In a dusty boomtown on the plains, not far from the train depot and a dry river bed, an old friend hid in plain sight. On that morning in Tel Aviv I strolled into a used book store near my work and out of only a handful of English books, the greatest of them all was on sale for 20 shekels.
It’d been about 20 years since I’d first read ‘Lonesome Dove’, and almost 30 years since the TV miniseries aired, leaving my dad glued to the TV and bolstering my boyhood fear of water moccasins to newfound heights.
I visited with an old journalism colleague in the store and then headed out with the book. In the weeks to come, I gradually read it back and forth from Tel Aviv to the suburbs, transported each time to somewhere between the Nueces and the Canadian.
When I first read Larry McMurtry’s magnum opus I was 18 or 19, living in my childhood bedroom, making a career move from unskilled drywall hanger to unskilled pizza delivery driver. I had acquired a taste for Texana – with a flag and a framed map of the pre-state colony on my wall. (I recently saw an Austin journalist I follow on Twitter use the term “Alamosexual” to describe these types, that sounds about right) Around that same time I read a biography of Charlie Goodnight (the inspiration for Captain Woodrow Call), and my literary and historical interests stayed within a tight orbit that ranged from Goodnight to Quanah Parker, the heroes of a past and a setting that many if not most urban Texans think long ago ceased to exist.
(In one of the best articles of 2017, the great Skip Hollandsworth of Texas Monthly spoke of the sensation of seeing the panhandle locales where this life still carries on. In a subsequent piece, he described how covering this culture as an urban Texan was akin to exploring the jungles of the Amazon.)
In the years since, every time I’ve heard someone discuss their favorite books, or whenever a “name your 10 favorite books” list went viral on Facebook, I’ve always had Lonesome Dove number 1 without question. It is the story of two retired Texas Rangers – Captains Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call – who laze away in a nowhere village called Lonesome Dove on the Rio Grande in the late 19th century, before they decide to steal a herd of cattle in Mexico and drive them all the way to Montana. It is far more than that though – the tale of the Hat Creek outfit is the undisputed great epic odyssey of the American West and the closing of the frontier.
It is the “Talmud of Texas”, a collection of parables on life, manhood, courage, foolishness, the treachery of men, and perhaps most of all, human suffering. It is an epic novel that takes Texas mythology and lays its violence, suffering, and pain exposed for all to see.
I’ve often thought that “everything you need to know about being a man you can learn from Lonesome Dove.” After rereading the book 20 years later, as a grown man raising two daughters in the era of Trump and #MeToo, it feels so different. It is still a masterpiece, but the parables seem different, the characters far more flawed, my internal responsa as a reader somewhere many miles away from how I saw it as a much younger man.
Namely, it is the men of Lonesome Dove who seem so different to me now.
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Was Gus woke?
I had always remembered Lonesome Dove as the tale of two equal, epic heroes. One a lazy, loud-mouthed libertine and the other a stern, hard-working and tight-lipped man who never tired, smiled, or lost control of himself or the men around him. Gus and Call were both fighters of the first order, whose feats of frontier gunplay and horsemanship were legend. They were the best of friends and polar opposites, two perfect renditions of classic cowboy archetypes.
Re-reading the book 20 years later I realize that one hero – Call – falls far short of the other. Gus was a womanizer and he never lifted a finger without a court order, but he had a heart and incredible clarity about his emotions. He chose to enjoy life in a world where it was cheap and could end in an instant for no rhyme or reason.
And though he was lazy, his courage and his skills knew no limit. When Lonesome Dove’s local prostitute Lorie was kidnapped by the murderous outlaw Blue Duck and forced into sexual bondage, Gus tracked him and his gang of outlaws across the Panhandle for days and nights on end, a man in his 60s alone on the plains with his horse and his guns. He found Blue Duck’s camp and rode straight in at night, gunning down the entire crew without a scratch. He then rode off with Lorie, staying by her side as she tried to recover from the trauma and exhaustion of her ordeal.
There was also the way he treated the women in his life, most of whom appear to have been prostitutes. He was still a client, and while there is a power dynamic at play here, one gets the feeling that he viewed these women as equals, not as objects to be demeaned.
(He also cheated at a card game in order to win a “poke” from Lorie, but if we put that aside, he showed a sensitivity and equality towards women in a time in which this was rare among men, especially in the type of environs he worked as a ranger and later as an accidental cattle man)
This 19th-century form of enlightenment can be seen in an early scene, when Gus is talking to Call about women (a subject Call avoided like the plague) and about a young prostitute he had loved and left heartbroken.
