Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove (1985), by Larry McMurtry, is the most critically acclaimed western. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986 and is McMurtry’s magnum opus. More literary fiction in a western setting than a cowboys-and-Indians romp, Lonesome Dove tells the story of two ageing ex-Texas Rangers who lead a cattle drive from south Texas to the wilderness of Montana. It examines friendship, love and death through a host of larger-than-life yet painfully realistic characters. Texas Monthly calls it the state’s hero myth. 

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are the co-owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium, renting out horses and cows in the dusty border town of Lonesome Dove. In their youth, they were Texas Ranger captains, who fought Comanches in the state’s frontier days. Now Texas is becalmed, and the buffalo are nearing extinction.

Quick-witted, charming and thoughtful, McCrae spends his days indulging in alcohol and prostitutes while pining for an old flame who married a horse trader twenty years before. 

Woodrow Call is a tough and determined leader of men, with an iron sense of duty. He is stubborn and pragmatic but socially inept, particularly around women, and refuses to face his past mistakes.

McMurtry claimed the idea for two opposing men – the pragmatic and the visionary – came from Don Quixote. McCrae is an Epicurean, Call a stoic, and, although they are very different, their many conversations echo those of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The call to adventure comes from their friend Jake Spoon. After ten years of absense, he appears in Lonesome Dove wanted, having killed a dentist in Fort Smith. Spoon tales of unclaimed land persuade Call and McCrae to leave Lonesome Dove and bring two thousand cattle to the last frontier. They hire a team of cowboys and set off.

The novel follows a host of characters including wistful whores, naïve sheriffs and sadistic bandits. The plotting is excellent. McMurtry’s narration is omniscient, slipping in and out of characters thoughts and opinions with ease. His dialogue and characterisation are superb, and often hilarious. The characters are not mere archetypes or cliches but bring a host of quirks and insecurities to the table – many with crippling emotional depth. 

Larry McMurtry, 2000:

“It’s hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man’s Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I’ll be mulling over for a long, long time.”

Lonesome Dove does not paint the romantic picture of the Old West, so loved in the genre, nor does it indulge in hellish depictions in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, though there is violence aplenty. Instead, McMurtry paints the Frontier as-is: a time of adventure and possibility, but also immense hardship and cruelty. The innocents suffer most.

McMurtry wrote one sequel – Streets of Laredo (1989) and two prequels; Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997). I have read the latter, which is nearly as good and features more of the Native American perspective. 

Larry McMurtry of Archer City, Texas (1936 – 2021) – who later co-wrote Brokeback Mountain – began Lonesome Dove in 1972 as a screenplay. He sold the rights to Universal Pictures. The leads he envisioned, however – John Wayne and James Stewart – rejected the script. Twelve years later, McMurtry bought back the rights for $35,000 and rewrote it as a book. The gamble paid off – Lonesome Dove was an immediate success and spent 52 weeks on the bestseller list.

In 1989, CBS adapted Lonesome Dove as a TV miniseries starring Robert Duval as Augustus McCrae, Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow Call, Diana Lane as Lorena and Donald Glover as Deets. The script maintained much of the book’s dialogue and was nominated for 18 Emmies, winning seven. It revived both the Western genre and the miniseries format. Four adaptations of the Lonesome Dove tetralogy followed but were subpar.

Standing at 843 pages, Lonesome Dove is one of those rare books which is easy to read while bearing literary clout. It is among the best books I have read, and will likely read again.

 Sources: Texas Monthly

See Also:

• Don Quixote

The Ark of the Covenant

The Ark of the Covenant is the most sacred object in Judaism. According to the Hebrew Bible (or Christian Old Testament), it houses the original Ten Commandments and the sceptre of Aaron. The power of God is said to live in the Ark, and the Hebrews used it to conquer their Promised Land. Its current location is the stuff of legend.

The Book of Exodus says the Hebrew God instructed Moses to build the Ark during his forty days at Mount Sinai to exact measurements and specifications. Moses had a craftsman named Belazel and his assistant Oholiab build the Ark out of acacia and coat it with gold.
The book of Deuteronomy claimed Moses made the Ark himself. The Hebrews housed the Ark in the portable Tabernacle until the construction of Solomon’s Temple.

The Ark granted the Hebrews divine favour. With it in their control, rivers opened, and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. When the Philistines, stole it, disease and famine struck the Hebrews until it was recovered. Only in the presence of the Ark could sinners atone.

Living embodiments of gods were common in the Bronze Age. The Babylonians, Assyrians, Philistines and others housed statues to their gods, which they protected fiercely. If the statue were stolen or destroyed, its people would lose their god’s favour. The statue of Marduk was stolen and recovered five times over a thousand years.

The Ark of the Covenant disappeared in the 530s BC when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem. Most scholars believe it was lost forever.

The Book of Maccabees – canon to Jews, Catholics and Orthodox Christians – claims Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave near Mount Nebo (modern West Bank). There it would stay “until God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy.” As the Biblical stories spread over the following centuries, so did legends about the Ark’s location.

Some believe the Ark resides in a secret tunnel beneath Jerusalem and that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a map to its location.

The Lemba people of Zimbabwe are descendants of Yemeni Jews. They claim their ancestors brought the Ark south on their migration to Africa until it crumbled. The Lemba priests built a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, allegedly on God’s command. In the 1940s, German scientists carbon-dated the Lemba Ark and found it dated to 1350, around the collapse of the Great Zimbabwe civilization. Today it is housed in the Museum of Harare, Zimbabwe.

The Ethiopian Tewehado Orthodox Church has a different story. According to the Ethiopian National Epic, King Solomon’s fathered a son by the Queen of Sheba. Their son was Menelik I, who became the first emperor of Ethiopia. He brought the Ark from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. The Ark allegedly resides in the treasury of the Church of Our Lady of Zion in the holy city of Axum to this day, where only the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is allowed to view it.

In a 1992 interview, Professor of Ethiopian Studies Edward Ullendorf claimed he saw the Ark firsthand in 1941 while working for the British army. The priests tried to stop him, but he forced his way into the chamber:

“They have a wooden box, but it’s empty,” Ullendorf claimed. “Middle- to late-medieval construction, when these were fabricated ad hoc.”

Sources: King James Bible, Live Science
See Also:

• Moses
• Second Temple Judaism
• The Historical Babylon
• The Allegorical Babylon