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Plot Summary
Dead Man's Walk is a novel by Larry McMurtry and part of the Lonesome Dove series. It follows the earliest adventures of Augustus "Gus" McCrae and Woodrow Call, two young Texas Rangers in the 1840s, as they survive two disastrous expeditions into the frontier wilderness of Texas and New Mexico.
The novel opens on the Rio Grande, where a small Ranger troop under Major Randall Chevallie camps west of the Pecos on a mission to scout a stage route to El Paso. Gus and Call are the youngest Rangers. The troop includes Bigfoot Wallace, a renowned scout; Shadrach, a grizzled mountain man; Long Bill Coleman; one-eyed Johnny Carthage; and Matilda Jane Roberts, a large, fearless prostitute known as the Great Western. Two scalp hunters, Kirker and Glanton, ride alongside, though Bigfoot and Shadrach suspect them of scalping Mexican children rather than Comanches.
Bigfoot has a disturbing dream in which Buffalo Hump, the most feared Comanche war chief, rides alongside Gomez, the most feared Apache, an alliance between tribes that would normally never cooperate. When a blind old Comanche woman believed to have prophetic visions wanders into camp, Shadrach speaks with her and learns that hundreds of warriors are heading south to raid Mexico.
While on guard duty one night, Gus wanders off and encounters Buffalo Hump during a lightning storm. The war chief chases him and hurls a lance that pierces Gus's hip, though Gus runs back to camp. Call, who stayed at his post, fires shots to distract Buffalo Hump. Chevallie presses on west, but the troop falls into a trap: What Bigfoot takes for mountain goats on a nearby crag are Comanche boys in goatskins. In their haste, the Rangers abandon a pack mule carrying most of their ammunition. Buffalo Hump kills and scalps a young Ranger named Josh Corn, then scalps fellow Ranger Ezekiel Moody alive at full gallop. Zeke steals a pistol and kills himself. The troop retreats to San Antonio, where Chevallie dies of fever.
Gus hears that Colonel Caleb Cobb, rumored to be a former pirate, is organizing an expedition to capture Santa Fe, New Mexico, and persuades Call to join. In Austin, Gus meets Clara Forsythe, a sharp-tongued girl who works in her father's general store, and is instantly smitten. Before the expedition departs, Clara comes barefoot into the muddy street to kiss him goodbye.
The expedition sets out with nearly two hundred men, including merchants and a perpetually drunk General Phil Lloyd. At the Brazos River, they encounter an enormous buffalo herd. When Buffalo Hump's warriors burn a farm family near Bastrop, a Ranger party pursues the Comanches to the flooded Brazos, where Call kills a Comanche boy hidden behind a dead mule during the crossing. Caleb promotes Call to corporal.
Call, Gus, Bigfoot, and Bes-Das, a Pawnee scout, are sent under a white flag to parley with Buffalo Hump. The war chief declares that both young Rangers belong to him: Gus because he escaped the lance, and Call because Call killed his son. Buffalo Hump visits Caleb's camp for supper, and when Captain Billy Falconer refuses to surrender his prized rifle as a gift, Caleb shoots Falconer dead and hands the weapon over. That night, Bes-Das and Alchise, a half-Apache scout, desert with six horses, stripping the expedition of its most knowledgeable guides.
The column pushes northwest. Shadrach and Matilda form a quiet bond and discuss marriage; she retires from whoring to care for the aging mountain man. Charlie Goodnight, a knowledgeable Texas rancher who crosses the expedition's path, delivers devastating news: The river the expedition is following is not the Red but the Big Wichita, and Santa Fe is hundreds of miles farther than expected. Caleb presses on. Kicking Wolf, the Comanches' most skilled horse thief, steals roughly thirty horses over two nights. A prairie fire closes on three sides with the Palo Duro Canyon at their backs, forcing the men to scramble down the canyon walls. Several die, including Black Sam, the cook, and General Lloyd, who shoots himself.
Caleb sends Bigfoot, Call, and Gus ahead on three recovered horses to find the New Mexican settlements. The trio nearly starves crossing the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains. When their last horse is stolen, they continue on foot, surviving on horse urine and rain puddles. They stagger into the village of Anton Chico, where Captain Salazar, a competent Mexican officer, arrests them and claps them in leg irons.
After a grizzly bear attacks Salazar's camp, the three escape and rejoin the main body, now about forty starving men. A Mexican army of roughly a thousand soldiers appears on the plain. Caleb surrenders without consulting anyone and departs with the Mexican general. Call, enraged, attacks Caleb and smashes his face with a glass jar. He is sentenced to one hundred lashes with a metal-tipped whip, a punishment that nearly kills him. Matilda tends his wounds.
