on Lonesome Dove

I used to think of the American West as a series of congealed myths–sagebrush, cowboys, sunsets–until I found my sense of the place I had lived my whole life transformed by a book beloved by Texan dads, a book which gave me language to think about the West I lived in. This was in Austin before the tech companies came, in the waning years of the Obama administration; I finished reading Lonesome Dove in the middle of a thunderstorm that made the river jump its banks. 

To say Lonesome Dove changed my life is overstating it a bit–but it changed the habit of mind which, I realized only after it was disrupted, I had unconsciously slipped into through the combined forces of Texas public school education and my own disinterest in the places I grew up. There are two parallel ways of thinking about the West in modern American life: that it is still a vast, wild emptiness to be won; and that it is the place where “real” people live, people who make up the true America of conservative politics, who eat only steak and drink only whiskey and drive only trucks. These imaginative modes run parallel to each other, I think, because the West has to be both untamed and already settled, both home to six of the U.S.’s top ten largest cities and a place a man can go to prove himself in what Stephen F. Austin called the “wild, howling, interminable solitude,” for the American dream machine to keep churning. Wallace Stegner, in his collection of essays on the West, writes: “What lures many people to the West has always been, and still is, mirage.”  

Larry McMurtry gave me Wallace Stegner, of course. Reading McMurtry gave me an interest in the real history of the West–not what had been taught to me in the multiple years of Texas history I had to take between fourth grade and finishing undergrad, but the truth, which is stranger and more brutal. But Lonesome Dove, in particular, felt like a Rosetta stone: a text that translated the myths of the West into their true genre, tragedy. A text that derailed my habits of mind and let me think of my home as a real place, instead of chugging easily along the twin tracks of eternal manifest destiny and eternal shitkicker pride.¹

And Lonesome Dove is a tragedy, have no doubt. It is 843 pages long and tells the story of a cattle drive from south Texas to the Canadian border, led by two middle-aged former Texas Rangers. There is no reason for the plot to happen at all, really. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call don’t need to cross another frontier, find another wild place to tame: but they do, because they don’t know what else to do. The West, McMurtry implies through their slow downfall, first attracted and then created men (and in his reckoning, it is usually men) who cannot exist in rooted society–the kind which requires human connection more than hard, silent work or sheer brutal force. This rugged individualism was the fatal flaw of the West which, rather than dying out with generations of settled life, was raised to the level of myth and beatified. 

I first read Lonesome Dove ten years ago now. In that decade, it feels as if the rest of America has become more like Texas, both politically² and culturally. When I tell people from other states this, it can get depressing (living in a right-wing oil oligarchy is depressing, unfortunately). But I’m never despairing when I read McMurtry. I turn back to Lonesome Dove when I need to hope in the place I’m from. Because the ability to think clearly about Texas, about the West, about American myths: it is a rare gift. I don’t take it for granted, which is why in these last hellish weeks I’ve turned to McMurtry and Stegner and Leslie Marmon Silko and Annie Proulx–writers who saw the West for what it is. I turned to them to help me think about the wannabe cowboys running our country. I’m looking for hope, for help–for that thunderclap of revelation.

Three Things: 

-This letter was sparked from one of the writing exercises in this post from Collegeville Letters, a newsletter on writing 

-I’m a billion years late to this but the audiobook of Killers of the Flower Moon had me pacing in my office

-I made this chicken stew and ate it for a week and was happy every time!!

1  Molly Ivins’s taxonomy of Texas residents defines the shitkicker for me.

2  I swear to God if I have to watch Ted Cruz run for president one more time