“What are you talking about?” Call said. “She was a whore.”
“Whores got hearts,” Gus answered.
There was also the moment at the end of the book [SPOILER], when, on his deathbed he is asked by Call if he would like him to hunt down the indians who had mortally wounded him.
Gus answered “Oh no Woodrow, we won more than our share with the natives. They didn’t invite us here you know. We got no call to be vengeful.”
These are small moments of humanity and maturity that in 2018 would be somewhere below the bare minimum expected of a man. In his day though, this would make him a strange, almost suspect man of curious enlightenment.
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The “Toxic Masculinity” of Captain Woodrow Call
Captain Woodrow Call was a different cowboy archetype altogether. He was the classic “man of few words”, a high plains ascetic who never joked, laughed, or missed a day of work. He didn’t drink and he didn’t go to brothels, and one gets the idea he never spent a cent that wasn’t necessary.
There was only one woman he was known to have been with – a prostitute who was the mother of the young cowhand Newt. He is obviously Newt’s father, but neither he nor his son are able to admit it and Newt seems to have never given the possibility much thought.
The first inkling that Cal knows that he is Newt’s father doesn’t come until the cattle drive reaches Oglala, Nebraska. A group of US Army cavalrymen and their scout demand the cowhands hand over their horses to replenish their exhausted stock, and claim the mounts as property of the US government. Newt refuses, and the scout begins to beat him and top hand Dish Boggins. Call sees the fracas from a general store and instantly rides his horse – “Hell Bitch” – directly into the scout and proceeds to beat him nearly to death with an iron rod in front of a group of horrified locals. In the book he is in a sort of animalistic rage, grunting and uncontrollable.
Finally, after Gus lassos him Call gathers himself and says to the townspeople “I hate rude behavior in a man, I won’t tolerate it,” in what is probably the best line in the book.
In this passage, Call shows a typical frontiersman’s attitude towards imminent domain law, but also the fact that brutal, near-homicidal violence was the only language he could use to communicate his loyalty and responsibility to a young man who idolized him since birth.
Reading this book and watching the movie the first time, I remember thinking what a powerful, badass scene that was. Now something about it strikes me as pathetic.
And what about the final act of the novel? The way that Call leads the cattle drive all the way past the Milk River, depleted and exhausted, against all odds, only to instantly turn back and ride all the way back to south Texas by himself, in order to bury Gus under a tree next to the Guadalupe River. It was Gus’ dying wish, and this act of selfless friendship has always been seen by fans of the book as a sort of timeless act of cowboy heroism.
A little over a decade ago a young friend of mine passed away in Israel. He was a Houston native and we had bonded over our shared background just a few months before he fell ill that day in Tel Aviv. His parents flew out and were with him when he passed, but I remember, in my daydreams as a younger man, thinking it would be a noble gesture to escort his body home – just like Woodrow Call! No one asked and it wasn’t needed, but I saw heroism in the act of going to great lengths to bring the young man back to Texas.
On occasion over the years I’ve envisioned ways one could honor a deceased loved one, and in the year after my father’s death in 2014 my life was marked by rituals and obligations to a person who no longer existed and could neither appreciate nor call off my actions.
There is great honor and devotion in these rituals, but Call’s was a fool’s errand. He was lucky to make it to the Montana homestead alive, and he left behind an entire crew of young men who needed his leadership in order to survive in such harsh terrain. He also left behind his son, and placed him in charge of the homestead – and Hell Bitch – before riding off. He had the courage to ride across the great plans to Texas alone with winter approaching, but did not have the heart to tell Newt he was his father before heading off without any assurance that he would see him again.
His greatest, most notable act was a courageous one, but also one of real cowardice. He not only chose a friend’s dying wish over his family and the young men who needed him, he arguably did it because he was terrified of the prospect of settling down, as if he believed that the second he stopped roaming the plains he would die. His last act of friendship and loyalty was a deeply flawed one, just like the man who carried it out.
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The hanging of the fuckboi Jake Spoon
Jake Spoon is one of a long list of tragic characters in the novel, and one of the most memorable. A former Texas Ranger himself, he spent years riding with Gus and Call, surviving countless close calls and shootouts, even though it’s unclear if he could even hit the side of a barn with a rifle shot. He was a good-looking, charismatic dandy, a compulsive card-player and skirt-chaser, who coasted through life without it appears ever having done an honest day’s work.
