Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" Hat Creek cattle-drive outfit is back on the trail - but in "Streets of Laredo," McMurtry is traveling a different sort of path.
In the sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Dove" (1985), Augustus McCrae is gone, of course, although his friend and partner Woodrow Call, the main character in the sequel, invokes old Gus' memory more than a few times.Young Newt, Call's son, and July Johnson, the Arkansas sheriff, didn't make it to the sequel: Newt was killed when a horse fell on him, and July drowned. But other Lonesome Dove characters show up in "Streets of Laredo," set some 15 years after the first book ended with the Hat Creek outfit's having reached Montana.
The Montana cattle ranch that had been Gus' dream failed after a couple of years, and Call - now around 70 - is a bounty hunter back in Texas.
As he did in "Lonesome Dove," McMurtry plants his story in several settings and then weaves them together.
Call, still single-minded and taciturn (and now occasionally sad and careless), has been hired by the railroad to track down Joey Garza, a young Mexican who is robbing trains and killing people. ("Joey Garza always smiled when he killed.") On the trail with Call are Ned Brookshire, a New York accountant representing the railroad company, and Ted Plunkert, a young deputy from Laredo.
Rushing to catch up to Call's little posse is Pea Eye Parker, the Hat Creek cowboy who was with Gus when he was shot up with arrows in "Lonesome Dove." Now a farmer in the Texas Panhandle, Pea Eye is married to Gus' sweetheart Lorena, the former prostitute who is now the mother of five and a respected schoolteacher.
Meanwhile, McMurtry looks in on the wretched life of Joey Garza's mother Maria ("the lack of laughter in her life was a thing Maria held against men"); follows the adventures of the man-burning killer Mox Mox, who once rode with Lonesome Dove's Blue Duck; checks in with real-life characters John Wesley Hardin (the killer), Roy Bean (the hanging judge) and Charles Goodnight (the cattleman); and creates eccentric minor characters.
McMurtry's old Texas is a place where life is dirt cheap, where the women are strong and where the men are cold, stupid, awkward, menacing or otherwise seriously flawed.
If "Streets of Laredo" isn't quite the page-turner that "Lonesome Dove" was, it's hard to imagine the first book being topped. Almost everything in Laredo is a bit off from Dove - the interweaving of story threads, the humor, the focus (on Call rather than on McCrae). And it's as if McMurtry tries too hard to thread in "Lonesome Dove" references.
But these are not fatal flaws, and setting the book 15 years after the first is important in that, already, the older Old West is becoming obsolete - farmers moving in, railroad companies wielding power, outlaws being killed or tamed.
McMurtry quotes the old ballad "Streets of Laredo" before he gets into his story: "We beat the drum lowly and shook the spurs slowly/And bitterly wept as we bore him along. . . ."
"Him," most likely, could be the "Old West" as easily as it is "our comrade" in the song.