Whatever You Want To Do

Running south out of Big Timber, Montana, the Main Boulder Road is paved for 25 miles through a wide and grassy valley full of small homesteads and hayfields. At Natural Bridge Falls, the pavement turns to dirt, and the road curls and winds its way along the Boulder River, and the Beartooth Mountains rise up on either side as the valley, and they close in, the valley slowly narrows for twenty-odd more miles until the road leaves the river behind and starts to climb the mountains themselves, you take a series of switchbacks, ending in a crater lake more blue than the sky. Driving at dawn or dusk, you'll slip in and out of the mountains' shade and through the crosshatched shadows of the pines.

There's no speed limit on the dirt section of the Main Boulder Road. There are signs that say there is one, but that's simply not the case. The Sweet Grass County Sheriff's office doesn't send patrols with radar guns down the valley. The forest rangers don't do traffic stops. You can drive as fast as you want, nobody will stop you.

But you gotta be careful. You're right up against the riverbank, and the road is too narrow for two cars to pass side-by-side, one of you is going to have to pull over. I've been on trips where the terrain was so bad we broke an axle and just left the truck up there, had to come back for it later. Friends have been on a bus that tipped on its side because the ground was softer than it looked. Too much sand.

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Compare this to the driving you've done this week. City streets are crowded and traffic patterns are precisely marked. Highways look open, but they're guarded by troopers enforcing laws about how fast you can go. I'm not saying those are bad things, but I am saying they're different from the lawlessness in Montana in the woods. If you drive recklessly in the city, you will be at least honked at, and likely punished by the police. The streets are in good shape, so it's difficult to break an axle, and if you do, a tow truck will take you to the mechanic. There are rules and there is safety. If you drive fast in the Boulder River valley, nobody will stop you. But nobody will protect you from falling in the river, either.

When I think about the West, that's what I think about. That road is a symbol for, and an example of, the freedom you are given and the responsibility you must carry with it.

This is how the entire Western genre functions, and why it works. When you get out to the frontier, near enough to remember civilization's rules but far enough that they no longer apply, the overwhelming power of the land itself serves as a check against human priorities of any kind. The American West is hard country. There is no safety net. If you fail, it is nobody's fault but yours. But what that means is that every triumph is even more triumphant. If you succeed, you deserve all the credit.

In Westerns, the untamed wilderness is a place of pragmatism and integrity while society is a place of legalism and hedging. Nature is pure and full of honor; culture is tarnished by corruption and compromise. The outdoors vs. the indoors. Strength vs. knowledge. Freedom vs. restriction. The frontier is where all of these themes collide with no buffer or safety net.

I'm talking about Westerns in order to introduce Lonesome Dove, which is the best one.

Gus McCrae and Captain Call, retired Texas Rangers, are more or less killing time on the porch when one of their old rangering buddies, Jake Spoon, rides in with tales of lush fields and wide-open country in Montana. Drive a herd of cattle up there, and you'd have the first ranch in the territory, have it all to yourself. And that is what Gus and Call decide to do: they ride into Mexico and rustle a herd of cattle, then recruit all the cowboys they can find nearby—Newt, Pea Eye, Deets, Dish Boggett, two hapless Irishmen they found on the trip to Mexico. Jake Spoon, turns out, is on the run from the sheriff of Fort Smith, Arkansas, where Jake killed a dentist by mistake. Jake is talented and well-known but not mature or responsible, kind of a Zach Bryan type of character, and when he tells the local sporting woman he'll take her to San Francisco, she believes him, God help her, so they ride together a little ways off from the herd.

Their route takes them from Lonesome Dove, between the Brazos and the Rio Grande, up past San Antonio then over to Fort Worth, then to Dodge City, Kansas, then up to Ogllala, Nebraska, and eventually up to Miles City, Montana.

The trip hurts them. Lorena is kidnapped by an Indian and Jake just doesn't care. Everybody gets separated and reunited. Stampedes. Water's hard to find. When a hotheaded Army captain breaks Dish's nose and tries to requisition Call's mare in Ogllala, Newt holds on to the reins so the major can't ride off. A fight breaks out between the soldiers and the cowboys, out in front of the saloon.

Right there we see it: are you strong enough to hold on to what's yours? Here's the civilizing US Military taming the land, and by the book, he has every right to requisition horses, send the bill to Fort Laramie. But we don't go by the book out west: you're being an asshole, and he loves that horse, you're going to have to go through me to get it. Who wins in a fight?