He was the antithesis of Woodrow Call and basically Gus without most of the redeeming qualities. He was what many in 2018 would depict as a sort of archetype of the white man who failed upwards and was constantly fortunate up until the end.
He was also the catalyst for the entire adventure. It was Jake who rode into Lonesome Dove and started talking up G-d’s country in Montana, and how endless, pristine ranching country was up for grabs. He had no intention of actually going himself – or ever working cattle – but he was happy to show off his wisdom and a get-rich scheme that would spell ruin for a series of more virtuous souls.
Most men are friends with at least one Jake Spoon in their younger days, before he or Jake grows up or moves on. He’s your loud-mouthed, hard-drinking and unreliable friend who has money without working and women without dating. He’ll stick around till he gets bored and never puts others before himself. He’s also the scoundrel you love regardless, the one who Gus always wanted at his side when he rode into Austin for cards and females after weeks spent fighting Comanches on the Canadian River.
The fact that Lorie – the most beautiful prostitute in the Rio Grande Valley – falls in love with him is not surprising. She’d known nothing but violent, sadistic and cruel men through her adult life, and Jake was a good-looking charmer who dressed well and even kept his fingernails manicured. He was kind, but also worthless, especially when Blue Duck kidnapped Lorie.
Jake’s fate is sealed when he falls in with a gang of murderous horse thieves. He doesn’t take part in the killing, but he also doesn’t lift a hand to stop them or make any effort to escape. He just goes along with his lot in life, free of Lorie and the Hat Creek outfit, free of responsibility and hard work, adrift on the plains heading nowhere and doing it half-drunk.
When his old ranger buddies catch up with the horse thieves they make quick work of the whole outfit, hanging them from the first tree they can find. They wait with Jake, and he does the job himself – spurring his own horse so it bolts and leaves him hanging by his neck from a tree branch.
In the book and the movie Gus says something about “you crossed a line Jake.” The killing of his former partner is framed as a sort of biblical judgement for his crossing of a moral rubicon from which there was no return. The sentence was lethal and all but instant, consistent with the way these things were handled then.
Perhaps they had no choice – Jake was already wanted for a (accidental) killing in Fort Smith, Arkansas and he would have probably fallen askew of another violent man eventually. Still, this frontier moral absolutism is lacking a sense of humanity, or any room for a human expression of loss, and what it means to have to execute your own friend and former partner.
Jake’s wretchedness is a sort of low-key fuckboi treachery – he is not sadistic or evil, but his self-interested, detached nature spells ruin for those around him. And while he did cross a line, this frontier “justice” seems like something else entirely to me now.
It seems lazy and cruel, in some ways worse than the man himself.
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The triumph of the soy boy Newt
There is also Newt, the young orphan ranch hand born to a prostitute who died when he was a young boy. He is also apparently the only man on Earth who does not realize that Woodrow Call is his father. Newt is another archetype – the sheltered, asexual naif who through the trials of the cattle drive evolves into a trusted and loyal cowhand worthy of running his own spread in Montana.
Newt failed completely in his responsibility to safeguard Lorie the night she was abducted, but a rabbinical analysis of this shortcoming would also point out that he would have surely been killed by Blue Duck if he’d been there, creating another pointless loss of life. Also, if no one knew of his failure, was he responsible? Did he need to tell anyone?
The young cowhand – played by a perfectly cast Ricky Schroder in the miniseries – is highly skilled and adept at his job, but he seems too good for his surroundings, a character who should have been born in a different time, in surroundings less cruel.
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Deets – the magical black scout
Joshua Deets is the only person in Lonesome Dove who is even less flawed than Newt.
A black former soldier in the Union Army, Deets is the trusted scout of the Hat Creek outfit and a man of almost supernatural frontier skills and wisdom. On a spotless south Texas morning he tells Lorie to move camp because a storm is brewing and the Nueces will flood, and he is proven right, just like he is repeatedly throughout the book.
His skills are offset though by his lack of education and his strange, almost childlike beliefs. He is convinced that the moon is moving closer to earth and that eventually people will be able to reach it from a ladder, and he also expresses some fear about Indians camping on the moon.
He is a familiar sort of literary figure, much like Jim in “Huckleberry Finn” – the trusted, older black sidekick without any book learnin’ who has magic powers that repeatedly save his white comrades time and time again. The only other black person in the book is Frog, a silent murderer in the gang of horse thieves. He is hung right before Jake Spoon.
