Streets of Laredo was published by Simon & Schuster in 1993, eight years after Lonesome Dove. Gus McCrae is dead, and the novel’s emotional register is correspondingly darker. Captain Woodrow Call, now in his seventies, is hired by a railroad to hunt down Joey Garza, a young Mexican bandit who has been robbing trains with a German rifle that can kill at distances beyond anything Call has encountered. Call accepts the job not because he needs the money but because he cannot imagine not accepting — he is a man whose identity is action, and without a mission he is nothing.
The pursuit takes Call across the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the 1890s, a landscape that has changed dramatically since the cattle drive to Montana. The open range is fenced, the buffalo are gone, the Comanches are on reservations, and the railroads have transformed distance from an adventure into a schedule. Call, who navigated by landmarks and instinct, is bewildered by a world of timetables and telegraph wires. He is also physically diminished — his eyesight is failing, his joints ache, his reflexes have slowed. The man who could face down any enemy in Lonesome Dove is now an old man hunting a young one, and the outcome is not what he expects.
Joey Garza
Joey Garza is one of McMurtry’s most disturbing creations — a teenage sociopath whose beauty, intelligence, and utter lack of empathy make him genuinely frightening. He kills without pleasure or remorse, simply as a practical matter. His mother, Maria, is the novel’s moral center: a poor woman in a Mexican village who loves her monstrous son and knows she cannot save him. The chapters set in Mexico — Maria’s daily life, the village’s poverty, the complex relationship between Mexican communities and the Anglo power structures across the border — are among the novel’s strongest.
The Demolition of the Hero
Streets of Laredo is, more explicitly than Lonesome Dove, about the destruction of the Western hero. Call is shot, loses an arm, and is left crippled — not in a climactic confrontation but in a random encounter that goes wrong. The hero does not go down fighting; he goes down because the world has moved beyond the skills that made him a hero. McMurtry strips away every comfort: Call’s competence, his physical strength, his certainty, and finally his stoicism. The ending is bleak in a way that Lonesome Dove, for all its deaths, never quite managed.
Collecting Streets of Laredo
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $15–$35
- Signed: $75–$200