Lonesome Dove was written by Larry McMurtry and published in 1985, which is surprising for two reasons. One, despite coming out in 1985, it is widely believed to be the very best western novel. "thrilling and almost perfectly realized," in the New York Times. "This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order," in Kirkus Reviews. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986.

The very best of any genre is hardly ever so young. If you ask for a consensus for the best romance novel, you might land on Pride and Prejudice, which came out in 1813. You might decide the best mysteries are about Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared 1887. But then here's Lonesome Dove. It only turned 40 on Sunday.

So why? What sets it apart? It's good by the standards of the genre, to start. Against kidnappers and weather and bears, the cowboys are traditional Western heroes. They're capable and prepared, so they win most of those conflicts, and this novel is 858 pages, so there are a lot of them. Can the men make it out of Mexico with the cattle? Can Newt hold on to the mare when the Army captain breaks Dish's nose? Can Gus rescue Lorena from the kidnappers? Can the herd make it through a lightning storm, or from one river to the next?

A less ambitious novel would be satisfied with fewer of these stories. A worse one would be satisfied by their achievement. What takes Lonesome Dove to the next level is it asks why those goals are worth pursuing, or if they're worth the sacrifice they cost.

If the west is a place of freedom, where you can achieve whatever you are capable of, the obvious risk is of failure. The more subtle risk is that you choose the wrong goal to pursue, and this is what haunts Lonesome Dove. Very few people make bad choices, but they do make the wrong ones.

They don't realize how much others care about them, or they care too much about people who don't care back. Multiple cowboys get their hearts broken when Lorena rejects them. Lorena gets abandoned by Jake, and then she's scared that Gus will leave her. Gus has his heart set on Clara, who's above all this foolishness. Her husband is dying. July Johnson's wife leaves him and he doesn't know why, and then his stepson dies, and as time passes, he also sets his heart set on Clara. When fortunes change and she's scared when a child is sick, and she's looking for comfort, July doesn't realize, and he isn't there. Call spends the whole book deciding whether or not to acknowledge and claim his son, and he fails to, because he's choosing to focus on the trip north. A trip on which many men died.

At one point in Wyoming, Gus says to Call, "Here you've brought these cattle all this way, with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don't have no reason in this world to be doing it."

If this were a different novel, I would say every character was carrying oceans of grief and disappointment inside. But Lonesome Dove is set only on the plains, far from any ocean. So instead I'll say they all have a vast empty space inside.

The day after I finished Lonesome Dove I drove north to Wisconsin to see my grandpa. He's 85 and might not see 86. The twelve hours across the Midwest weren't a cattle drive out of Texas, but it was something. I met up with my parents and sister and grandma and we all just went to see him.

Grandpa rose fast through the ranks of the Burlington Northern, transferring between depots on a kind of circuit that took him as far south as Fort Worth and as far west as Montana. We got to look through some pictures on the trip. Here's grandpa on the train. Here he is with the governor, and here he is shaking hands with his men. When the locomotive derails, he's down there alongside everyone he works with.

In Lonesome Dove, the last town the herd reaches is Miles City. My dad's first memory is from there, watching his brother and sister wrestle their dad to the ground again and again in the backyard. My grandpa, out in Montana, a leader of men, had the freedom and the ability to do anything, and he was out playing with his kids.

Welcome to Season 2

Last month I announced I was taking an issue off. After every seven issues of the newsletter, I'll take a break and refresh before the next set of seven (a group of seven works is a "septology"). The first seven issues, I didn't have a consistent theme, but from now through December, I'll write about books every month. The second change is the design; I've learned some HTML and how to work it, and I'm going to continue figuring that out. Still plenty of ground to cover—maybe I'll include an image next time—but I'm proud of how it's coming along so far.

Here's the latest update to my in-rotation playlist "acceptance," and here is a list of my actually most-played songs. You'll see a lot of Jack Van Cleaf on there, I found his album "JVC" on my drive back from Wisconsin and have put it on repeat many times since.

Also here is a bonus third playlist. I made it two years ago after watching Oppenheimer, it's called "Physics and New Mexico." (I'm in New Mexico).

Thank you, as always, for reading. Expect the next issue on the 7th of July, which is a Monday.

From Santa Fe,

Tim

© 2025 Tim Hatton
My home base, for this and other work, is "timhatton.online"