Lonesome Dove 749her an opportunity to reminisce about how the “old
Frankie” interacted with them; still the members of
the community, outside her family, remain nameless.
There is the “street preacher, a known town char-
acter” (84), the “little crown of [Mexican] children”
(73), the woman sweeping the front porch of a
“lace-curtained boarding house” (74), the Portuguese
bartender, the Law, and the redheaded soldier. Both
the “old Frankie” and the new F. Jasmine desire vis-
ibility and connectedness to her community: to be
known and embraced for who she is and who she will
become. In order to do so she feels she must reject
the known and look to the unfamiliar, the exotic, and
the dangerous in order to establish a presence. Com-
munity is both a blessing and a curse.
Connor Trebra
mcmurTry, Larry Lonesome Dove
(1985)
Originally published in 1985, Lonesome Dove won
the Pulitzer Prize for author Larry McMurtry. The
sprawling western also spawned additional books
in the saga, Comanche Moon, Dead Man’s Walk, and
Streets of Laredo, as well as a television mini-series
and a syndicated spin-off series.
It tells the story of the first great cattle drive
from Texas to Montana, led by two former Texas
Ranger captains, Woodrow Call and Augustus
McCrae. Call is taciturn, slow to speak, and unre-
vealing of his feelings. McCrae is the more gregari-
ous and rambunctious of the two partners.
Much of the conflict of the story comes from
the supporting characters. Former Texas Ranger
Jake Spoon, an old comrade of Call and McCrae,
suggests the cattle drive as a moneymaking adven-
ture. However, it is also his accidental shooting of a
dentist in Arkansas that brings the sheriff from Fort
Smith, July Johnson, into the story. Spoon ultimately
leaves the cattle drive and joins an outlaw gang.
Once Call and McCrae catch up with the gang,
they are forced to hang the outlaws, including their
old friend.
The climactic sequence in the book tells of
McCrae being mortally wounded by Indians near
the end of the cattle drive and Call taking his part-
ner’s body back home to Texas for burial.
While not based on historic events, it captures
the spirit of that time in the West, presenting an
authentic picture of the historic cattle drives by fig-
ures such as Charles Goodnight.
Ronald C. Thomas, Jr.ethicS in Lonesome Dove
The ethical themes in Lonesome Dove are more
authentic in their portrayal of the actual time period
of the American westward expansion than in the
western movies of the 1940s or the television west-
erns of the 1950s. There are no Hollywood cow-
boys like Gene Autry or Roy Rogers in this book;
the characters created by Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Larry McMurtry inhabit a territory closer
to where real people like Wyatt Earp and Wild
Bill Hickock walked. While the female characters
in the book fulfill some of the literary archetypes
of the shrewish wife, cheating spouse, whore with
heart of gold, and sturdy frontier widow, it is the
cowboys who present the ethical conflicts that were
a part of everyday life in the real Wild West. There
are no true white hats or black hats but different
shades of gray, just as the gunslingers of the past
sometimes plied their trade as outlaws or lawmen
as they drifted from town to town.
The central characters, retired Texas Ranger cap-
tains Woodrow Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae,
clearly stood for the side of right in their former
careers and do so throughout the cattle drive adven-
ture in this novel. However, each has an unspoken
ethical code they exemplify in their actions and
the way they interact with other characters. For the
reserved Call, work provides value and meaning to
life and a man is known by what he does. For the
cantankerous Gus, plain talk is valued, even if his
sharp tongue bites a bit into those he cares about.
These character traits provide a way of viewing all
of the other characters in the book against one of
these two standards, Call’s work ethic and Gus’s
rough honesty. The ways in which they express these
values, Call’s stoicism and Gus’s gregariousness, pro-
vide verbal examples of the ethical frames through
which each man sees the world.
The journey for Gus and Call comes in the form
of another Ranger comrade, Jake Spoon, who sug-
gests that there is money to be made in assembling