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Visiting a Novel on a Cattle Drive L
onesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize- winning novel, is named for the dusty South Texas border settlement where retired Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and
Woodrow Call live. The story is a vast, authentic, and compelling tale of an 1870s cattle drive to Montana across an American West populated with passionate but fl awed characters, optimistic (oſt en doomed) set- tlers, opportunists, sporting women, and American Indians desperate to save their way of life. Loyalty, goodness, evil, and death — whether from an “Injun attack” or an infected toe — are matter-of-fact parts of life. McMurtry has said his inspiration was Don Quixote, and the novel is loosely based on the lives of Charles Goodnight and Oliver Lov- ing, who pioneered the Goodnight-Loving Trail. The Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum (www.chisholmtrailmuseum.org) in Cuero, Texas, interprets cattle drives with displays, maps, weapons, and other in- formation. The Cattle Raisers Museum in the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (www.cattleraisersmuseum.org) details the rise of cattle ranching, including cattle drives, from the 1850s to the pres- ent. Download a guide to the Chisholm Trail (and other cattle drives) at www.thc.state.tx.us/public/upload/publications/chisholm-trail.pdf. — Col. Glenn Pribus, USAF (Ret), and Marilyn Pribus
28 MILITARY OFFICER NOVEMBER 2015
IMAGES: ABOVE, SHUTTERSTOCK; TOP, A. ZIEGELASCH, KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY