Lonesome Dove, Texas, is a one-tart town and so quiet you can hear the lady's bedsprings a block away. For those with a thirst, there is the Dry Bean saloon, where customers pass time whittling the edges off the tables. It is the late 19th century. Pyramids of buffalo bones rise on the prairie, the red man is down to his last can of war paint, and a couple of old Texas Rangers have seen the future, and it works without them.
"Women and children and settlers are just cannon fodder for lawyers and bankers," McCrae said. "They're part of the scheme. After the Indians wipe out enough of them you get your public outcry, and we go chouse the Indians out of the way. If they keep coming back then the Army takes over and chouses them worse. Finally the Army will manage to whip 'em down to where they can be squeezed onto some reservation, so the lawyers and bankers can come in and get civilization started. Every bank in Texas ought to pay us a commission for the work we done. If we hadn't done it, all the bankers would still be back in Georgia, living on poke salad and turnip greens."
Nobody does the cowboy blarney better than Larry McMurtry, elegist of the old Southwest and observer of the new culture in the Sunbelt, where the air conditioner is king. Yet his novels are not nearly as well known as the movies made from them. Horseman, Pass By is more recognizable as Hud. The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment have had far more viewers than readers. Lonesome Dove, McMurtry's tenth novel, is probably stampeding toward the screen at this moment. But first things first.
The book's great length and leisurely pace convey the sense of a bygone era, while the author's attachment to misfits and backwaters never goes out of style. Neither does his premise: two aging gunfighters give it one more shot. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are descended from the noble buddy system of American literature. Exotically paired males, like Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim, fling themselves at the wilderness and sooner or later paddle into the mainstream. McCrae and Call join the mythic flow by stealing a herd of Mexican cattle and driving them from Texas to Montana. Why leave semiretirement and undertake a journey better suited for younger men? One answer is that Lonesome Dove would be a dull book if the two remained proprietors of the Hat Creek Cattle Co. & Livery Emporium ("GOATS AND DONKEY'S NEITHER BOUGHT NOR SOLD/WE DON'T RENT PIGS"). It isn't that life in town can't be dangerous. One can always fall off a porch, get snakebit picking up a jug or risk Tex-Mex cooking. The recipe for varmint stew: "Whatever the dogs catch. Or the dogs themselves, if they don't manage to catch nothing."