We Killed the Right Animal

IN THE CRUEL—and, honestly, somewhat funny—way it tends to happen for artists, Larry McMurtry was heaped with a fresh wave of copious praise just at the point when he could no longer appreciate it—after he had died, in 2021, at the age of 84. And through the subsequent machinations of internet-age virality that the entertainment industry can only dream of understanding, McMurtry’s 800-page magnum opus, Lonesome Dove, has once again become a book du jour, just like it was when it was first released in 1985 and won the Pulitzer Prize. McMurtry may not be here to bask in the phenomenon, but his publisher and estate certainly are; in February, it was announced that a new TV or film project was in the works based on the larger Lonesome Dove series.

Watercooler moments in the book world are increasingly rare, and since this one promised horseback adventures, my friends and I recently decided to join the moment and commit to Lonesome Dove as the latest entry in our semiregular book club. The assignment was no small task for a group of thirtysomethings, some of them with young children, and all in the precarious state of fighting against potent attention-economy distractions. I personally hadn’t managed to read a book this long since college. But we all found ourselves spellbound by McMurtry’s vivid vision of a post–Civil War cattle drive, undertaken by Texas cowboys in the twilight of the Wild West. Every one of us finished the book with dirt-covered enthusiasm. The virality, as it often is, was well earned.

Over bowls of chili, our book club met outside on a cold night in Los Angeles—the far west end of the country’s trail, really—and fell for a familiar trap: we romanticized the hell out of Lonesome Dove. It’s difficult not to. There’s a reason people have named their kids after Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae, the lovably toxic former Texas Ranger at the center of the book, along with his lovably even-more-toxic longtime compatriot, Captain Woodrow F. Call. The many semiconnected characters of the full saga, who circle each other across a meandering path through the middle of the country, luxuriate in the book’s space.

McMurtry has talked about these characters as if they were so organic that he had no control of them—as if he were on the edge of his seat to find out what they did, the same as we were. In this way, the book’s naturalistic quality makes it a ready foil to Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish depiction of roughly the same time and place in Blood Meridian, which was also released in 1985. Lonesome Dove is like the relief of waking from a bad dream; there are horrors in McMurtry’s world too, but at least there’s also love and humor and heroism. Despite copious death, it feels eminently livable.

So, like the unruly remuda of Lonesome Dove fans of the last 40 years, I grew attached to McMurtry’s presentation of the 1870s. I joined the long lineage of starry-eyed readers, some of whom have been drawn by the beauty of our past’s open landscape, others by the opportunity and adventure that such a landscape offers. I also joined the lineage of readers McMurtry himself probably would have rolled his eyes at.

“The book is permeated with criticism of the West from start to finish,” McMurtry said in a 2010 oral history of Lonesome Dove published in Texas Monthly.

Call’s violence, for example. But people are nostalgic for the Old West, even though it was actually a terrible culture. Not nice. Exterminated the Indians. Ruined the landscape. By 1884 the plains were already overgrazed. We killed the right animal, the buffalo, and brought in the wrong animal, wetland cattle. And it didn’t work. The cattle business was never a good business. Thousands went broke.

Lonesome Dove is indeed a crushingly brutal book—the type of story in which bad things happen to people not because of narrative logic but because, in 1870s Texas, sometimes lightning just strikes you. And when it does, there’s no hospital nearby, no treatment to dole out. There’s little sentimentality to be offered either. A shallow grave and some quick words are the most you’ll get, if those around you have the time to spare.

McMurtry’s insistence that his book is meant to be a critique rather than a glorification of the Old West aligns him with a particular school of exasperated nonfiction writers and scholars: those who routinely publish articles, year after year, reminding doom-stricken readers that it is actually, currently, the best time to be alive on this planet. That determination can be made when taking into account factors like infant mortality rate, average lifespan, medical innovations, and so on. Want to live without hunger? Want an education? Want to die of old age? You’ve never had a better shot than right now.

But the reason some version of this article has to be written every year is because it rarely feels like you’re among the luckiest people to exist, especially when dips in quality of life call into question the general upward trend. Discussing Lonesome Dove in my friend’s backyard, we were just a short distance away from Altadena, where an entire community had recently been wiped from the earth by wildfires. The cost of living has been doing laps around inflation-adjusted income, plummeting 401(k) values have become a straight-up meme, and the long-term ramifications of climate change are starting to rear up in frighteningly tangible ways. It’s a difficult period to be told that this is “the best time to be alive.”

What I can accept, though, is McMurtry’s broad point that, yeah, okay, at least from a misery-index standpoint, I’m probably fortunate not to have been born in the 1800s. I can nitpick the ebbs and flows of year-to-year quality of life growth, but I cannot deny that I’m much less likely to be killed by a water moccasin than your average 19th-century cowboy was.

Still, I remain a little jealous of the dramatic lives of my Lonesome Dove friends. It’s a contradictory pang of human nature that McMurtry was clearly aware of, even if he didn’t like to admit it. The epigraph he chose for the book is about this wistful hypernostalgia: “Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside,” the quote from the early 20th-century academic T. K. Whipple reads in part. “We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

Eventually, people are destined to look back upon our lives in the 2020s and see beautiful savages of their own. Some will wonder if they would have been happier or more fulfilled in our simpler world—and, given the way things are trending, they might very well be right. But all the while, they’ll be reminded of the plain truth of the matter—that it’s getting better all the time.