Comanche Moon was published by Simon & Schuster in 1997, completing the Lonesome Dove tetralogy. Chronologically, it falls between Dead Man’s Walk and Lonesome Dove, covering the period from the late 1850s through the 1860s — the years when the Texas frontier was at its most violent, the Comanche empire was in its death throes, and Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were in their prime as Texas Rangers.
The novel’s central conflict is the Ranger campaign against Buffalo Hump and his successor Kicking Wolf — the last great Comanche war chiefs, whose raids into the Texas settlements were both acts of war and acts of desperation by a people who knew their world was ending. McMurtry’s portrayal of the Comanches is more nuanced here than in the earlier novels: Buffalo Hump, now aging and aware that his people cannot win, undertakes a final great raid — a last, magnificent, doomed gesture of defiance that takes him all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Gus and Call in Their Prime
This is the novel where Gus and Call are most fully themselves — mature, competent, confident in their skills and their partnership. Gus is involved with Clara Allen, the great love of his life, whose eventual marriage to another man will haunt him for decades. Call has a brief, awkward relationship with Maggie Tilton, a prostitute, which produces Newt — the son Call will never acknowledge. These personal failures, set against professional success, give the novel its emotional depth. Gus and Call can defeat any enemy on the frontier, but they cannot manage the simplest human relationships.
The novel also introduces or develops characters who will appear in Lonesome Dove: Blue Duck, here presented as Buffalo Hump’s half-white son, already exhibiting the sociopathic cruelty that will make him the original novel’s great villain; and Jake Spoon, young and already unreliable.
The End of the Frontier
McMurtry uses the tetralogy to trace the complete arc of the Texas frontier from the 1840s to the 1890s. Comanche Moon covers the period when the frontier’s destruction was most active and most violent — the years of the great Comanche raids, the construction of the frontier forts, and the beginning of the systematic extermination of the buffalo herds that would starve the Plains Indians into submission. McMurtry does not romanticize either side: the Rangers are capable of atrocities, and the Comanches are capable of breathtaking cruelty, and both are caught in a process that neither fully controls.
Collecting Comanche Moon
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25
- Signed: $50–$150