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Chapter 26
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
July, Elmira, and Joe live in a little, dirt-floored cabin outside of town. When July gets home, Joe has already milked their cow and Ellie has made dinner. She’s sitting in the sleeping loft with her feet dangling down into the cabin, and she doesn’t come down to eat with them. Most nights—most of the time, in fact—she stays up in the loft with her feet dangling. It bothers July because it feels so unconventional, but he doesn’t say anything about it. July is a man of such regular habits a person could set a watch by him. This irritates Ellie. She finds him boring and tedious.
Ellie’s defiance of July’s expectations of wifely behavior suggests her independence. She doesn’t feel the need to please July or anyone else but herself. But this moment also speaks to July’s soft and lackadaisical approach to life. He doesn’t like what’s happening but remains unwilling to put any effort into changing it—even in the form of just asking Ellie to sit at the table. He seems to possess Call’s meticulousness without any of his drive.
Themes
Elmira used to be a sex worker in Kansas, where the clientele consisted of gamblers (including Jake Spoon, whom she’d recognized in town) and buffalo hunters. She’d retired after a frightening encounter with one buffalo hunter and after the man she loved, a gambler named Dee Boot, decided to leave Kansas. She wanted to go with Dee, but he urged her to “go respectable.” He gave her some money to get to Missouri and helped her cook up a story about a husband who died of smallpox. When she realized she was pregnant, she panicked and seduced the first man she could: July. Now, she regrets both letting Dee go and marrying July, even though she knows that gentle, predictable sheriff will never use her as badly as the buffalo hunters did.
Ellie’s backstory highlights the dangers of being a sex worker—especially on the frontier, with its social outcasts and dangerous men. Buffalo hunters in the book become a sort of shorthand for the dirtiest, least civilized and most hardened frontiersmen. Notably, Ellie doesn’t seem ashamed of the work and doesn’t seem to care much about respectability, suggesting how much more fluid social norms were on the frontier. And readers should note how enamored she still is of Dee, even though he seems to have abandoned her.
Themes
After supper, July says that he will probably start after Jake in the morning. Elmira doesn’t like the fact that this is Peach’s idea—she feels that she should be the only one bossing her own husband around—but suddenly she sees it as a way around her problems. If July is gone for a month, maybe she can slip away and head north, after Dee. Maybe July will die on the trip. It’s dangerous, and Jake is a good shot. Maybe it’s the ticket to her freedom. So, she changes her tune, encouraging him to go and to take little Joe, who she says needs to learn something about the world.
Elmira can find no contentment in her life as it is, even though there are benefits to July (he’s dependable, unlike Dee; he’s kind and gentle, unlike the buffalo hunters). She’s not wrong in her assessment that he’s no match for Jake and that fate might take care of this unlikeable situation for her. But she’s not content to wait. Instead, she’s driven by a compulsion to return to the man she truly loves, no matter the costs.
Themes