When the book was published, the term “magical negro” hadn’t yet entered the critical lexicon to describe a certain cinematic stock character, but looking at Deets in 2018, he seems to fit the bill. I’m fairly certain that if the miniseries premiered today not only would the term be used, but Deets would also be described as almost a racist depiction of a black man in the post Civil War years.
The character of Deets was actually inspired by Bose Ikard, a black cowboy and tracker who rode with Charlie Goodnight on his cattle drives.
When Ikard died, Goodnight wrote the following epitaph:
“Bose Ikard (1859–1928) Served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches, splendid behavior. C. GOODNIGHT.”
After Deets was killed, Call and the outfit buried him on the plains, with a marker and epitaph that Call hastily carved:
“Josh Deets Served with me 30 years, Fought in 21 Engagements with the Comanche and Kiowa. Cheerful in all weathers. Never shirked a task. Splendid behavior.”
Deets was a true hero who has only aged better with time. His depiction – perhaps not as much.
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Clara and Lorie – the women who deserved better
Clara Allen (played by the perfectly-cast Angelica Huston) is a balabusta of the high plains and a hero of the top order.
Gus’s one true love, she is the archetype of a woman condemned to suffer a life of hardship and physical labor, sunken by grief for her two sons who died of illness and the invalid husband she did not love. She buried both boys in the backyard of the Oglala homestead she ran, which is set deep in the sort of soul-destroying frontier environment that one could shudder just thinking about.
When the Hat Creek outfit passes Oglala heading north they stop at the homestead, and it is obvious almost immediately that Lorie will decamp and stay with Clara. There is safety, love, and a new beginning with Clara and her daughters.
She had worked as a prostitute for years and was taken hostage and repeatedly raped by Blue Duck’s crew. Years earlier, she was married to an east Texas peckerwood who beat her mercilessly, and later, she married a manicured San Antonio man who almost killed her with his beatings. She had then had a short love affair with Jake Spoon, who lost interest and abandoned her.
She had known little but cruelty, violence, and degradation from men and found safety and a home with Clara.
When I first read this book as a young man, I thought little of this relationship or of Clara, who I saw as a side character of limited consequence. Today I see her as one of the great heroes of the novel and in her relationship with Lorie, a powerful depiction of sisterhood and salvation in a time and environment where the lives of women were beyond perilous.
- Part III
Lonesome Dove and the pantheon of Texas heroes (almost all of them men) are part of some halcyon depiction of manhood that I at many times looked up to or aspired to. Today, as a father of two girls pushing 40, living on the other side of the world, I think of these men and women to some extent in a different light.
My life and my upbringing are not rural or wild. They were suburban, middle-class, liberal, and Jewish. In the environs of my younger days Bob Wills was never the King – it was all ‘Heiroglyphics’ and southern rappers, punk rock and weed smoke. The literary Texas was a foreign one to me in many ways, but like countless urban Texans, it depicted life and a sort of manhood that I at some point deeply admired.
Today (especially in light of the current political reality in the US) I feel more distant than ever from these myths and these Texas archetypes, and more aware of all of the different definitions of “Texan” that have been overlooked in our literature and films. That said, these ideals remain powerful and they are depicted on the first page of the book, in the dedication that reads:
“What they dreamed, we live – and what they lived we dream” (T.K. Whipple, Study Out the Land)
The line describes the way in which the frontier forefathers of today’s Texans would have given anything to have the easy lives we enjoy today. Nonetheless, though they dreamed of comfortable lives like ours, we daydream of the freedom, danger, and adventure that was their lot, no matter how foreign it is to us.
I think of my father, who loved Lonesome Dove (but far preferred McMurtry’s “The Last Picture Show”). He grew up in southeast Texas, but most of his life was middle-class, and he was highly-educated, liberal, Jewish, and a bit of a weird Austin guy who loved the 29th street Oat Willie’s and remembered quite clearly some nights spent at the Vulcan Gas Company.
Nonetheless, when the miniseries came out – around the time of my Bar Mitzvah – he was obsessed. Recently, reading over some old diary entries of my father’s, I found one where he wrote about being a single father of two boys, as well as the words “Ben’s Bar Mitzvah speech,” and a line I assumed he wanted to say or hoped I would put in my speech.
It was Gus’s last line in the miniseries, which he said to Call as he lay dying of his wounds in a doctor’s office in Miles City, after refusing to have his leg amputated after a Blood indian shot him with an arrow.
In my dad’s handwriting I saw the line “Augustus McCrae’s final words: It’s been a hell of a ride, hasn’t it?”
It always has, but 20 years later it looks a little different in the rearview.