Dr. Charlie Travis is an Associate Professor of Geography and Geographical Information Systems in the Department of History and serves as a Fellow of UT Arlington’s Center for Greater Southwestern Studies. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Charlie is an editorial board member of Springer Nature Press’s Historical Geography and Geosciences series; Il Sileno Edizioni Associazione Scientifico’s Geographies of the Anthropocene series; and the journal Literary Geographies. His published books and edited volumes include the Routledge Handbook of Digital Environmental Humanities (2022), Historical Geography, GIScience and Text (2020), and Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS (2015) and Literary Landscapes: Geographies of Irish Stories, 1929-1948 (2009).
In The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (2010) McMurtry borrows tropes from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-1615), to depict the Southwestern travels and shapeshifting lives of Augustus ‘Gus’ McRae, a raconteur from Tennessee, and his stolid partner Woodrow Call, remarking the “crazy old knight and the peasant pragmatist” comprised “an essential pair,” and were “the ultimate source of Gus and Call.”1 Incorporating the scaffolding of the early modern, historical, and Victorian novel from Cervantes, Walter Scott and George Eliot, The Chronicles manifest as an epic tapestry on the closing of the “American West,” subtly embroidered with Gaelic, American and Indigenous folklore, and subtle threads of magical realism, all parsed through the cracked lenses of myth, fiction and history.
The Scottish-Gaelic etymology of McMurtry’s surname is “son of Muircheartach,” translated as “navigator” from the words muir (sea) and ceartach (ruler). In plotting Gus and Call’s many journeys across the “ocean” of the Great Plains and the arroyos and deserts of the Southwest, McMurtry’s storytelling echoes the ancient tropes of the Irish tána bó(cattle raid) sagas, -in particular the 8 BCE Táin Bó Cúalnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley). The epic medieval poem’s, “senses of place” are imparted by landscape and climate, and in The Chronicles, apocalyptic sunsets, raging rivers, the Llano Estacado, alkaline badlands, grasshopper swarms, dust, hail and lighting storms also manifest as characters.
McMurtry’s remediation of place re-drafts the blue print of the “Western,” sketched by Owen Wister in The Virginian (1902) and populates his saga with strong women, people of color, scouts, messianic filibuster captains, European immigrants, store, saloon and bordello keepers, pueblo dwellers, indigenous mystics, chiefs, villagers and legendary warriors, illiterate cow hands, Yale educated cattle barons, scalp-hunters, and pathological villains of all races, all leavened by cameo appearances from historical figures.
McMurtry’s literary representation invokes a Cervantine precedent that “does not disentangle the story from the history, but points its telescope at the ill-defined frontier itself.”2 “Deep mapping” borderscapes involves the act of balancing “sense of place” and its poesis with the grids of Euclidian, political and cartographic space. The phenomenological confluence between landscape, identity and sense of place is aptly described by the Czech author Milan Kundera: “Man and the world are bound together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and as the world changes, existence (in-der-Welt-sein) changes as well.”3 By illustrating how contingencies of place, period and identity coalesce and unfold across the indigenous and settler landscapes depicted in The Chronicles, McMurtry illustrates how Gus and Call’s identities phenomenologically shapeshift from frontiersmen, to brigands, rustlers or smugglers, and then metis and forgotten people, as they travel in place and time across the borderscapes of the “West.”4
The Chronicles
Recounting Gus and Call’s days as filibusters, Texas Rangers, cow-men and man-hunters The Chronicles in part depict the shifting raidscapes of the Southwest by incorporating fictionalized accounts of the freebooting 1841-1842 Texan-Santa Fe and Mier expeditions in Dead Man’s Walk (1995); the Texas Ranger-Comanche Wars during the 1850’s and ‘60s in Comanche Moon (1997); Goodnight and Loving’s 1866 pioneering cattle drive in Lonesome Dove (1985) and the rise of the Railroad Barons in the 1880s-‘90s in Streets of Laredo (1993).
