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Chapter 53
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
It takes Augustus half a day just to find Blue Duck’s tracks, since he rode straight through the stampede. But after that, the tracks go northwest in a line as straight as an arrow. Gus’s tracking skills are a bit rusty, but he believes Blue Duck will just head northwest of the Palo Duro Canyon to his favorite hideout. As Gus rides the country gets even emptier; although settlers, Rangers, and the Army have subdued most of the Comanches, enough roving bands remain to strike terror into the hearts of settlers. And without settlers to occupy and hold the land, it’s not hard for the Comanches to maintain their foothold.
Augustus overestimates his own abilities—and underestimates Blue Duck’s resourcefulness. This illustrates one of Gus’s character flaws—pride. And it allows the men to exemplify the dynamic that marks the territory they cross during the era. Well-armed and well-funded American soldiers and Rangers worked to clear the land of its Indigenous inhabitants to clear the way for white settlers, but the Indigenous nations didn’t give up their lands willingly or without a fight.
Themes
It’s late spring, the time of year when the buffalo herds used to move north, except there are barely any herds left to speak of. Augustus can remember when the buffalo were almost as thick as the mosquitoes. But now the plains are eerily empty and quiet. Not long after Augustus comes in sight of the Canadian River, he sees a strange spectacle indeed: an old man pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with buffalo bones. Augustus recognizes the man as Aus Frank, an odd store owner from Waco. He and Call once arrested Aus after he evidently went out of his mind, robbed the bank next door, and ran off. He quickly escaped the jail and fled, and Augustus had no idea what happened to him.
The nature of the west has changed drastically within Augustus’s lifetime thanks to the encroachment of white settlers and the work that he and other Texas Rangers did to clear the way. Aus’s borderline mental stability speaks to the harshness of life on the frontier, too: so many things could go wrong in so many ways, his story suggests, that any one person’s survival can start to feel like a miracle.
Themes
Riding up to Aus, Augustus strikes up a conversation. Aus was never much of a talker and his conversational skills have evidently suffered from his isolation. As he pushes his wheelbarrow back to the foot of a gigantic pyramid of buffalo bones—one of five along the banks of the river—and begins tossing bones onto it, Aus tells Augustus his story. He first went to the Pecos Mountains to trap beavers. Five years ago, for some reason he doesn’t mention, he and another trapper came to the Canadian River. Blue Duck and a band of Kiowa killed his friend and his dog, which they ate. The sun sets while Aus is talking, and he falls asleep in the middle of his story. After a while, Augustus sleeps, too, only to wake in the middle of the night to the unfamiliar sound of Aus chucking more bones onto his pyramids.
Again, the book comments on the disastrous effects that hunting and the fur trade had on the buffalo population—Aus Frank’s pyramids of bones recall several famous 19th-century photographs that mark the scale of the devastation. The most famous of these, taken in the early 1890s, shows a humanmade hill of bison skulls that’s clearly more than 20 feet tall. Aus Frank’s story illustrates the challenges and hardships of life on the frontier. And it suggests one of the reasons people were drawn to it: Aus clearly doesn’t fit in well with normal society, but he thrives on his own in these vast, empty spaces.
Themes
Augustus mounts his horse and bids Aus farewell, as the sun rises. It’s his favorite time of the day, but he feels melancholy and a bit foolish for riding off into such danger by himself, all for Lorena, whom Jake Spoon seduced and abandoned. But, then again, he was never very good at being sensible.
At the beginning of the drive, Augustus told Newt his worry that he might not survive the journey, given his advancing age. It’s hard for him to let go of the man he was when he was younger, but—typically—he refuses to let it keep him sad for long.
Themes
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