Gomez ambushes the general's escort and kills the general. Caleb is found blinded and hamstrung by the Apaches. Salazar gives him a pistol to end his life, but Caleb turns the gun on Salazar, creasing his neck. A stray bullet kills Shadrach through the heart. Mexican soldiers riddle Caleb with bullets. Matilda's grief for Shadrach is so fierce her howling unnerves the entire camp.
The combined force enters the Jornada del Muerto, a roughly two-hundred-mile, water-scarce desert whose name translates to "dead man's walk." Gomez stalks the column, killing soldiers and Rangers. Salazar shoots Jimmy Tweed, a tall young Ranger from Arkansas with an injured ankle, when Tweed refuses to march. Johnny Carthage, overwhelmed by dread, crawls from camp at night; Gomez finds and kills him. After brutal sleet, Gus spots a light: the village of San Saba, where they find shelter and food.
At El Paso, Major Laroche, a cold French officer, takes command. A panicked attempt to flee during a river bathing triggers a cavalry massacre of most remaining Texans. The ten survivors are taken to San Lazaro, a leper colony. Laroche conducts a bean lottery: Each blindfolded man draws from a jar holding five white and five black beans. White means life; black means death. Call draws white; Bigfoot draws black; Gus draws white. Bigfoot and four others are executed by firing squad. From a balcony, Lady Lucinda Carey, a Scottish aristocrat with leprosy who resides at the colony, sings a requiem that stills the courtyard and moves listeners to tears.
Lady Carey proposes that the survivors escort her party to Galveston and finances their re-equipping with horses, weapons, and provisions. As they travel east, Buffalo Hump, returning from a raid into Mexico, spots the party and paints for war.
Lady Carey disrobes to reveal her leprosy-blackened body, drapes her boa constrictor over her arms, mounts sidesaddle, and rides toward the Comanche line, singing Verdi. Her attendant Emerald follows, holding aloft a sword and leading a white mule. Kicking Wolf rises from ambush but sees what he believes is a death spirit and flees. The other warriors scatter. Buffalo Hump alone holds his ground but will not charge: His grandmother's prophecy warned that a woman with a white mule would mean catastrophe for the Comanche people. He backs away, resolving to kill the Texans another day.
The party reaches Galveston, where Lady Carey and her household board a ship for home, paying each Ranger one hundred dollars and Matilda two hundred. Long Bill announces he will quit rangering for carpentry. Gus takes Call's arm and proposes they visit Austin, so he can see if Clara still wants to marry him.
The novel opens on the Rio Grande, where a small Ranger troop under Major Randall Chevallie camps west of the Pecos on a mission to scout a stage route to El Paso. Gus and Call are the youngest Rangers. The troop includes Bigfoot Wallace, a renowned scout; Shadrach, a grizzled mountain man; Long Bill Coleman; one-eyed Johnny Carthage; and Matilda Jane Roberts, a large, fearless prostitute known as the Great Western. Two scalp hunters, Kirker and Glanton, ride alongside, though Bigfoot and Shadrach suspect them of scalping Mexican children rather than Comanches.
Bigfoot has a disturbing dream in which Buffalo Hump, the most feared Comanche war chief, rides alongside Gomez, the most feared Apache, an alliance between tribes that would normally never cooperate. When a blind old Comanche woman believed to have prophetic visions wanders into camp, Shadrach speaks with her and learns that hundreds of warriors are heading south to raid Mexico.
While on guard duty one night, Gus wanders off and encounters Buffalo Hump during a lightning storm. The war chief chases him and hurls a lance that pierces Gus's hip, though Gus runs back to camp. Call, who stayed at his post, fires shots to distract Buffalo Hump. Chevallie presses on west, but the troop falls into a trap: What Bigfoot takes for mountain goats on a nearby crag are Comanche boys in goatskins. In their haste, the Rangers abandon a pack mule carrying most of their ammunition. Buffalo Hump kills and scalps a young Ranger named Josh Corn, then scalps fellow Ranger Ezekiel Moody alive at full gallop. Zeke steals a pistol and kills himself. The troop retreats to San Antonio, where Chevallie dies of fever.
Gus hears that Colonel Caleb Cobb, rumored to be a former pirate, is organizing an expedition to capture Santa Fe, New Mexico, and persuades Call to join. In Austin, Gus meets Clara Forsythe, a sharp-tongued girl who works in her father's general store, and is instantly smitten. Before the expedition departs, Clara comes barefoot into the muddy street to kiss him goodbye.
