Larry McMurtry’s Literary Geography

McMurtry, the scion of a modest cattle-ranching family based in Archer City, north-east Texas  drew inspiration from first-hand experience with cattle, family lore, memory and the pace of his hometown as sources of inspiration:  

“I grew up in a bookless town, in a bookless part of the state—when I stepped into a university library, at age eighteen, the whole of the world’s literature lay before me unread, a country as vast, as promising, and, so far as I knew, as trackless as the West must have seemed to the first white men who looked upon it. It behooved me to locate Homer, Shakespeare and the other major landmarks scattered through the stacks.” 

McMurtry’s first novel  Horseman Pass By (1961) set in Thalia, Texas, borrowed its title from a William Butler Yeats poem and was made into the film Hud (1963).  His second novel Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and third, The Last Picture Show (1966) -itself translated into a critical and successful film- created a triptych portrayal of life in mid-twentieth century north Texas that cut against the grain of an idealized West. 

McMurtry recalled “Before I was out of high school I realized I was witnessing the dying of a way of life – the rural, pastoral way of life. In the Southwest the best energies were no longer found in the homeplace, or in the small towns; the cities required these energies and the cities bought them . . . The cattle range had become the oil patch; the dozer cap replaced the Stetson almost overnight. The myth of the cowboy grew purer every year because there were so few actual cowboys left to contradict it.” Like Cervantes’ depiction of the Plains of La Mancha,  McMurtry parses the cultural and physical geographies of the American west and southwest through the cracked lenses of myth, fiction and history:

“In Shakespeare only the guards hear the strange music that marks the god’s departure, but it is still a telling moment -indeed, a telling fancy. I believe I can still hear the music myself, in Fort Worth, Houston, Dallas; by the Rio Grande and the Brazos; in the brush country and on the Staked Plains.”

Of the fading Cowboy God, McMurtry notes:

“The music of departure is now rather faint, the god almost out of hearing. The god who abandoned Antony was Hercules -what is the name of the god who now abandons Texas?     . . . one thing that is sure is that he was a horseman, and a god of the country. His home was the frontier, and his mythos celebrates those masculine ideals appropriate to the frontier.”

His novel, Lonesome Dove, a paean to this fading myth, originated as a film script titled ‘The Streets of Laredo’: “I remember laboring, around  1971, on a screen offering for John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, a bittersweet, end-of-the-West Western in which no scalps were taken and no victories were won. The three actors were horrified, genuinely and touchingly  horrified. Over? The Old West? They  couldn’t quite articulate it, but what they were struggling to say, I think, in response to the disturbing script that eventually be­ came Lonesome Dove, was that the only point of the movies, and thus, more or less, of their lives, was that the Old West need never be over. You might as well say that America could be over, a notion so high-concept as to be, at the time, unthinkable, or at least unproduceable.”

However, after Lonesome Dove was published, and made into a CBS-TV series in the 1980s, it seemed to rekindle the myth. In 2016 McMurtry remarked “It isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination . . . All I had wanted to do was write a novel that demythologized the West. Instead, it became the chief source of western mythology. Some things you cannot explain.” What is interesting is that this myth is now being remediated away from the ‘hetero-normative white male figure. The first to cross this rubicon was Annie Proulx with her short story Brokeback Mountain, about a life-long romance between two gay, closeted ranch-hands. McMurtry bought the film rights for the story, and with his writing partner Diana Ossana, won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screen Play in 2006. Recently, there has emerged “a growing canon of alternative Westerns that reinvent old myths about the American West.” Such titles include C .Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold, Téa Obreht’s, Inland, Tom Lin’s The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, and Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and A Thousand Moons.

References: 

Mapping The Lonesome Dove Chronicles

On a wider regional scale, McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove tetralogy maps the transformation of the West from indigenous and Spanish imperial trails to cattle-drives and later railways laid by Eastern railroad companies—a shift from the gods of the nomadic horse cultures of the Great Plains and Southwest, to the extractive gods of steam and coal hailed by the barons of the industrial revolution.

The digital-interactive maps below are based upon The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (2010) which contains all four novels. Click on the links to access the digital maps (Use Google Chrome browser for best results.)

I. Lonesome Dove (1985)

Lonesome Dove Montana Cattle Drive / Call’s Return with Gus & 1870 Census Population figures. Map by Charles Travis. 1870 Census Data Source: Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 14.0 [Database]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. 2019.

The titular, Pulitzer-Prize winning novel introduces Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call (‘Gus and Call’) in the late 1870s as retired Texas Rangers settled on the Rio Grande border town of Lonesome Dove and proprietors of a small livestock business. Visited by their old compadre Jake Spoon, Gus and Call are convinced gather a herd of steers stolen from Mexico and drive them north to Montana to start a cattle ranch. Gus’ sign introduces the Hat Creek Cattle Company crew:

Larry McMurtry, The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (p. 1245) Simon & Schuster.

