Lonesome Dove

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Part 2, Chapters 56-60Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 56 Summary

The Kiowas ambush Gus. He makes it to a buffalo wallow, dismounts, and waits. He kills his horse with a knife and hides behind it as they approach. The Kiowa horses stop when they smell the blood, and Gus kills two of the riders, then three more. As he waits, he regrets that he has no one to talk with. Gus has always been fascinated by different men’s battle strategies. Call was all aggression. He would kill as long as he could once he was angry. Deets was good at sensing ambushes. Gus is more patient. He waits until night and then goes to the river. He hears voices, then finds July and his group. They spot the enemy camp. July goes to fight with Gus.

Part 2, Chapter 57 Summary

In Blue Duck’s camp, Dog Face is almost dead. One of Gus’s bullets hit him. Blue Duck leaves after giving Lorena to the Kiowas. They castrate and scalp Dog Face. Gus then rides in, shoots them all, and saves Lorena before sending July back to protect his group from Blue Duck.

Part 2, Chapter 58 Summary

Roscoe talks with Joe about Elmira and July. He wakes to see a figure. The man kills Roscoe, Janey, and Joey. July finds the three of them dead an hour later. He remembers Gus encouraging him to stay with them.

July digs their graves with a knife. Gus and Lorena arrive. Gus takes care of the bodies. Roscoe and Janey are eviscerated, and Roscoe is castrated. Joe’s head is crushed. Gus tells July they don’t have the resources to chase Blue Duck. July leaves. Lorena won’t talk yet and can’t stand to be away from Gus.

Part 2, Chapter 59 Summary

Call worries that Gus isn’t back; it has been a week since he left. He lets the men go to Fort Worth. Po Campo knows Blue Duck and doesn’t believe Gus can catch him. Blue Duck killed his three sons. Call can’t imagine Gus dying.

Part 2, Chapter 60 Summary

They reach the Red River during a storm but manage to cross easily. Po gives Deets a wooden figure of a woman that he carved. Call catches himself talking to himself about Gus.

Part 2, Chapters 56-60 Analysis

Gus manages to save Lorena without much difficulty, but July pays a heavy price in the loss of Joey, Janey, and Roscoe. Call’s agitation over Gus’s disappearance is significant. Although he finds it difficult to express affection, he cannot imagine his life without Gus. When he realizes that he cannot imagine Gus dying, it foreshadows the end of Gus’s life. Ironically, Gus can kill multiple men in a gunfight in hostile territory during a rescue mission, but he will meet his end under less dramatic circumstances after they reach their destination.

These chapters portray some of the most graphic violence in the novel. The Kiowas castrate and scalp Dog Face. Gus’s raid to save Lorena causes him to kill all the Kiowas holding her captive. And Blue Duck murders and mutilates Joey, Janey, and Roscoe. This condensed sequence of intense violence highlight’s the novel’s theme of the Flawed Dream of the American West. As they begin their cattle drive, the protagonists enter an environment that is not only inhospitable to human life but also with a centuries-long cycle of violence stemming from Spanish and English colonization and intersecting with the Atlantic slave trade. All the main characters feel aggrieved and in the right. And, in some cases, the ceaseless violence has numbed characters to the meaning of their actions and their effects on others. Beneath the adventure of the cattle drive and the sometimes-humorous incidents, the novel paints the West as a bleak moral landscape.