Lonesome Dove

Historical references

According to McMurtry, Gus and Call were not modeled after historical characters, but similarities exist with real-life cattle drivers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. When Goodnight and Loving's African American guide Bose Ikard died, Goodnight carved a wooden grave marker for him, just as Call does for Deets. Upon Loving's death, Goodnight brought him home to be buried in Texas, as Call does for Augustus. (Goodnight himself appears as a minor but generally sympathetic character in this novel, and more so in the sequel, Streets of Laredo, and the prequels Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon.) Blue Duck also was a historical person, a paramour of Belle Starr, "Queen of the Oklahoma Outlaws".

According to McMurtry's memoir, Books: A Memoir, the ultimate sources for Gus and Call were Don Quixote, the crazy old knight, and Sancho Panza, the peasant pragmatist, from Don Quixote. He stated: "What is important that, early on, I read some version of Don Quixote and pondered the grave differences (comically cast) between Sancho and the Don. Between the two is where fiction, as I've mostly read and written it, lives."[14]

Other books of the Lonesome Dove series feature other prominent historical events and locations such as the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, the Great Raid of 1840, and the King Ranch, and characters such as Buffalo Hump, John Wesley Hardin, and Judge Roy Bean.


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