Revisiting Lonesome Dove

I've been watching movies that paint a different portrait of the American West than I was taught in school. 

"Lonesome Dove" on Prime Video tells the tale of two aging Texas Rangers that drive some cattle to Montana. Cattle drives were mighty popular when I was a kid. "Rawhide" featured a young Clint Eastwood as cattle drover Rowdy Yates. "Red River" was a pretty good John Wayne movie about a cattle drive. I did my early growing up in Colorado where the stockyards employed many and the annual Stock Show was basically a promo for Eat More Beef.

I did not see "Lonesome Dove" when it was first aired in 1989. I didn't need another western as I'd seen them all. I was mistaken. "Lonesome Dove" is an eye-opener. Accurate about the violence that was the American West. The drovers die in terrible ways: death by water moccasins, death by hanging, death by Indians (of course), death by stupidity. Fine acting by Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and Diane Lane. 

It was based on Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name. The late Texas author was known for vivid portrayals of the hard life faced by cowboys, Indians, women, and lawmen. I haven't read any of his books which I chalk up to ignorance. Most mainstream novels of the West are formulaic. That suited me fine when I was eight. I grew up and needed to know the real story.

Last night I watched "The Revenant" on commercial TV. The ads were annoying but I stuck with it. Brutal in its honesty of what it must have been like in the fur-trading days of the 1800s. Hugh Glass is leading a trapping expedition and is attacked by a grizzly. The almost-dead Glass is abandoned by his colleagues who want to flee an Arickaree war party. Glass doesn't die. He wants revenge and he eventually gets it as he struggles to get back to "civilization," which is not very civilized, where male Indians get hanged and females get raped. The setting is Wyoming and Montana and the scenery is beautiful. Bad things can happen in beautiful places.

Realistic westerns appeared before "Lonesome Dove," mostly in feature films. "The Wild Bunch," "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Little Big Man," and "The Horse Soldiers," among others. Many came out of the ferment of the 1960s and '70s and may have been meant to reflect the nightly horror show from Vietnam. The Air Cav cowboys flew in on choppers and the setting was jungle instead of wide-open spaces. But we got the picture.

HBO brought us westerns that were more like gangster films, "Deadwood" and "Hell on Wheels" to name two. Deadwood's founding year of 1876 featured at least one murder a day. There would be hell to pay if Deadwood in 2020 had 365 murders. Deadwood's godfather was diabolical dance hall proprietor Al Swearengen. He liked to feed the pigs.

"Hell on Wheels" portrayed life in end-of-track towns along the UP line in the 1860s. People were shot regularly and there was evil afoot in the many bars and brothels that were the main features of these towns (Cheyenne was one). The "Hell on Wheels" burg of Benton 11 miles east of Rawlins consisted of 25 saloons, five dance halls and a place called "The Big Tent" where fornication went on in one part of the tent and, in the other, physicians treated diseases spawned on the premises. Benton's heyday was in the summer of '68 and is now officially a ghost town. 

Am I shocked that humans behaved like humans in the days of my great great grandparents? No, that's history. We all need to know that human misdeeds were not always chronicled in our fourth grade history books. In fact, the texts were whitewashed to tell a sanitized version of history. We need to know the details so we don't repeat them. We will, of course because that's what people do. The hope is that in the future we will be more like the space voyagers of "Star Trek" and its Prime Directive than the bastards who slaughtered Natives at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. Vietnam, too, and Iraq. Maybe we will learn. Maybe not. At least we will have somethings to guide us other than tired myths.

Many fine history-based books and poems have been written. We'll discuss those in a future post.