The expedition sets out with nearly two hundred men, including merchants and a perpetually drunk General Phil Lloyd. At the Brazos River, they encounter an enormous buffalo herd. When Buffalo Hump's warriors burn a farm family near Bastrop, a Ranger party pursues the Comanches to the flooded Brazos, where Call kills a Comanche boy hidden behind a dead mule during the crossing. Caleb promotes Call to corporal.
Call, Gus, Bigfoot, and Bes-Das, a Pawnee scout, are sent under a white flag to parley with Buffalo Hump. The war chief declares that both young Rangers belong to him: Gus because he escaped the lance, and Call because Call killed his son. Buffalo Hump visits Caleb's camp for supper, and when Captain Billy Falconer refuses to surrender his prized rifle as a gift, Caleb shoots Falconer dead and hands the weapon over. That night, Bes-Das and Alchise, a half-Apache scout, desert with six horses, stripping the expedition of its most knowledgeable guides.
The column pushes northwest. Shadrach and Matilda form a quiet bond and discuss marriage; she retires from whoring to care for the aging mountain man. Charlie Goodnight, a knowledgeable Texas rancher who crosses the expedition's path, delivers devastating news: The river the expedition is following is not the Red but the Big Wichita, and Santa Fe is hundreds of miles farther than expected. Caleb presses on. Kicking Wolf, the Comanches' most skilled horse thief, steals roughly thirty horses over two nights. A prairie fire closes on three sides with the Palo Duro Canyon at their backs, forcing the men to scramble down the canyon walls. Several die, including Black Sam, the cook, and General Lloyd, who shoots himself.
Caleb sends Bigfoot, Call, and Gus ahead on three recovered horses to find the New Mexican settlements. The trio nearly starves crossing the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains. When their last horse is stolen, they continue on foot, surviving on horse urine and rain puddles. They stagger into the village of Anton Chico, where Captain Salazar, a competent Mexican officer, arrests them and claps them in leg irons.
After a grizzly bear attacks Salazar's camp, the three escape and rejoin the main body, now about forty starving men. A Mexican army of roughly a thousand soldiers appears on the plain. Caleb surrenders without consulting anyone and departs with the Mexican general. Call, enraged, attacks Caleb and smashes his face with a glass jar. He is sentenced to one hundred lashes with a metal-tipped whip, a punishment that nearly kills him. Matilda tends his wounds.
Gomez ambushes the general's escort and kills the general. Caleb is found blinded and hamstrung by the Apaches. Salazar gives him a pistol to end his life, but Caleb turns the gun on Salazar, creasing his neck. A stray bullet kills Shadrach through the heart. Mexican soldiers riddle Caleb with bullets. Matilda's grief for Shadrach is so fierce her howling unnerves the entire camp.
The combined force enters the Jornada del Muerto, a roughly two-hundred-mile, water-scarce desert whose name translates to "dead man's walk." Gomez stalks the column, killing soldiers and Rangers. Salazar shoots Jimmy Tweed, a tall young Ranger from Arkansas with an injured ankle, when Tweed refuses to march. Johnny Carthage, overwhelmed by dread, crawls from camp at night; Gomez finds and kills him. After brutal sleet, Gus spots a light: the village of San Saba, where they find shelter and food.
At El Paso, Major Laroche, a cold French officer, takes command. A panicked attempt to flee during a river bathing triggers a cavalry massacre of most remaining Texans. The ten survivors are taken to San Lazaro, a leper colony. Laroche conducts a bean lottery: Each blindfolded man draws from a jar holding five white and five black beans. White means life; black means death. Call draws white; Bigfoot draws black; Gus draws white. Bigfoot and four others are executed by firing squad. From a balcony, Lady Lucinda Carey, a Scottish aristocrat with leprosy who resides at the colony, sings a requiem that stills the courtyard and moves listeners to tears.
Lady Carey proposes that the survivors escort her party to Galveston and finances their re-equipping with horses, weapons, and provisions. As they travel east, Buffalo Hump, returning from a raid into Mexico, spots the party and paints for war.
Lady Carey disrobes to reveal her leprosy-blackened body, drapes her boa constrictor over her arms, mounts sidesaddle, and rides toward the Comanche line, singing Verdi. Her attendant Emerald follows, holding aloft a sword and leading a white mule. Kicking Wolf rises from ambush but sees what he believes is a death spirit and flees. The other warriors scatter. Buffalo Hump alone holds his ground but will not charge: His grandmother's prophecy warned that a woman with a white mule would mean catastrophe for the Comanche people. He backs away, resolving to kill the Texans another day.
The party reaches Galveston, where Lady Carey and her household board a ship for home, paying each Ranger one hundred dollars and Matilda two hundred. Long Bill announces he will quit rangering for carpentry. Gus takes Call's arm and proposes they visit Austin, so he can see if Clara still wants to marry him.