Dead Man’s Walk introduces Gus and Call as teen-age Ranger recruits enlisted in a Republic of Texas filibuster raid to capture Santa Fe from Mexico. A fictional conflation of the 1841 Texas Santa-Fe and 1842 Mier Expeditions, the novel takes place prior to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and Cession of present-day New Mexico, Arizona and California to the United States. After leaving Austin, expedition climbs on to the Llano Estacado. McMurtry writes:
“Call had a sense of trespass, as he rode. He felt that he was in a country that wasn’t his. He didn’t know where Texas stopped and New Mexico began, but it wasn’t the Texans or the New Mexicans whose country he was riding through: it was the Comanches he trespassed on.”5
Gus and Call’s borderscape personalities manifest as “ironic” frontiersmen, acting as “tough, resourceful guardian [s] of the imperium, ready to confront the dangers from across the border.”6 Their campaign is dogged by Buffalo Hump, (Potsʉnakwahipʉ, -Comanche for Buffalo Bull’s Back) the historical and legendary war chief of the Penateka band.7 As casualties mount, members of the expedition begin to dwindle, desert, and die. Reaching Santa-Fe, they are captured by the Mexican Army and forced to walk 100-mile southwards to a leper colony in El Paso, along the Jornada del Muerto. Named by Conquistadores that broke the Camino Real trail across the longitudinal desert basin of eastern Nuevo Mexico, the appellation imparts a desolate “sense of place.” Trudging along the route,
“Gus had the conviction they were all going to die. As far as he could see -ahead, behind, or to the side-there was nothing. Just sky and sand. The dead man’s walk was a hell of emptiness.”8
When the prisoners reach El Paso, McMurtry restages the 1843 Black Bean Death Lottery that condemned Texan prisoners to death after the Battle of Ciudad Mier. Gus and Call draw white beans, avoid the firing squad, and are recruited by a Scottish noblewoman suffering leprosy to escort her to the port of Galveston.
Borderscapes depicted in Comanche Moon – in Patricia Limerick’s words- comprise “many complicated environments occupied by natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge.”9 Taking place during the 1850s and ‘60s as Anglo-American settlements, Mexican villages and indigenous territories encroach on each other, Gus and Call though Ranger captains and more seasoned frontiersmen, are unable to prevent a Comanchería warrior band raid on Austin, the capital of Texas. Buffalo Hump reprises his role as the embodiment of Comanche horse culture whose raids commence near the Arkansas River and descend
“. . . the old-trail, down into Mexico, and bring back captives, children they could use as slaves, or sell to the half-breed traders, in the trading place called the Sorrows, near the dripping springs where travelers on the llano stopped to rest and water their animals.”10
Prior to the independence of Mexico, Anglo-American settlement was encouraged in the province of Tejas y Coahuila by New Spain as a means to create a human buffer zone between its provinces and indigenous raids, despite the fact that “in the Southwest, the Comanches and Utes became regional suppliers of slaves to other Indians as well as to the Spaniards, Mexican and Americans.”11 After Mexican independence in 1821, raids had an “enormous impact south of the Rio Grande, turning much of northern into an exploited and fragmented raiding hinterland. One observer wrote that “scarcely has a hacienda or rancho on the frontier been unvisited, where the people have been killed or captured.”12 Raids supplied a enslaved labor pool creating “the force that allowed Comanches and Kiowas to elevate their livestock trade into the largest industry in the midcontinent.”13 Ironically, after Texas’ annexation as a slave state in 1845 by the United States, it was argued that the destruction of Indigenous raids in addition to pre-emptive and counter raids by Rangers and the U.S. Army “proved critical during the Mexican-American War,” with the “Comanches and Kiowas inadvertently” paving “the United States’ takeover of the Southwest.”14 In the 1850s, Buffalo Hump watches with disgust as settlers “squirming like maggots up the rivers and onto the comanchería,” infest the “home of the people,” and longs for:
