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Chapter 67
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
Jake doesn’t feel like he has much of a choice about joining the Suggs brothers: Dan has heard gossip about how July Johnson and a little girl got the better of Hutto and Jim. Still, he regrets his situation. Dan, Ed, and Roy are the meanest, roughest men he has ever encountered. They talk about slaughtering settlers as casually as a person might pick fleas off a dog. Dan’s plan—to trail a cattle drive to within a few miles of Dodge City, kill the cowboys, take possession of the herd, and sell it off—strikes Jake as dangerous. He decides his best hope is to lay low until they reach Dodge City, then try to slip away. He feels deeply sorry for himself about his current situation.
Jake protests to himself—and to readers—that he doesn’t have a choice about joining the Suggses. But readers know by now that the book always thinks that people have a choice, even if they don’t choose to exercise it. And readers have seen other characters make plenty of difficult choices (to stay at home or to go in search of better things; to overcome trauma and suffering rather than quit; to make a life in difficult circumstances). Jake wants to make excuses for poor choices he makes out of selfishness and fear, even if he knows they’re wrong.
Themes
Outside a general store on the banks of the Red River, they encounter a group of “nesters”—settlers—heading west from Missouri. One of them, a beautiful young woman sitting on the seat of a wagon, catches Jake’s eye, and he saunters across the street to introduce himself. The girl is younger than he expected, but also more beautiful. And she’s shy. She whispers that her name is Lou just before her husband emerges from behind the wagon and strikes Jake with the butt of his shotgun. Before the man can strike him a second time, Jake shoots him twice.
The Suggs gang exemplifies some of the most terrifying forms of outlawry and brutal violence the rough-and-tumble American frontier had to offer—they are a counterpoint to Blue Duck’s gang, and they show that violence and terror aren’t the exclusive purview of one group or race. Jake thinks he’s better than them, but this episode with Lou, where he effortlessly (and thoughtlessly) kills a man for trying to stop him from flirting with a woman suggests that, at heart, Jake might not be as different as he wants to believe. From the perspective of the plot, too, this random violence forces Jake’s hand. Now indisputably an outlaw, he must go on the run.
Themes
As Jake, the Suggs brothers, and Frog Lip mount their horses to escape the forming mob, Lou gives Jake an enigmatic smile. Jake is irked. Yet again, he’s the victim of another unlucky accidental killing. It was only self-defense, but he doubts the law will see it that way, especially given the outlaw company he’s riding with. He starts to feel sorry for himself. All he wants is a clean saloon to gamble in, a pretty sex worker to sleep with, and some whiskey to drink. He wonders why that’s too much to ask for in life.
The book asked readers to follow Gus’s and Call’s example in giving Jake the benefit of the doubt for the shooting of the Fort Smith mayor. Even if Jake shouldn’t have gone for a gun, the chances that the situation would end as it did—with a man across the street dead—were so astronomically slim. Jake has no such benefit here. He's shot a man at point-blank range, and even if it was in self-defense, Jake brough the attack on himself through his inability to let a pretty woman alone.
Themes
Jake, Dan, Ed, Roy, and Frog Lip ride north without further incident. And then one day, Dan decides it’s time to start their career as regulators. He rides up to a settler’s house and demands $40 in exchange for protecting the family’s fields from overgrazing when the cattle drives pass through. Unfortunately, the settlers speak only German. Eventually, Dan gets their son to understand that he wants money. The boy brings him the family’s savings—all of $2. Just before the gang rides away from the terrified family, Frog Lip drives their milk cows onto the roof of the sod house. They fall through, ruining it completely.
Jake doesn’t participate in this highway robbery, but he doesn’t do anything to stop it, either. It’s a stark reminder of just how far he’s fallen in life. At one time, he was a Texas Ranger—the kind of lawman tasked with protecting settlers not just from the Indigenous people they displaced, but also from brigands and outlaws like the Suggses. By prioritizing his own pleasures above all else, Jake has come to embody all the things he once stood against.
Themes
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