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Chapter 70
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 is looking forward to Dodge City, where he hopes to visit a barber and then a brothel. He feels hopeful that his luck is about to improve. But then, Dan Suggs catches sight of three men driving a remuda of horses. One of them is Wilbarger—a man with whom Dan has a score to settle. Wilbarger was the boss who turned Dan off of life as a cowhand. Dan declares that they’ll attack after dark, then take the horses to Abeline, Kansas to sell. No one dares argue.
Dan Suggs doesn’t want to take responsibility for himself or his actions. He failed as a cowhand, yet he blames Wilbarger for firing him. Similarly, Jake doesn’t want to take responsibility for himself—either for the men he’s killed, the women he’s abandoned, or the fact that he’s fallen in with a bunch of cutthroat outlaws. He’s no better than the Suggses, even if he thinks he is.
Themes
When they attack Wilbarger’s camp, there is so much confusion that Jake can’t figure out what’s happening. He fires a few shots blindly. When it’s over, Wilbarger has escaped, although Dan claims he put three bullets into him. His men—Chick and another one Jake doesn’t know—are dead. Frog Lip, shot through the groin, is dying. Eventually, Ed shoots him to save him the horror of a slow death. The party rides on. In the afternoon, they find two settlers ploughing fields. Dan kills them in cold blood, strings their bodies up on the limb of a tree, and sets them on fire.
Jake’s blind shots seem designed to avoid Dan Suggs’s ire while also preventing Jake from being personally responsible for the carnage. His track record with lucky and unlucky shots suggests the limitations of this approach. Regardless, it doesn’t matter if he kills any of the men or not: he’s still a party to their murder and the theft of the horses—both hanging crimes. In his quest to avoid responsibility for the accidental killing in Arkansas, Jake has implicated himself in much more serious crimes.
Themes
