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Chapter 89
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
After two days on Salt Creek, Call reluctantly gets the herd going again. Montana seems very far away. Then, Indigenous people steal a dozen horses one night. Call takes Gus and Deets with him to retrieve the stolen animals. They track the thieves southwest over a hundred miles before they find them, camped in an arid little draw. Deets, who scouts ahead, reports that only about 20 individuals, mostly women and children, comprise the band. And they’re starving—they stole the horses to eat them. Call shoots into the air to scatter the thieves, hoping to round their animals back up without violence.
The Indigenous people who terrify Pea Eye in his dream are, apart from Blue Duck, largely figments of his imagination. While Indigenous nations put up fierce and long-lasting resistance to the encroachment of settlers on their land, by the 1870s most of the American Indian Wars had concluded, and the survivors were largely confined to reservations and the wild hinterlands. And, like this band, most Plains nations suffered acutely from being driven off their lands and from the near-total extinction of the American buffalo.
Themes
For the most part, the Indigenous people flee, but one small boy—who’s clearly blind—gets left behind. Deets picks the little boy up and starts carrying him back toward his people. He smiles and moves slowly, showing that he means no harm. But a starving, hostile teenager picks up a spear and makes a run for Deets. Call and Gus both shoot, but it's too late. The angry young man runs Deets through with his lance.
Deets has long been one of Newt’s favorite among the Hat Creek men, and it’s easy to see why in this moment: he’s the one who most naturally and instinctively cares for others. Just like he took Newt under his wing, he acts—without thinking about the potential consequences—to protect the little boy. It’s important to note that, while seeking to contextualize the young man’s anger through the lens of oppression and violence against Indigenous people in North America, this scene still flattens his grievances into a racially charged caricature of mindless Indigenous vengeance.
Themes
Call and Gus rush to Deets, who asks them to make sure that the little blind boy makes it back to his family safely. Then, he asks after Newt. Gus reminds him that Newt’s at cow camp. Gus and Call sit with Deets until he dies. They can’t get the spear out, so they break off its handle before putting him on his horse. Leaving three horses for the starving band, they head back to camp. Call berates himself for forgetting the first law of Rangering: anyone can kill you.
When Deet’s heavily foreshadowed death finally happens, it proves his intuitions right. It also should give Call pause to reassess his plan. But he doesn’t. He can’t imagine that he made a mistake, at least not one more serious than forgetting to pay attention to his surroundings. Notably, Deets’s final acts and words revolve around taking care of others, both the little Indigenous boy and Newt, to whom he’s been an important friend and father figure.
Themes
They arrive back at camp before dawn on the morning of the second day. Newt wakes up to see Po Campo trying to remove the spear from Deets. He rolls over and squeezes his eyes shut, wanting it to be a bad dream. But it isn’t. The sun rises and the others get to work tending the herd and preparing to bury Deets while Newt sits wrapped in his blankets and weeps. Pea Eye doesn’t cry, but he feels shaken. It’s hard to believe that a man he’d so recently had a friendly conversation with is now dead. Call lets Lippy help dig the grave; Gus wraps Deets’s body in a sheet. After they bury him, the Captain spends the afternoon carving a marker out of a board taken from the wagon.
Newt wants to pretend that nothing bad has happened, as if he can remake the world according to his whims and desires— this, of course, is impossible. His intensely emotional reaction speaks to the close relationship he had with Deets, who was the most overtly kind and loving of his various father figures. But it also speaks to the kind of man he is growing up to be. He knows he must face the loss, but he still admits to himself and others how much it hurts him—in direct opposition to the stoic Call, who refuses to admit the grief that he so clearly feels.
Themes
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After a while, Gus comes and gets Newt, telling him they should go see what his father wrote on Deets’s headstone. Newt thinks Gus is making a joke—in very poor taste—about Call being his father, so he ignores the comment. Call carved “Josh Deets” into the marker, along with a note about how many years he served with the Captain and how invaluable he was as a partner and a man.
Newt grieves Deets as he would a father, and this inspires Gus to finally tell the boy what everyone else—including readers—know: that Call is his father. The epitaph Call carves on Joshua Deets’s grave marker comes almost directly from the words written by historical Ranger-turned-cattleman Charles Goodnight on the headstone of his friend and faithful right-hand man Bose Ikard. The words speak to Call’s respect for the man, irrespective of race, and offer a quiet reminder of the greater (albeit still limited) freedoms and opportunities the West afforded Black men and women—many of whom, like Bose Ikard, had been born into slavery—in the wake of the Civil War.
Themes
