Comanche Moon (Lonesome Dove #4) (1997)

by Larry McMurtry

Chronologically second in the Lonesome Dove series, this excellent novel is less an adventure about winning the West than a sorrowful account of worlds dying. 

It follows the younger Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae on the Texas frontier, but author Larry McMurtry spends more time exposing the costs of frontier heroism than celebrating it. 

Larry McMurtry

The result is a novel that makes the frontier feel dangerous, absurd, comic, grotesque, and tragic all at the same time. 

McMurtry does not simplify either history or character. 

The leader Buffalo Hump is not presented as a straightforward villain but as a tragic figure who understands that his people’s way of life is ending even as he continues to fight against that reality. 

By contrast, his son Blue Duck is darker and more chaotic, emerging as a figure of almost pure menace. 

McMurtry also depicts some of the harshest realities of frontier life with unflinching realism, including Indian raids and the rejection of women who survived sexual assault during those raids. 

Some readers have criticized the novel for denying climactic confrontations between Call, McCrae, and the various renegade Indians who move through the story, but this simply is not that kind of Western. 

Rather than following familiar genre conventions about heroic Rangers rescuing settlers and defeating enemies, this book emphasizes the immensity of the West and the severe limitations of the Rangers themselves. The frontier is too vast, communication too slow, and resources too scarce for anyone to exert much control over events. Because it consistently undercuts heroism with grotesquery, absurdity, and psychological damage, this novel may disappoint readers looking for triumph, but it is an honest and emotionally devastating examination of the frontier.