The huge cast of characters reminded me a bit of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City”, although obviously none of them are gay, or if they are they certainly aren’t mentioning it. Jerome Lynch, KC, will be pleased that there are also a couple of lynchings. Google reckons it’s 1,370 I think McMurtry is taking into account all the detours required to actually get there, in the case of the cook and 2 pigs, on foot.Įven aside from Indian attacks the cowboys have to, inter alia, deal with sandstorms, grizzly bears, venomous river snakes, waterless 80 mile deserts, lightning, grasshopper storms, etc, throughout each trying to keep 2,600 cattle together and all going in the right direction.

The author repeatedly refers to this as being 3,000 miles but as Dr. The main characters are Gus and Captain Call, two retired Texas Rangers who embark on the rather eccentric task of taking the first ever cattle drive up to Montana on the Canadian border. The Lonesome Dove of the title is a small settlement on the Rio Grande, the border between Texas and Mexico, at an unspecified date but probably about 1880. In 1989 it became a television mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. The book was a great success and won the Pulitzer Prize. It was never made and in 1983 McMurtry bought the rights back and turned it into an 843 page novel. “Lonesome Dove” started out as a screenplay written by him and Bogdanovich in 1971 and intended to star Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and John Wayne. His adapted screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain” won him an Oscar. Larry McMurtry, who died last year, wrote a number of novels that were made into very successful films, including “Terms of Endearment”, “Hud” and Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show”.

Lonesome dove novel