Lonesome Dove and the Old West

I am steadily making my way through the 945 pages of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove in preparation for our book club meeting in ten days. This is not a chore. While in Puerto Vallarta in the winter I read two of McMurtry’s sequels to this tome, The Streets of Laredo and Dead Man’s Walk. Chronologically, these books were prequels, going back to the earlier lives and exploits of Captains Call and McCrae of the Texas Rangers. I would have read Lonesome Dove during that period as well, so taken was I with the vast sweep of early southwestern American history that McMurtry captured. However, I was unable to find a copy at the local library or in one of the used book stores. I have been reading Lonesome Dove with my Rand McNally atlas close to hand, following the movement of the men and women of this tale from the Rio Grande border with Mexico, through all of Texas, into present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and to date in my reading, Nebraska. Other important people in the book begin their journeys in Arkansas, going either south into Texas or north, following the Arkansas River and cattle trails into Kansas. The contrast between the conditions of life in this mid- 19^th century south-western setting and the way that we live now could hardly be more stark. The geography, weather, and the almost total lack of settlements throughout these areas, imposed a way of being on travellers not just difficult for people of our time to imagine, but most likely, to survive. Besides these elemental forces, without the rule of law other human beings in the territories could without warning create situations of peril. Residual bands of natives not yet under the iron control of the American government, rough groups of buffalo hunters, horse thieves, gamblers and drunks found in the smallest of settlements could threaten the movement of families seeking homesteads, or even in unlucky circumstances, the considerably well organized cattle-drive groups like those of Call and McCrae.

The story focuses rightly on the men of the old west as it was men who primarily fought for this area, ultimately allowing the settlement of families and a space for women. Most of these men live rough lives with one another, experiencing little if any connection with women other than the “whores” to be found in small towns. McMurtry paints their interactions with one another and their varying roughness, discomfort with, and longing for the company of women, with a deft hand. Three women play important roles in his narrative: Clara, Gus McCrae’s old love who married a farmer and moved to Nebraska; Elmira, the wife of a sheriff in Arkansas, a former “sporting girl” who had passed herself off as a widow when she came to his town; and Lorena, the beautiful “sporting girl” of the Lonesome Dove (a tiny south Texas town) saloon who longed to make her way to San Francisco.

Other than in developing her own strong drive and energy, Clara’s earlier life in her parents’ general store further east did not prepare her for the rigour of farming life in Nebraska. She raised her five children in a sod house, burying her three sons within a few years, and seeing her husband slowly die after being kicked in the head by a mare he was attempting to tame.  Elmira’s desire to marry stemmed from terror engendered by her near-death treatment at the hands of some buffalo hunters. Regretting her decision after several months of quiet “respectability,” she abandoned her husband while he was away on a search for a killer, heading north and west looking for Deet, an earlier lover. The troubles that she then fell into were more terrible than her previous experiences had been. Lorena, who joined the Call/McCrae cattle drive heading north and west for Montana, was captured en route by a notorious native renegade and sold to a group of natives who cruelly raped and tortured her, leaving her profoundly traumatized long after her rescue by Gus McCrae. All three of these women are drawn, not as stereotypes, but as living personalities, each exemplifying in some fashion aspects of the roles and perils available to women in that location and time.

My husband, Mark, who was born, raised, and educated in Michigan, and who has lived in New York City, Rhode Island, Alaska, Boston, and Los Angeles, has long been interested in the native peoples of North America, especially in the American southwest. Over our time together I have gradually understood some of the reason. Though we Canadians are similar to Americans in so very many ways, our own history and geography have brought us up to different attitudes and values. I have often reflected on the importance of slavery, the civil war, and their aftermaths, as major factors in the differences between us. But the taking and settling of the southern and western portions of the current USA have had perhaps an equally important role in the inherent collective national narrative. Larry McMurtry quotes at the opening of his novel a passage from T K Whipples’s Study Out The Land, which I shall replicate here:

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

Our own early Canadian history contains some of the elements to be found in McMurtry’s narrative but the differences are substantial. Other than the native peoples found throughout North America when Europeans came and began to explore, conquer, and colonize, the founders of both Canada and the USA were of the same ilk. We are like children of the same parents, alike in some basic fashion, but demonstrating our profound differences in both genetic materials and time and place of nurture: siblings who by no means always “get” each other.

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