I’ve been reading the Lonesome Dove trilogy for weeks (months? or is it years?) now.
I’m normally a quick reader, but I’ve been playing outside from dawn ‘til dusk this summer and neglecting my novels.
At my current bookmark, one of the outfits just got the hell out of Dodge City - an appropriate place to go with my photo of the day.
It’s hard to imagine undeveloped, sprawling plains and cattle drives with hundreds of cattle being led by only a handful of cowboys. In fact, I was having so much trouble in picturing it I looked up cattle drives on YouTube. I couldn’t find anything with the magnitude detailed in Lonesome Dove, but I did find this video on The Green River Drift, the longest running cattle drive in the United States.
The American West has fascinated me, with most of my favorite books falling into the westerns category (978 in the Dewey Decimal System). The stories all tell a hard life that is divorced from my own reality. I don’t like the inherit racism/sexism/and disregard for Native American life, but there is something about the landscape and the exposure to the elements that intrigues me.
-C