“. . . a great raid as there had been in past [when he] had raided all the way to the Great Water, coming back with so many horses that they filled the plains like buffalo. The great raids had scared the Texans so badly that they were eager for councils and treaties.”15
In Comanche Moon, Indigenous peoples, Mexican villagers and Texas settlers inhabiting distinct but overlapping “landscapes of fear” each shaped by respective lifeworld experiences of violent geographical encroachment across the borderscapes of their perceived territories.16
The titular novel of The Chronicles finds Gus and Call in the 1870s operating the Hat Creek Cattle Company in a “little fart of a town” on the banks of the Rio Grande in south Texas.17 Pea-Eye, the African-American scout Deets, Newt, and their Mexican cook, Bol, comprise their crew. An accidental “sporting girl,” Lorena Wood, and the prodigal ranger Jake Spoon, on the run after shooting an Arkansas dentist, round out the primary cast. The unexpected return of their ill-fated compañero, spurs a quixotic quest to drive the first cattle herd to Montana – with Call wanting to see the unspoiled territory before “the bankers and lawyers” get it, while providing Gus the opportunity to rekindle a romance with Clara -wife of Bob Allen, a horse trader near Ogallala, Nebraska.18 The Rio Grande watershed was the region where the “early range cattle industry of the West,” emerged possessing “antecedents in the pastoral activities of Spanish America and, more remotely, in the meseta of Spain,” the high Castilian plateau of La Mancha, where Cervantes set Don Quixote.19 Indeed the “rustling” practices of the Hat Creek crew echo practices that sparked a war in the Gaelic raiding epic, the Táin:
Every now and then, about sundown, the Captain and Augustus and Pea and Deets would strap on guns and ride off into darkness, into Mexico, to return about sunup with thirty or forty horses or perhaps a hundred skinny cattle. It was the way the stock business seemed to work along the border, the Mexican ranchers raiding north while the Texans raided south. Some of the skinny cattle spent their lives being chased back and forth across the Rio Grande.20
In Lonesome Dove, Gus and Call shapeshift into brigands, rustlers and smugglers who seem “at odds with the rest of the population, partly because the law of the state was not effectively enforced in remote regions.”21 This is illustrated by Gus’ wry observation about the herd they are driving to Montana: “All these cattle and nine-tenths of the horses is stolen, and yet we was once respected lawmen.”22
As a bitter coda after the failure of the Montana ranch and deaths of Gus, Deets and Newt, Streets of Laredo finds Call living in a shed on Charles Goodnight’s J.A. Ranch, near the Palo Duo Canyon. In an emerging industrial Texas, spiderwebbed with rail-road tracks and telegraph lines, Call along with Pea-Eye -married to Lorena, with children in Quitaque- inhabits the borderscape personality of “the forgotten people of the periphery.”23 Hired by an eastern Railroad Baron to hunt down Joey Garza, a teenage bandit from Ojinaga, Mexico robbing mail trains, Call enlists Pea-Eye, and the legendary Kickapoo tracker “Famous Shoes” in his posse. Ranging by railroad and horseback from the Panhandle to the thriving border town of Laredo, into Mexico and west of the Pecos River the manhunt takes us to Crow Town in the New Mexico sandhills where gun-fighter John Wesley Hardin -flaunting the borderscape personality of the brigand– holds consumptive court. Surrounded by rotting buffalo hides, fleas and carrion birds, Crow Town possesses a liminal and bleak “sense of place” at the end of a degenerate gambling trail leading from Dodge City, Silver City, Deadwood and Tombstone. However, the heart of Streets of Laredo concerns the futility of Maria -Joey’s mother- attempts to save him (wounded by Pea-Eye, Garza is killed by Ojinaga’s butcher) and Lorena’s trek to return Pea-Eye from the perils of the outlaw hunt back to the bosom of his family and children in Quitaque, while rescuing the severely injured Call in the process.
