. Newt idolizes the ex-Rangers, particularly the stoic Captain Call, and despairs of ever living up to their impossible standards, even as he secretly wonders which one of the men might be his father and why they never acknowledged him. As for the Rangers, Gus is a talkative, argumentative sort, a frontier philosopher and ideal partner for the reserved Call. Their old companion Jake is trouble from the moment he arrives, as ever he was in their previous acquaintances; this time, even as he tries selling them on another dream that he's likely to walk away from the moment it requires work, he has a lawman on his tail for an accidental shooting in Arkansas. The lawman, his distant wife, and his deputy also come to have storylines, as do several other characters they encounter, all stories that are in some way braided around the men of the Hat Creek outfit and the cattle drive from Lonesome Dove to Yellowstone, a journey in itself fraught with perils and death and conflicts. Even as they travel, Gus and Call see how the West has changed in their lifetimes, and how their own reputations, once the brightest stars in the Texas skies, have dimmed or been extinguished outright by a generation of settlers who have already forgotten who opened the way for them, taking for granted what others bled and died for. Nobody is unchanged by their journeys, not even the hard-edged Call, and many lives are ended. Through it all, the grandeur and forbidding nature of the land itself endures, defying the wills of all humans who dare to call it home.
For all that I enjoyed about the story and the scope, there were some parts that I found less satisfactory. Lorena, who starts out with a surprising level of guts and agency, ends up broken and needy and utterly powerless over her own fate. (Granted, her experiences are traumatic, but it undercut what could have been a remarkable character.) Some of the deaths felt almost like an author disposing of characters he wasn't quite sure what to do with after establishing them, while a few others were done away with in a couple lines that could've used more detail or development. There is, of course, expected sexism and racism throughout, in keeping with the era and the characters' worldviews, and this was written (of course) from a white settler perspective, though some mention is given of the incalculable tragedies preceding the "opening" of the West, the decimation of natives and almost complete eradication of the buffalo. It's a brutal, bloody, often amoral business, spreading "civilization", and the sort of people attracted to the frontier are often the most brutal, bloodiest, and most amoral of the lot. The ending also felt a little unfinished, particularly the arcs of a few characters. And, this being a 25th Anniversay Edition I read, it starts with an author preface that spoils some plot ploints. (Seriously, is it that hard to either avoid spoilers or move such extra matter to the end of the book, where new readers won't be spoiled and old readers will appreciate it more for having their memory of the story refreshed by reading?)
All things considered, I wound up landing on a solid four-star Good rating. I'm not sure if I'm interested enough in the characters' fates to read on in the series, though.

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