Essays From West of 98: American Idol, Part 4: Woodrow and Gus
The complicated legacy of Lonesome Dove
Woodrow F. Call and August McCrae were not good people.
Now that I’ve gotten your attention and perhaps enraged or alienated a few of you, let us wrap the journey through Western literature and film. There’s no better place to do so than the rare story that would go on the Mount Rushmore of BOTH literature and film, “Lonesome Dove.”
As some readers might know, this masterpiece almost took a very different path. After their collaboration on the award-winning film “The Last Picture Show,” Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich set out to write a Western screenplay. They envisioned John Wayne as Woodrow F. Call, Jimmy Stewart as Augustus McCrae, and Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon. Wayne turned down the role on the advice of John Ford, who disliked the script (which makes sense, since the final product is a very not-John Ford Western). The project was shelved for over a decade until McMurtry turned the script into a novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize and spawned one of the most successful television miniseries of all time, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, and Robert Urich instead of the original cast.
McMurtry’s relationship with the Western was complicated. His ancestors in Archer County, Texas (about 80 miles from where I currently sit) scraped out a life on the hard frontier. His views on and resentment of the “classic” Western were colored by his knowledge of the frontier and its people. They lived very different lives from what he saw in Technicolor and as told by John Ford and John Wayne in Monument Valley. McMurtry wrote almost three dozen novels and over a dozen non-fiction works that spanned the eras from the “Old West” to suburban life in Houston. He wrote of the West, but it was the changing West. Cowboys owned automobiles, worked day jobs in town, and could be rather ignoble characters. “Leaving Cheyenne,” “The Last Picture Show,” and “Horseman, Pass By” were Westerns in a very non-classic but very realistic sense. When McMurtry sought to demythologize the old-time cowboy via “Lonesome Dove,” he unintentionally created two heroes, Woodrow and Gus, as a result.
My love for McMurtry and “Lonesome Dove” is no secret. When McMurtry died in 2021, I penned a tribute in this very space. In that very tribute, I discussed the flaws and personal failings of his two most famous characters. Despite holding some important and deeply-rooted ethical views on matters like the rental of pigs, their lives as decorated Texas Rangers had degenerated to a glorified livestock fencing operation, dealing in stolen and re-stolen cattle. They were self-aware of some failings and too prideful to acknowledge others. Their actions—sometimes selfish, sometimes careless, and sometimes unnecessarily single-minded—put loved ones in harm’s way and even got a few of them killed. Their longtime sidekick Jake Spoon learned all of Gus’s vices without holding an ounce of his charm or sense and Jake caused deep harm to others as a result.
If Woodrow and Gus were purely irredeemable characters, they would not have been believable and, frankly, the book would have been bad art. Others might write such a novel, but McMurtry was far too talented for that. He set out to write “heroes” that were not heroes at all. He succeeded. He was too skilled of a writer to not make these incorrigible humans into multi-dimensional, fascinating characters that would stand tall in the Western literary pantheon, but as we glorify them, we should not forget who and what they were.
Next week, I will close out this series with my final thoughts on why the cowboy mythos and its idolatry is both deeply frustrating and deeply inspirational to me.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.