The character of Joshua Deets was based upon the African-American cowboy Bose Ikard, a member of the Charles Goodnight cattle crew. Other principal characters include Newt Dobbs -Call’s unrecognized son, top-hand Dishwater Bogget, Blue-Duck -a ruthless Comanchero who kidnaps Lorena Woods, an erstwhile sporting lady, and Clara Forsythe, a Nebraska horse-trader and Gus’ old flame. McMurtry drew on the fictional characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 novel Don Quixote, in addition to the historical figures of Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving who broke the first cattle trail from Texas to Montana. In Lonesome Dove, the trail that Call follows to return Gus’ remains to Texas, traces the Goodnight-Loving Trail in reverse.

II. The Streets of Laredo (1993)

Streets of Laredo. Map by Charles Travis  Inset image: Henry Wellge (attributed) (1850-1917). Laredo, Texas in 1892. Perspective Map of the City of Laredo, Texas. The Gateway to and From Mexico, 1892. Toned lithograph, 19.6 x 33.1 in. Published by American Publishing Co., Milwaukee, Wis. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth. Wikicommons.

Set in the 1890s, the West Texas of the Streets of Laredo is slowly being girded by the “infrastructures of progress”: telegraph wires and railroad tracks– while Call though wealthy despite the failed Montana venture, lives destitute in a shed on Charles Goodnight’s J.A. Ranch, near the Palo Duo Canyon. McMurtry opens the novel in the Texas Panhandle, with Call meeting Brookshire, a representative of Colonel Terry—an eastern Railroad Baron in New York city—chasing his hat down the windy street of Amarillo in front of the train station.  Hired to hunt down Joey Garza,  a nineteen-year-old Mexican bandit who has been robbing mail trains with the aid of a German scope and rifle, Call assembles a ‘posse’  that includes Brookshire and Pea-Eye, the last of the Hat Creek crew. They pursue Garza to the borderlands West of the Pecos and into the Mexican provinces of Coahuila and Chihuahua.

III. Dead Man’s Walk (1995)

Texan Santa Fe Expedition of 1841-42. Map by Charles Travis. Source & Cartographic Inset: A. Ikin, Map of Texas, in ‘Texas, Its History, Typography, Agriculture, Commerce, and General Statistics’ (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1841). The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections, Gift of Jenkins Garrett.

Set in the 1840s, when John L. O’Sullivan’s flag of Manifest Destiny was unfurled and planted firmly by President James K. Polk in the soil of the Republic of Texas, Dead Man’s Walk introduces Gus and Call, as new teen-age recruits to the hard-scrabble Texas Rangers and junior members of a filibuster to capture Santa-Fe from Mexico.  A fictional retelling of the 1841 Texas Santa-Fe and 1842 Mier Expeditions  Dead Man’s Walk takes place prior to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and Cession of present-day New Mexico, Arizona and California territories to the United States. The novel’s title in Spanish, Jornada del Muerto, is the name Conquistadores who broke the Camino Real gave to their trail across the longitudinal desert basin of eastern New Mexico.  McMurtry remediates the Black-Bean Episode of the Mier Expedition which occurred in Soldado, Tamaulipas to El Paso. In addition, McMurtry describes the Sorrows, a place in the southwestern desert where white, black, indigenous and Mexican captives are traded and enslaved.

IV. Comanche Moon (1997)

Comanche Raiding Trails and Heat Map of Texan-Comanche Conflict 1825-1878. Map by Charles Travis. Raid Data Source: Sam Haynes, et. al. Borderlands: The Struggle for Texas, 1820-1879, Center for Greater Southwestern Studies, UTA Libraries, University of Texas, Arlington https://library.uta.edu/borderland/about; Raid Trails Source: Ralph Smith, “Indians in American-Mexican relations before the war of 1846.” Hispanic American Historical Review 43, no. 1 (1963): 34-64.

Comanche Moon spans the 1850s and 1860s in scope and focuses on interactions between Anglo-American Texans, migrant settlers from the East and Europe, and the indigenous Comanche, Kickapoo, and Kiowa people. Set in Austin, the novel relays the maturing of Gus and Call into Ranger captains, and their respective relations with Clara Forsythe, a shop-keeper’s daughter, and Maggie Tilton, a prostitute. It also introduces their compañero, Jake Spoon, and what will become the crew of the Hat Creek Cattle company: Joshua Deets, the African-American scout, the wrangler, Pea-Eye Parker, and Newt Dobbs, Maggie’s child and Call’s unrecognized son. Out of the Chronicles’ four novels, Comanche Moon showcases the spatial agency and technology of the horse culture of the Comanchería. McMurtry draws upon the historical and legendary figure of the War Chief Buffalo Hump (Comanche:  Potsʉnakwahipʉ  translated as  Buffalo Bull’s Back) leader of the Comanche Penateka band, who was born around 1800 and died in 1870. References to the Linville Raid of 1840, echo in McMurtry’s depiction of Buffalo Hump’s raid on Austin. In addition, the bandit Ahumado, based in Coahuila alludes to the Aztec-Mayan cultures of Mexico and serves as foil for Gus and Call as they rescue their Captain, Inish Scull from Ahumado’s cages and pit in the Sierra Perdida mountains.

Timeline

Sources:

Project funded in part by The Portal to Texas History Fellowship, University of North Texas Library.

Questions? Contact Charles Travis (charles.travis@uta.edu)