Lonesome Dove

I've had a trepidation to reading any novels from the Western genre, mainly because of the clichés and the typical tropes that come with them from literature, movies, television, comic books, and more. But my wife purchased a used copy of this novel and told me she had always wanted to read Lonesome Dove. I had a curiosity about Larry McMurtry as well and decided to overlook any preconceptions about this adventure set in the Old West. And, boy, am I glad I did.

I'm not going to go into too much summation because there are too many storylines and too many characters. But I will say this: two former Texas Rangers, Woodrow McCall and “Gus” McCrae, are inspired to gather a herd of cattle and drive them north to begin the first cattle ranch north of the Yellowstone River because of an old friend's description of a beautiful and “uninhabited” Montana (by white folks, of course). The first thing I noticed, almost immediately and enjoyed for the entirety of the novel, was just how funny it was, the way the characters razzed each other, some of the situations they got themselves in. I found myself laughing out loud quite often and enjoyed the banter between the men in the Hat Creek outfit. Gus was the instigator of a lot of this banter, mainly because he just loved to talk, something that loveably irritated most of the outfit; they hated it when Gus was around but missed it when Gus was gone.

Although the novel takes place in the Old West, the narrative isn't bogged down with minutiae of setting or the things used in this time period like apparel or whatever. With the exception of naming a particular brand of gun or weapon, the story mostly focuses on the relationships between the characters rather than the details of the setting, something that a lot of genre fiction does i.e. to nerd-out on the details. The comradery of the friends, the women in their lives, and the men in the Hat Creek outfit is the nucleus of the novel. Their hopes and dreams propel them north for a better life although death shrouds them like a specter. The Hat Creek outfit as well as the other people that orbit them are constantly dealing with death.

Clara, the old flame that Gus pines for throughout the novel and is introduced to us later in the story, is in my opinion the conscience of the book. She meditates on death, having lost many children and a husband too soon, at one point concluding, ‘It's too much death, she thought. Why does it keep coming to me?' And as she recounts the things, places, and people that have traversed with her through her life, the narrator concludes, ‘It struck her that endings were never as you would expect them to be.' And I meditated on these two points often throughout the book. Although the dream of settling Montana with cattle propels Gus and Woodrow to move the Hat Creek outfit with the herd north, it isn't the culmination of the story or the ending we think will be. In fact, that dream dims and fades as friends are lost to unimaginable horrors brought on by bad weather, animal attacks, Indian ambushes, criminal interventions, and the like.

It's a brutal story, one that can't help but make you wonder, ‘What's the point of it all?' Not just with this story, but in all our lives, with death on the horizon. And late in the story (I'll do my best not to spoil the story) when Clara asks McCall why he's doing what he's doing for Gus, he simply states, “I can't forget no promise to a friend,” Call said. “Though I do agree it's foolish and told him so myself.” This is a touching summation to a great novel, that friendship is what gets us through it all.