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Series
The Lonesome Dove quartet follows Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call from their first service as young Texas Rangers to old age at the closing of the nineteenth-century frontier. Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon trace their early experiences during the Republic of Texas, the Santa Fe expedition and the long conflict between Texan expansion and Comanche power.
Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo move into the cattle-drive era and its decline, using the friendship between Gus and Call to examine loyalty, leadership, violence and loss. Publication order differs from story chronology: Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo were published first, followed by the two prequels.
Reading order
In the early 1840s, the young Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call join the Texas Rangers before either man has acquired the skill or reputation associated with his later life. Their first service exposes them to Comanche warfare and to Buffalo Hump, whose attacks reveal how little…
Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are now experienced Rangers serving under Captain Inish Scull as settlement pushes farther into Comanche country. When Kicking Wolf steals Scull’s horse, the captain follows him into Mexico and falls into the hands of the bandit Ahumado. The effort to recover…
Former Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call run the Hat Creek cattle company near the Rio Grande. Call decides to drive a large herd north to Montana, and the outfit gathers cowboys, former Rangers and the young Newt for a journey across the plains. The…
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.…