No doubt about it, this is an epic Western. The outline of the story is deceptively simple. Call, a former Ranger who is bored hanging around in Lonesome Dove decides to gather a herd and drive it from Texas to Montana. He assembles a crew, most of them not very experienced, and along the way they pick up some others. A woman, a couple of Irishmen, a Mexican cook. It's a long shot, but the determination of Call carries them a long. I loved the language, the dry wit, the complexity of the characters. I also loved the setting. Being a westerner myself, I could quite literally picture the country they were traveling through and McMurty did a masterful job with the sense of place. The ending wasn't totally satisfactory, but it was realistic. McMurty deals out death to his characters without respect to the feelings of the reader, but with great respect to his characters. Well worth the read. 
 ...on a quiet spring evening in Lonesome Dove, a shot could cause complications. 
 But once in a while, even if nobody mentioned one, the thought of women entered his head all on its own, and once it came it usually tended to stay for several hours, filling his noggin like a cloud of gnats. Of course, a cloud of gnats was nothing in comparison to a cloud of Gulf coast mosquitoes, so the thought of women was not that bothersome, but it was a thought Pea would rather not have in his head. 
 "If I'd have wanted civilization I'd have stayed in Tennessee and wrote poetry for a living." Augustus said. "Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made the country interesting to begin with." 
 "Don't be trying to give back pain for pain," he said. You can't get even measures in business like this..."