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Chapter 41
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
With both their cook and their wagon gone, Call and Augustus decide to ride into San Antonio to see if they can find replacements. The drama puts Call in a blue mood—it seems like an awful lot of bad luck to be falling so early in the trip. As they ride toward town, Augustus notes the increasing size of the settlements and mourns the fact that the Rangers cleared out all the Indigenous people and Mexican bandits just so that civilization could get a stranglehold on the country.
Call won’t—or can’t—back down from a mission or a challenge, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have doubts. And things certainly seem to be going poorly at the moment, although as Gus points out elsewhere, luck is always changing. As they ride into town, the friends reflect on the legacy they’ve left. Through Gus, the book criticizes the project of American expansion, both for displacing and decimating the Indigenous population and for spending the lives of mostly poor settlers to open up a frontier subsequently abused by wealthy costal elites for their own profit.
Themes
After buying a new wagon—and two fresh mules—from a livery stable, Call and Augustus head into town for a drink, stopping at a saloon they used to visit regularly in their Rangering days. There, Gus quickly gets into an altercation with a young and disrespectful bartender who doesn’t recognize him or Call as the heroes they once were. When Gus performs a trick shot to prove his point, the bar’s owner comes rushing down the stairs and threatens Gus and Call with arrest for their actions. Unfortunately for him, the sheriff—who happens to be passing by at that moment—is another former Ranger who not only recognizes but is friends with Call and Augustus.
Usually, Gus is the more laid back of the friends, but in this case, he takes offense at the bartender’s inability to show him the proper recognition and respect. Just a few chapters earlier he mentioned to Newt his fear that he might not survive the drive, because he’s getting older and less spry. In a way, the drive offers both Call and Gus one last opportunity to make immortal names for themselves. Call can’t acknowledge that to himself or anyone else, but here Gus’s actions hint that he knows his time to make a mark on the world becomes shorter as he ages.
Themes
The sheriff refuses to take any action against them, and the bar owner goes scurrying back up the stairs in frustration, leaving Call, Augustus, and the sheriff to reminisce about the old days. They enjoy this, but the sheriff looks mighty sad when it’s time to leave, as if arresting drunks doesn’t fulfill him like Rangering did. Augustus feels it too, the sense of irrelevance. One day, he speculates aloud to Call, the settlers will round up all the old Rangers and put them on a reservation just like they did to the Indigenous people. Call thinks this talk is nonsense.
Like Gus and Call, the sheriff behaves as if something went missing in his life when he stopped being a Ranger. The adventure and promise of the early days of the frontier evaporate as American civilization becomes more entrenched, and neither these three men nor the book itself seem to think that’s a particularly good outcome. Besides, Gus observes, the machine of progress will come for anyone and anything society deems irrelevant—and that might include them, someday, too. His observation is particularly prophetic and poignant given that the book is set in the late 1870s and the very waning days of the great cattle drives that typify the west in the American imagination.
Themes
