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Chapter 101
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lonesome Dove, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Mythology
Family
Luck, Fate, and Chance
The Good Life
The Meaning of Masculinity
Feminine Strength
Summary
Analysis
The farther Call travels with Gus’s body, the greater his fame grows until he finally decides to cut west into Colorado to avoid the main cattle drive routes through Kansas. He stops in Denver to send a telegram to Wilbarger’s family with news of that man’s death the previous year. Near the Purgatoire River, Charles Goodnight, famed cowboy and rancher, rides into Call’s camp to pay his respects to Gus, and to tell Call that Blue Duck has finally been captured. A lucky shot by a deputy sheriff killed his horse under him as he was fleeing after massacring a bunch of settlers. He’s due to hang in Santa Rosa, New Mexico within the week.
The attention the notoriously private Call receives on his quest to bury Gus in Texas suggests that the request may have been at least partially a wry joke Gus played on his best friend. In any case, it forces Call to confront again and again the foolishness of his actions. But typically, instead of paying heed to the questions life (and people like Clara) want him to consider, he instead avoids the question altogether. At least as much as he can. And luckily, this brings him news of Blue Duck’s impending execution. Just as Gus once predicted to July, fate catches up with even the most vicious outlaws in the end.
Themes
Call rushes to Santa Rosa, where it seems everyone in the territory has come to watch the outlaw—whose fearsome reputation has reached supernatural proportions—meet his fate. Call visits Blue Duck in Santa Rosa’s jail. Blue Duck has heard about Gus’s death and Call’s mission. In their brief conversation, he makes it clear that he has nothing but contempt for Gus and Call and the law they once represented.
The way the locals fear Blue Duck suggests the way that some of the myths and legends of the American West were born—the actions of people who may have been extraordinary but were nevertheless human can be easily blown out of proportion in the retelling.
Themes
On the day of the hanging, Blue Duck throws himself through the third story window of the courthouse rather than hang. He drags the deputy who caught him along. Blue Duck dies on impact, and the deputy soon after. Call hightails it out of town as quickly as he can, intent on getting away from people again.
Blue Duck’s lack of remorse speaks to his evil nature. Unfortunately, it plays to and draws upon racist stereotypes that painted Indigenous people as bloodthirsty savages. This kind of language and imagery helped to license the oppression and murder of countless Indigenous peoples throughout the period. Blue Duck shows the book’s complicated relationship with American mythology: it critiques the romanticization of the American West while simultaneously capitalizing on those tropes at key moments, like this one.
Themes
On the dry plains of New Mexico, four Indigenous riders surprise Call. They shoot him in the side. It’s a minor wound, but the gunshot frightens the mule, who crashes and destroys the buggy in his headlong flight. Call brought Augustus’s Hat Creek Cattle Company sign with him, and now he fashions it into a sledge that he hitches to the mule to carry Gus’s remains the rest of the way. When the mule dies, Call lashes the sledge to the horse and keeps going. He wishes he’d kept the Hell Bitch and given Newt his worthless name instead of the valuable animal.
The brief encounter with the Indigenous riders serves to add some danger to Call’s otherwise uneventful journey south. Because it recalls in some ways the attack that led to Gus’s death, the book also portrays it as disruptive and threatening, yet again painting the Indigenous people—who were being forced off their land, among other oppressions—as faceless and nameless adversaries against whom men like Call can show their worth. Again, while the book criticizes such romanticization of a brutal and terrible chapter of American history, it can’t always escape the pull of the very myths it criticizes.
Themes
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Eventually, Call reaches Clara’s Orchard and buries Gus’s body. Then he puts up the last splintery remnant of the sign—which says “Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium”—as a marker. He quickly realizes that it will confuse any travelers passing by and that one, annoyed to find no livery stable there, will likely smash it. He tries to carve Gus’s name in—to make it clear that it’s a grave marker—but the wood is too rotten. All he can manage are the initials A. M.
Call set out from Texas with his best friend and his (unacknowledged) son at his side, accompanied by 2,600 cattle. He returns to Texas a little more than a year later with nothing to show for it. The sign reinforces his sense of loss and regret. Of all the things he once had—companions, a home, a purpose—there’s nothing meaningful left. His quest has merely brought him home again, yet instead of a triumphant return, he comes back in utter defeat.
Themes
Call plans to stop in San Antonio to have a doctor tend his gunshot wound, but he changes his mind at the last minute and turns south, toward the border. The first thing he hears as he rides into Lonesome Dove at sunset is the sound of Bolivar whacking the dinner bell with his crowbar. The old cook went home to his family but came back to the old place after finding his daughters married and his wife just as bitter and hateful as he had remembered. He’s been eking out a living sharpening knives. Tears of relief fill his eyes at the sight of the Captain.
At first, it seems like nothing has changed—Bolivar is still ringing the dinner bell as if he’s calling the Hat Creek Company to dinner, and as if Call could walk into the house and find time unwound, with Gus and Deets still among the living. But that’s not how things work. Bolivar returned to Mexico to find his home and his family irrevocably changed. He lost his chance to be with them many years ago. Likewise, Call returns home with his chance at a family already ruined. The only thing these two lonely men have is each other.
Themes
As Call stands on the porch and drinks the coffee Bolivar made him, he realizes that the Dry Bean Saloon is gone. He walks into town to investigate and is surprised when a one-legged man comes hobbling toward him out of the dark. Initially, he thinks it’s Gus, but it turns out to be Dillard Brawley, the town’s one-legged barber. He tells Call that after the drive—and Lorena—left, Xavier locked himself in Lorena’s room for a month, then burned the Dry Bean—and himself—to ashes.
But of course, things have changed. Xavier Wanz is dead, a victim of his hopeless love for Lorena. Closing on this bleak note, the book points toward the impermanence of life—Xavier, Sean, Swift Bill Spettle, Jake, Deets, and Gus are dead—and its unpredictability. Although Xavier threatened to do exactly what he did, Lorena didn’t believe him, and nothing suggested to readers that he would follow through on it, either. Readers will never know what happens to Newt all the way up in Montana, or whether Lorena will succumb to her grief or get over it in the end. All that Call tried to build is gone, and there’s nothing—no grand vision or overarching mission—left to replace it. Drained of its romance, the life of the cowboy seems like a bleak stretch of suffering. Human effort, meanwhile, seems inadequate to meet the challenges of life, suggesting the wisdom of Gus’s approach of finding joy wherever one can in life.
Themes