Conclusion
In Lonesome Dove, the Montana cattle-drive trail parallels “the rise of Plains Indian horse cultures along [an] orientation of grasslands, which meant that the northward spreading frontier crossed several climatic belts.”24 In this landscape, the pair of ex-Rangers shapeshift into the “cultural-hybrid” borderscape personalities of the metis,25 confirmed by Gus’ view that “they were people of the horse, not of the town; in that they were more like the Comanches than Call would ever have admitted.”26 By casting Gus and Call as lapsed W.A.S.P. American reincarnations of the Cervantine Errant Knight and Sancho Panza, McMurtry illustrates how territories inhabited by the Nahual, Apache, Pueblo, Kiowa, Comanche and other indigenous peoples transformed into a palimpsestic “meeting . . . and fusing place” for “two streams of European civilization, one coming from the south, and the other from the north.”27 However, Indigenous, Texan, American and Mexican raids across Southwestern borderscapes depicted in The Chronicles reinforce the notion that “all borders that have ever been built have been changed. No border will stay the same. That is perhaps not a popular message for many politicians, yet a historical given.”28
Acknowledgements
Thanks for research fellowships from UTA’s Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the University of North Texas Library’s Portal to Texas History. Also thanks to Professor Andy Milson for feedback on the maps in this article. Explore Larry McMurtry’s Literary Geographies online at: <https://websites.uta.edu/travisc/research/larry-mcmurtrys-literary-geography/>
Bibliography
1 McMurtry, L., Books: A Memoir, (N.Y. Simon & Schuster, 2008):10.
2 Wardropper, B. W. “ ‘Don Quixote’: Story or History?’ Modern Philology 63:1 (1965) 1-11. Ref: 5.
3 Kundera, M. The Art of the Novel. (London: Faber and Faber, 1988): 35.
4 Anderson, M., 2010. Researching European frontiers. Journal of borderlands studies, 25(3-4): 232-250.
5 McMurtry, L., The Lonesome Dove Chronicles, E-Book (Riverside: Simon & Schuster, 2010): 217.
6 Anderson, 234.
7 Schilz, J.L.D., “Buffalo Hump,” Handbook of Texas Online,
<https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/buffalo-hump.>
8 McMurtry, The Lonesome Dove Chronicles, 317.
9 Limerick, P.N. 1987. Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York): 26.
10 Ibid, 386.
11 Reséndez, Andrés, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Harper Collins, 2016): 7. ; Gwynne, S.C., Empire of the summer moon: Quanah Parker and the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history (Simon and Schuster, 2010).
12 Hämäläinen, P., The rise and fall of Plains Indian horse cultures. The Journal of American History, 90: 3 (2003), 833-862. Ref. 843.
13 Ibid, 843.
14 Ibid.
15 McMurtry, The Lonesome Dove Chronicles, 438; 595.
16 Tuan, Y.F., Landscapes of Fear (London: Basil Blackwell, 1979): 7.; Buttimer, A. “Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66, no. 2 (1976): 277-292.
17 Ibid., 1929.
18 In McMurtry’s text, it is Augustus who wants to take a look at the frontier ‘before the bankers and lawyers get it’ (LDC, 1205). In William D. Wittliff’s 1989 teleplay for the Lonesome Dove CBS-TV miniseries, it is Call, played by Texas actor Tommy Lee Jones, who recites this line.
19 Kollmorgan, W.M., The Woodman’s Assaults on the Domain of the Cattleman, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 59:2 (1969), 215-238. Ref. 216-217.
20 McMurtry, The Lonesome Dove Chronicles, 1140.
21 Anderson, 235.
22 McMurtry, The Lonesome Dove Chronicles, 1348.
23 Anderson, 235.
24 Hämäläinen, The rise and fall of Plains Indian horse cultures, 835.
25 Anderson, 235.
26 McMurtry, The Lonesome Dove Chronicles, 1203.
27 Hämäläinen, P., and Truett, S. “On borderlands.” The Journal of American History, 98, no. 2 (2011): 338-361. Ref. 341.
28 Henk van Houtum and Mark Eker, “Redesigning Borderlands: Using the Janus-Face of Borders as a Resource,” in (Eds.) Brambilla, C., Laine, J. and Bocchi, G., Borderscaping: Imaginations and practices of border making (Routledge Press 201): 43.
Image credit: Cover tile design by Christopher Conway, utilizing an unrestricted photograph from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog (photograph by John Vachon [1914-1975], LC USF34-008805-D).
