A Journey Through McMurtry’s American West
Reading Larry McMurtry’s complete Lonesome Dove cycle—from Dead Man’s Walk through Streets of Laredo—feels like witnessing the birth and death of the American frontier through the eyes of truly unforgettable characters who refuse to leave you long after the final page.
Brilliantly Envisioned Characters
While I’d cherished Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call for years through the original Lonesome Dove novel and its well-received television adaptation, experiencing their full arc across all four books revealed psychological depths of character development I never suspected. Call, in particular, emerges as one of literature’s most complex protagonists—a man whose apparent neurodivergence and emotional rigidity inflict profound damage on those around him, yet who finds a kind of grace in his final years through the devotion of a sweet, blind Mexican girl who becomes his unlikely salvation.
McMurtry populates this sweeping saga with characters who transcend the typical Western archetype. Famous Shoes, the Kickapoo tracker who threads through all four novels, embodies a vanished wisdom that our modern world desperately lacks—his understanding of landscape and human nature feels almost mystical. Clara Allen stands as one of American literature’s great female characters, simultaneously gracious and irascible, approaching life’s complexities with a pragmatic wisdom that makes her rejection of Gus all the more poignant and understandable.
Throughout all the books, the author’s gift for capturing authentic frontier personalities shines through his integration of historical figures like cattleman Charlie Goodnight and hunter Ben Lilly—men whose larger-than-life exploits feel both mythic and utterly believable. McMurtry’s settings pulse with life, from the unforgiving Texas plains to the brutal Mexican borderlands, creating a geography that becomes as much a character as any human protagonist.
Ranking the Four Novels in the Series
Ranking the four novels reveals an uneven achievement, and the order of composition tells its own story. Lonesome Dove remains the high-water mark, and not by accident—it was the first written, and McMurtry’s engagement with Gus and Call feels undiluted by everything that came after. The characters receive his fullest attention here; nothing feels like scaffolding for a later book.
Dead Man’s Walk, the first chronologically, is a grueling read in the best sense. The historical material is strong and competent, and the ill-fated Texas Santa Fe expedition gives McMurtry a canvas for genuine brutality—the grizzly attack in the mountains between Santa Fe and Mesilla is one of the more harrowing set pieces in the whole cycle. More importantly, this is where Buffalo Hump enters, and the enmity McMurtry establishes between the Comanche chief and the young McCrae and Call reverberates through the rest of the series in ways that feel earned rather than convenient.
Comanche Moon is the cycle’s most difficult volume to love. It meanders through the pursuit of Kicking Wolf, the horse thief whose exploits shade into something like folk magic, and the novel’s back half descends into the genuinely surreal camp of Ahumado, a Mexican-mountain despot who rules through pure terror. The book loses its way at times, and readers may find themselves losing the thread along with it. Its lasting contribution is Blue Duck—Buffalo Hump’s deranged half-Comanche son—whose menace pays off in the original Lonesome Dove and gives this otherwise unwieldy novel a reason to exist.
Streets of Laredo, written second but positioned last in the internal chronology, is the cycle’s weakest entry and the clearest evidence that McMurtry’s attempt to return to Lonesome Dove’s characters came at a cost. An aged Call is hired to track down Joey Garza, a young sniper murdering railroad men, only to discover that the psychopathic Mox-Mox is loose on the same territory, killing simply because he enjoys it. Mox-Mox is a memorably vile creation, and his end is satisfying in the way only a truly earned comeuppance can be. But the novel’s treatment of Call in its final stretch—diminishing a character we’d spent three books coming to admire—lands with the same sour note as the recent Star Wars sequels’ handling of Luke Skywalker. It’s a legacy character put through indignities that feel less like tragedy and more like a failure of nerve about what to do with him.
Struggles through the Books
Yet the series isn’t without its flaws. McMurtry occasionally stumbles over continuity between volumes, and his prose—while effective—sometimes feels workmanlike when a more lyrical voice (think Cormac McCarthy) might have elevated certain scenes to the heights that they truly deserved. The emotional undercurrents that drive some of the lesser characters occasionally surface too briefly, leaving the reader hungry for deeper exploration. Some (including me) might also indict McMurty on killing off the very best character he ever dreamed up in the first novel!
Despite these quibbles, the Lonesome Dove saga succeeds magnificently as both entertainment and (occasionally) literature. It’s a work that honors the brutal poetry of the American West while never romanticizing its violence or overlooking its moral complexities—a fitting epitaph for a vanished world and the remarkable people who shaped it.
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