750 McMurtry, Larry
a herd of cattle and driving it up to new territory
in Montana. For two former lawmen attempting
to scratch a living out of the dusty south Texas
land near the town of Lonesome Dove, there is no
money to buy a herd. An ethical irony occurs when
Call, Gus, Spoon, and some hired cowboys cross
the border into Mexico essentially to rustle a herd
from the Mexican Pedro Flores. The justification
is that the cattle and horses were probably already
stolen from Texas and Call and Gus’s outfit was just
stealing them back. Two wrongs do not really make
a right, but it is close enough in this world of ethical
equivalency.
Spoon provides another ethical example in con-
trast to Call and Gus. Even though Spoon had the
idea of the cattle drive, he was drawn more toward
gambling and living on the edge of the law than
the hard work of the drive. As he drifts further
away from his former comrades, he falls in with an
outlaw gang led by the sadistic Dan Suggs. Spoon
had thought he was throwing in with a gang of
bank robbers, but Suggs leads them into horse theft.
Suggs next commits a brutal killing of two farmers,
including hanging and burning the bodies. When
Call and Gus eventually cross paths with the Suggs
gang, they administer rough frontier justice, hanging
the four members of the gang, including their old
comrade Spoon. In the West, horse stealing gener-
ally was met with summary hanging; stranding a
man on the frontier without a horse was a virtual
death sentence and horse thievery was considered a
capital offense (the cross-border rustling by Call and
Gus’s outfit notwithstanding).
Even though Spoon had committed no killings
himself, he is in for the same sentence as the rest
of the Suggs gang and he knows it, even though he
pleads his case to Call and Gus. Guilt by association
might be considered a logical fallacy, a legal defense,
and an ethical failing by 21st-century standards,
but in the late 19th century, if you threw in with
the gang, you were in for the same fate. The four
outlaws are lined up on horseback, nooses around
their necks, waiting for the end under a stout
hanging tree. Gus takes the task of whipping the
horses out from under the outlaws. Spoon, in that
final moment of clarity, knows his life has come to
no good and spurs his own horse out from under
himself. Gus understands that Jake has balanced
his own scales.
Toward the end of the cattle drive, Gus is attacked
by Indians while scouting ahead. Ultimately, arrow
wounds force a doctor in Montana to amputate his
right leg while Gus is unconscious from the infec-
tion. Had the doctor not been a drunkard, he would
have taken both legs to save Gus from the spreading
gangrene. By the time Call locates Gus, the infec-
tion has become irreversible. Gus says that he would
never have allowed the doctor to take both legs. In
this scene, Gus acts out a problem of medical ethics
that persists to this day. At what point does someone
have the right to forgo treatment and die in what he
determines to be dignity?
The final part of the novel deals with Call’s
epic trip from Montana to bring Gus’s body back
home to Lonesome Dove, Texas, to be buried. For
Call’s sense of ethics through silent action, he has to
endure any hardship to honor his friend’s deathbed
request. In the arduous, 2,500-mile journey, Call
comes close to dying himself. The act of burying
his friend sorely taxes Call and provokes him to say,
once the task is done, that he will be more careful
about what he promises in the future. Still, with
Call’s ethic of work and loyalty, the reader is left with
no doubt that he would do it again.
Ronald C. Thomas, Jr.Gender in Lonesome Dove
Given only a cursory look, McMurtry’s 1985 novel,
which won the Pulitzer Prize the next year, would
certainly be characterized a “men’s book,” obviously
in the western genre. McMurtry’s saga draws much
of its human drama from its cast of interesting
female supporting characters. It is the interaction of
the women with the male leads that spurs much of
the interpersonal conflict, the plot twists and turns,
and, by these devices, reveals more about the men
than the reader could ever glean from their taciturn
cowboy ways. The female characters in Lonesome
Dove run the spectrum of archetypes from the
shrew to the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, from the
long-suffering-but-loyal-wife to the attracted-to-
bad-men to the long-lost-love. However, McMurtry
does not turn these recognizable character types into
clichés or cardboard stand-ups for his male leads to