Lonesome Dove 751read lines with. His women actually seem to talk and
act and react like real women would, a great accom-
plishment for a male writer, let alone one working in
a traditionally male-oriented genre.
While McMurtry has said that he got the idea
for the fictitious name of the south Texas town
of Lonesome Dove off of a church bus, the term
“soiled dove” was Old West slang for the prostitutes
of the day. This is a convenient connection, as one
of the most important female characters in the story
is Lorena “Lorie” Wood, a prostitute in Lonesome
Dove. She turned to that profession after being
abandoned there by a previous lover. With a firm
will and optimistic nature, Gus McCrae takes a lik-
ing to her company. Jake Spoon takes a liking to her
physical pleasures. Once Spoon convinces the Rang-
ers that there is big money to be made in taking a
herd of cattle and horses up to Montana, Lorie sees
that going along with Jake is her way out.
However, Jake is rough to her emotionally and
physically, and it is Gus who keeps a kindly eye out
for Lorie along the way on the cattle drive. Eventu-
ally, Jake leaves the cattle drive completely, never
having been much for hard work, and falls in with
an outlaw gang. On the way to Montana, Lorie is
abducted by the renegade Blue Duck, an old nemesis
of Gus and Call from their Texas Ranger days. It is
Gus who rescues her and Lorie stays with the drive
all the way. She never does go on to her eventual
goal of San Francisco, which represents respectabil-
ity and stability, but she finds that in the company of
these cowboys and, in the end, a home.
Another of Jake’s indiscretions spurs a couple of
other female characters to bring Sheriff July John-
son into the main plot. In Fort Smith, Arkansas,
Jake gets into a gunfight and accidentally shoots
the sheriff ’s brother, Ben. Ben’s widow, the shrewish
Peach, demands that July bring Jake Spoon back to
Fort Smith to face justice. Even though July Johnson
knows it was an accidental shooting and no judge
would convict the ex-Ranger on such a charge, July
goes on the manhunt just to escape from his sister-
in-law’s nagging.
However, as soon as he leaves, his pregnant
wife, Elmira, uses this opportunity to run away
from home and seek out her old lover, an outlaw
named Dee Boot. In a weakened state from her
harrowing travels, Elmira arrives at a farm run by
a woman who is caring for her comatose husband
and two daughters. The woman, Clara Allen, takes
her in and sees to the delivery of July Johnson’s
son. Elmira abandons the inconvenient offspring
of the man she never loved and finds Dee Boot
just in time to see him hanged for his crimes.
Shortly afterward, she and one of the hunters she
is traveling with are killed by Sioux and the reader
never quite understands what made her such a hard
woman. Along the trail of Jake Spoon, July Johnson
learns that his wife has gone off in search of Dee
Boot so he abandons the manhunt to go after his
wife and he, too, winds up at the Allen farm.
As the cattle drive works its way north, the
plotlines that had been twisting independently
finally intersect. Call and Gus bring the cattle drive
through at the Allen farm and it is here that the
reader learns that the long-lost love that Gus has
often mentioned is Clara. He had proposed to her
30 times back in Texas, but she preferred the stable,
if unremarkable, life of a farmer’s wife in Nebraska.
Now, however, her husband is comatose from having
been kicked in the head by a horse and she is run-
ning a farm with only two teenage daughters to help.
Clara is representative of the strong pioneer
women that settled the American frontier, who trav-
eled westward in Conestoga wagons and raised their
families in sod houses and log cabins. The various
story lines find a strong nexus here, just as the his-
torical western families found their strong center in
the character of the women that held them together.
After a tender and melancholy reunion with Gus,
Clara constructs a new family out of the various
elements that have come through her place. July
Johnson stays on as the man of the house, as Bob
Allen has passed away, and awkwardly tries to court
Clara as they raise his baby. Lorie stays on, too, as
Clara sees only her character of the present and not
her deeds of the past. One of the trail hands, Dish
Boggett, takes a job as a farmhand to stay close to
Lorie because of his long-standing crush on her.
As Captain Call takes his epic trip back to
Lonesome Dove with the body of Gus McCrae to
bury him back in Texas, he plays out the finale in
what most readers would see as one of the ultimate
man-to-man bonding legends. However, a closer