Thoughts on Lonesome Dove

Background

I started Lonesome Dove a couple weeks ago on my brother's recommendation. That turned out to be good advice, because I tore through it in about a week— uncommon, given I usually manage to drag books out for a month or more. For those who are unfamiliar (like I was a few weeks ago), Lonesome Dove is a Western about the members of a cattle outfit who decide to drive a herd from South Texas to Montana in the years following the Civil War. As might be expected in a Western, they contend with Native American tribes, bandits, and the forces of nature throughout this 1,700 mile odyssey.

I historically haven't been into Westerns. I liked No Country For Old Men (neo-Western?) and might've seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at some point in college, but I'm far from having any connection to the genre. So Lonesome Dove was kind of a leap for me, but I'd been craving some good fiction, and once I started I had a hard time stopping. This is the kind of book you stay up reading way too late on a weeknight. Take that as a warning.

But I'm not here to write a book review. My thoughts would be: "Go read it, thank me later." Instead, I want to talk about how this novel affected me during the days I was wrapping it up.

Wanderlust, to be cheesy

The inescapable feeling I had in the last hundred or so pages of the book was a longing for a time when such a vast landscape lay unconquered. Maybe not a shocker that this is what I connected with, given two of my favorite things are birds and plants... but it's hard not to be impressed by the thousands of miles of sweeping plains, snaking rivers, desert, and brush that the protagonists cross on the way to Montana. During this era, Nebraska's statehood was a recent event, and Montana and many other pieces of the West were still territories. Native American tribes like the Sioux and Crow controlled much of that land, and violence was an everyday occurrence on the frontier. I mean, Ogallala, Nebraska was a significant hub, for chrissakes. (I'd say "no offense" to anyone from Ogallala, but I'll risk the odds of one of those 1000 people reading this.)

But you get the point. At the time, wildness wasn't a nostalgic memory for people sitting comfortably beside a fire: it was a tangible, dangerous part of life. It was the risk of raids by (justifiably) unfriendly tribes, the limited reach of the law, and, more than anything, the unknown.

That last part strikes a nerve in me. I'm not a fighter, or a rugged survivalist, or even particularly handy with a map. I wouldn't have fared well in an old-timey war zone. But I can't shake the awe of a time when it felt like the world was unconquered, indomitable. When we couldn't track everything and everyone, didn't know what secrets the horizon held. When, rather than being fragmented and caged up and crammed into parks and preserves, nature sprawled for a week's ride in any direction. A world I never lived in.

I'm sure this was intentional. The near-extinction of the buffalo is a central theme in the book. Main characters often express surprise seeing buffalo hunters who haven't given up, pursuing the herds deeper and deeper into the diminishing wilderness. As you read, you feel the doors creeping shut on the entire milieu of the Western genre. Pretty soon, there'll be rail lines and towns and army forts from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the cowboy will go the way of the buffalo. Without wildness, there can be no Old West, and without wilderness there can be no bison. As I read, I couldn't help remembering this quote from the great Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac:

What a thousand acres of silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

Damn, that's poignant.

Obviously the Old West is gone forever. There's no need for trading posts and general stores, no reason to pine for the danger inherent to the time and place. I'm glad I don't have to reach for a rifle when I see a group of horsemen approaching my house on a Sunday afternoon. I'd venture that the near-doubling of an American's life expectancy over the past 150 years is enough to sway anyone still on the fence. But I think that wildness is a core human craving— for some people, even a need. To reference the novel's opening quotation:

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. — T.K. Whipple, "Study Out the Land"

And unlike an anachronistic, heavily-romanticized few decades in American history, I believe that wildness is something we can bring back in little-but-important ways: by protecting our remaining wilderness, and working to restore more. I can't envision a world where elk and cougars roam central Illinois again— c'mon, think about how cool that'd be— but I've seen medium-scale wilderness proudly existing in the face of great adversity at places like The Nature Conservancy's Nachusa Grasslands, and it gives me hope.

They even gave a shoutout to our ol' friend Aldo:

(That's a dessicated compass plant, silphium laciniatum, inside the case.)

And finally, it isn't all silphiums, but my favorite nature preserve (and place, generally) on the planet, Middlefork Savanna, showcases a good 700 acres of natural beauty. Walking through the head-high sawtooth sunflower and big bluestem, you can almost forget you're not roaming the plains of a bygone era.

So where does that leave me?

In the immediate future, I'll try to scratch the itch from Lonesome Dove by getting outside and enjoying our natural Midwest summer spectacular in the prairie as much as possible. And I'm craving a roadtrip; something about the Great Plains is calling me.

Long term, I'll try to do my small part to help keep our remaining wild lands, well, wild.