Streets of Laredo

Name: Streets of Laredo
Rating: 4.5 (7227 reviews)

by Larry McMurtry Book 4 in the Lonesome Dove series.

First published 1993

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4.5(7,227)

In the 1890s Woodrow Call works as a bounty hunter in a West increasingly controlled by railroads and commercial interests. A railway company hires him to pursue Joey Garza, a young Mexican marksman whose attacks on trains have made him both feared and difficult to locate.

Call’s pursuit draws Pea Eye Parker, Lorena and Garza’s mother Maria into separate journeys across Texas and the borderlands. Encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean and Charles Goodnight place the fictional chase inside a frontier whose legendary figures are ageing, dying or becoming part of history.

Call’s pursuit occurs after the classic cattle-drive era that formed his reputation. Railroads, hired detectives and corporate interests are replacing the older frontier institutions, while Garza’s youth and mobility make him a product of that changing landscape rather than a simple continuation of earlier outlaw types. The novel deliberately sets an ageing lawman against a West that no longer needs his methods in the same way.