Streets of Laredo’s central plot—the manhunt for Joey Garza—is set against the backdrop of an encroaching industrial civilization with corporate bureaucracy at the helm. The novel portrays the era of the lone ranger and the independent cattleman as a fading memory, giving way to a new order of railroads, ledgers, and impersonal employment. The wild frontier, once a landscape of epic struggle and individual will, is systematically being tamed and industrialized by forces that value profit and efficiency over honor and justice.

The alliance of Captain Call and Brookshire, the Brooklyn accountant sent by railroad president Colonel Terry to oversee the manhunt, embodies this tension. Brookshire is a “salaried man,” wholly out of place in Texas, where the wind steals his hat, and the vast emptiness gives him a “blowing-away feeling” (19). He thrives in a world of ledgers, reports, and budgets, where even a manhunt is a corporate expense to be managed. His presence transforms Captain Call from an independent agent of justice into a contracted employee, subject to the whims of a distant boss who communicates via terse, demanding telegrams. This shift from personal mission to corporate assignment signals the subordination of old frontier codes to the logic of modern business.

The railroad itself is the primary engine of this transformation, a symbol of commerce cutting through the once-limitless prairie. It alters the very nature of crime and justice. Outlaws no longer just rustle cattle; they rob trains, targeting military payrolls and corporate assets. Call is hired to protect the profits of the railroad rather than to bring Joey to justice. After Joey robs a train carrying a military payroll, Brookshire notes, “The military did not take kindly to having its money snatched. Hints had been received; the military let it be known that they might have to find other modes of conveyance if the young Mexican struck one more time” (62). From the opening chapters, McMurtry frames the motivation behind Joey’s capture as primarily financial. The manhunt is a corporate-funded expedition managed by an accountant. The train shrinks the vast distances of the West, but as Call observes, it also weakens the essential skills of the old world, like remembering the location of water holes. The technology that connects the nation also makes the rugged self-sufficiency of the frontiersman increasingly obsolete.

The personal choices of the characters reflect this broader societal change. Pea Eye definitively chooses the settled life of a farmer and family man over the violent, nomadic existence of a ranger, a decision that symbolizes the end of the era of the wandering frontiersman. His loyalty has shifted from his former commander to his wife and his land. By the novel’s end, even Captain Call, the last holdout of the old order, is completely removed from the world he once dominated. Injured and dependent, he is reduced to sharpening tools in a barn on Pea Eye’s farm. This final image acts as an elegy for the mythic West: The great hero, who believed he was taming the wilderness with his gun, is now a relic, his epic skills rendered irrelevant in an industrialized landscape.