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Intro
In the late 1870s in Fort Smith, Arkansas, former Texas Ranger Jake Spoon accidentally kills the mayor, then skips town, afraid he’ll be hung otherwise. He races to the tiny town of Lonesome Dove, on the Texas-Mexico border, where his friends and fellow former Rangers Augustus McCrae, Woodrow Call, Pea Eye Parker, and Joshua Deets have established the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium. Along with Newt—Call’s unacknowledged son from a relationship with a sex worker named Maggie—the men make a living by selling cattle, most of which they steal from Pedro Flores and other Mexican cattle thieves who in turn steal cattle from Texas.
Jake tells Call and Gus about a trip he made to Montana with an Army scout. He claims it’s prime cattle land. Call, who’s been in desperate need of a mission ever since he left the Rangers, decides to rustle up a herd, head north, and establish a ranch there. Reluctantly, Gus agrees. While Call hires men and collects cattle, Jake starts a relationship with the town’s current sex worker, Lorena Wood. He promises her that they will leave with the cattle drive together and that he will take her to San Francisco.
Within a few weeks, Call has gathered several thousand cattle, dozens of horses, two lost Irishmen (Sean and Allen), and a bunch of cowboys led by the extremely competent Dish Boggett. Jake and Lorena travel in tandem but at a little distance from the drive, creating complications, since Dish and half of the men are in love with Lorena. Near Austin, an Indigenous outlaw named Blue Duck kidnaps Lorena while Jake is in town visiting the saloons.
Meanwhile, Fort Smith sheriff July Johnson returns home from a business trip to find that his brother, the mayor, is dead (he was the mayor whom Jake Spoon accidentally killed). July’s sister-in-law, Peach, bullies him into going after Jake Spoon, and July’s new wife, Elmira, talks him into taking her son, Joe, along. As soon as they’ve left, she runs away on Fowler’s whiskey boat, intent on finding her old beau, a gambler named Dee Boot, in Nebraska. When Peach discovers Elmira’s absence, she sends the sheriff’s deputy, a hapless man named Roscoe Brown, to chase July down and let him know. She also sends a letter to Fort Worth to intercept July. Roscoe hates travelling, at least until he picks up a runaway named Janey, who has excellent bushcraft skills. When July reads Peach’s letter in Fort Worth, he turns back toward Arkansas. Soon, he runs into Roscoe and Janey. After Joe tells him about Dee, he changes his mind and heads northwest, chasing Elmira with Joe, Roscoe, and Janey.
Back in central Texas, Gus leaves the cattle drive and tracks Blue Duck and Lorena to the banks of the Canadian River, where Blue Duck and his gang of outlaws have made camp. Gus survives an ambush by Blue Duck’s men and then runs into July and the others by chance. July goes with Gus to storm the gang’s camp. They rescue Lorena but miss Blue Duck, who kills Roscoe, Janey, and Joe and then escapes.
Lorena and Gus rejoin the cattle drive as they cross the Canadian River. On the way north, they encounter the usual hazards of the trail: poisonous snakes, hazardous river crossings, dust, drought, and thunderstorms. Two men—Sean and Swift Bill Spettle—die, and the company’s first cook, Bolivar, retires. Call hires a replacement named Po Campo. Otherwise, the crew and herd are mostly intact when they reach Dodge City, Kansas.
Meanwhile, Jake has fallen in with Dan, Roy, and Ed Suggs and their friend Fish Lip. This gang of violent criminals rampages across the Kansas prairies, killing settlers and stealing horses. Fish Lip dies in a shootout. When Call and McCrae hear about the horse theft, they track the brothers—and Jake—down and execute all four. Then they return to the heard and press on toward Ogallala, Nebraska.
Elmira is simultaneously heading toward Ogallala, now in the company of two buffalo hunters named Big Zwey and Luke. She’s pregnant, and they barely make it to the homestead of Clara Allen (Gus’s former flame) just outside of Ogallala before she goes into labor. She abandons the boy (whom Clara names Martin) within a day of his birth, intent on finding Dee. He’s in jail in Ogallala, about to be executed for murder. Elmira suffers a serious hemorrhage, and by the time she recovers, Dee has already been hanged. A few weeks later, July tracks Elmira to Ogallala, where he meets Clara and finds out about the baby. When he asks Elmira to come home with him, she runs away again, fleeing across the prairie toward Missouri. Sioux warriors kill her and Big Zwey before they get far. July decides to stay with Clara for a while.
When the Hat Creek outfit reaches Ogallala, Gus stops to visit Clara. Although they both still have affection for each other, it’s clear that they have no romantic future together. Clara convinces Lorena to stay on the farm with her instead of finishing the drive and wintering in Montana. Meanwhile, the cowhands take turns going into town, and Newt has his first sexual experience. Not long afterward, Gus tells Newt directly—for the first time—that Call is his father.
The cattle train presses northwest through Wyoming, where they nearly die of thirst while crossing an 80-mile stretch of high desert. Soon afterwards, a group of starving Indigenous people steal some of their horses. Call, Gus, and Deets track the animals and retrieve them, but in the process, Deets dies.
The crew makes it to Montana without any other major catastrophes, and Call starts scouting for a suitable ranch location. One day, Augustus and Pea Eye surprise a band of Indigenous buffalo hunters. In the ensuing fight, Gus takes an arrow to the leg that he struggles to remove. The messy wound quickly becomes infected. Gus sends Pea Eye back to the cattle herd and starts walking toward Miles City. A trapper named Hugh Auld finds him and lends him a horse, but by the time Gus makes it into the care of Miles City’s Dr. Mobley, it’s too late. He might be able to survive if he lets Dr. Mobley amputate both legs, but he refuses. Call arrives in time to sit with his friend as he dies. Gus’s dying wish is for Call to carry his body back to Texas for burial.
Call drives the company north of the Milk River, where he finally picks a place to build and establish the ranch. As soon as they’ve built a cabin to winter in, Dish quits the company and heads back to Nebraska, hoping to woo Lorena now that Gus is dead. Throughout the winter, Newt demonstrates new maturity and skills, impressing Call, although he still won’t acknowledge the boy as his. Late the following spring, Call leaves the ranch in Newt’s care and starts south with Gus’s body. He visits Clara and Lorena in Ogallala. Clara tries to dissuade him from completing his final mission, to send him back to Montana and his son. But, having accepted Gus’s mission, Call will carry it out if it kills him. He hauls Gus’s body 1,500 miles south (stopping briefly in New Mexico to witness Blue Duck’s execution) and then keeps going, all the way back to where he started, in Lonesome Dove.
