a part of it. By now a cowboy novel probably would have to show some underlying awareness of the movies. Mr. McMurtry seems ideally equipped for that. Dish, hopelessly in love with and devoted to Lorena, lost all sense of what life was about. He even lost the sense that he was a cowboy, the strongest sense he had to work with. He was just a fellow with a glass in his hand, who life had suddenly turned to mud. (p. 98) This story was actually based on the real lives of Charles Goodnight’s and Oliver Loving’s cattle drive from Texas to Montana. His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins). wants horses or cattle, the former lawmen drop into Mexico at night and steal them. One of the captains, Augustus McCrae, is a lazy, hard-drinking, falsely erudite old coot; the other, W. F. Call, is strong and silent in circumstances

Andy Adams (writer), wrote the Log of a Cowboy, an account of a five-month drive of 3,000 cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to Montana in 1882 along the Great Western Cattle Trail first and last,'' and his essays show that he has done considerable digging around in obscure first-hand accounts of trail drives. Also, if the myth-making machine has expropriated the subject, well, Mr. McMurtry knows about However, after reading a nonfictional book about Dodge City, I thought I might finally be ready to try a fictional western.was based), his latest book was something of a departure. But this time he was intrigued by the myths themselves, by how they endured so powerfully even though the trail-drive era lasted 20 years. I loved so many characters in this book and I feel like I have been on that journey with them. I kept wishing they would have stayed in Texas or at least stopped in Nebraska after so much they went through. And my emotions are still raw as I cry. Because people die and when you love characters you don't want that but that is life for real, life in books and life in movies and tv. Weiss, Brett (February 24, 2016). " 'Lonesome Dove' exhibits open at museums in Fort Worth". Star Telegram . Retrieved December 3, 2017. Then Augustus saw the boy walking up from the lots, so tired he was barely moving. Pea Eye was half drunk by the time Newt finally made the wagons.

I don't know,'' he said, ''except most of the men who participated in it were young men and the country they were going into was young country. I've always had a soft spot for western movies. In high school, I roped my friends into watching the ones starring this guy: But, when you get right down to the nitty gritty, this novel has many of the elements I love in a good long saga that spans over a long period of time. I love how the story takes readers on an adventure, giving the characters true tests of courage, and letting them develop in a way we don't see much of, these days.

Lonesome Dove

Special thanks to Lloyd, Alli, and Cheri....for the gentle push-encouragement to read it now...( not some other year) and J. Frank Dobie. It seems mysterious that so rich a subject has not produced a great novel - perhaps it has become so stylized that there is no juice left in it. It sneaks up on you, but before you know it, you suffer when they suffer, your heart soars when they succeed, you understand and forgive when they fail. And you wish you had about an ounce of their grit - because these men and women are all tougher in their sleep than I could ever be on my toughest day.

Augustus ignored the remark. “I figure it was a Kiowa on his way to steal a woman that lost that mare,” he said. “Your Comanche don’t hunger much after señoritas. White women are easier to steal, and don’t eat as much besides. The Kiowa are different. They fancy señoritas.”Jake accidentally killed July’s brother and now July is out for blood. Jake puts it in the minds of Call and Gus to gather a large herd of animals and drive them north. The goal is to set up a cattle ranch at their destination. In their rangering days, when things were a little slow the boys would sit around and swap stories about Augustus’s eating. Not only did he eat a lot, he ate it fast. The cook that wanted to hold him at the grub for more than ten minutes had better have a side of beef handy. As you know this is the enormous story of a big old cattle drive from Texas to Montana. That’s kind of it. Bits get added on here and there but the main idea is to get these thousands of cows across 3000 miles of dangerous territory, through sandstorms, blizzards, bandits, droughts, through Indian nations, across rivers, via grizzly bears and hardly a single town in sight the whole way. At the very least, Call would come stomping up from the lots, only to be annoyed to discover it had just been a snake. Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever tool he had in hand. “A man that slows down for snakes might as well walk,” he often said, a statement that made about as much sense to an educated man as most of the things Call said. All that, however, is only incident to the central storyline: the platonic love story of two men. It is their co-dependent (some would argue destructive) relationship that drives the plot and gives Lonesome Dove its sometimes staggering power.

She bit a hunk out of him, that’s why,” Pea said. “I don’t know why the Captain wants to keep her.” I’ve reasoned it out,” Augustus said. “You could have done the same if you ever stopped working long enough to think.” Augustus doesn’t teach us about conquering the frontier, dispossessing the Indians, or the costs of forging a continental empire. He teaches us instead how to live each day with joy, taking pleasure in the smallest things, and loving the smallest things so much that they become life’s very meaning. As was his custom, Augustus drank a fair amount of whiskey as he sat and watched the sun ease out of the day. If he wasn’t tilting the rope-bottomed chair, he was tilting the jug. The days in Lonesome Dove were a blur of heat and as dry as chalk, but mash whiskey took some of the dry away and made Augustus feel nicely misty inside—foggy and cool as a morning in the Tennessee hills. He seldom got downright drunk, but he did enjoy feeling misty along about sundown, keeping his mood good with tasteful swigs as the sky to the west began to color up. The whiskey didn’t damage his intellectual powers any, but it did make him more tolerant of the raw sorts he had to live with: Call and Pea Eye and Deets, young Newt, and old Bolivar, the cook. of a Godforsaken one-saloon town on the dusty south Texas plain near the Rio Grande. Two former captains in the Texas Rangers have retired from the long wars against Indians and Mexicans to run the Hat Creek Cattle Company - when a customerWhen I was a lad, around the time the glaciers receded and civilization began, I was enthralled with a certain TV miniseries. It was, in fact, Lonesome Dove. Though it took a couple decades, I finally made myself read the book the miniseries was based on and I've very glad I did. Western Novels are totally out of my confort zone however I do like a challenge and this book reminded me of The Pillars of the Earth in the sense that it is an epic monumental novel, with a wonderful sense of time and place, the most amazing and extremely well formed characters that you grow to love and root for and a book that suprises the reader in so many ways.