Lonesome Dove

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Part 2, Chapters 66-70Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 66 Summary

Luke pesters Elmira constantly, and she worries that he will try to rape her. He threatens to kill Zwey unless she gives in to his demands. One afternoon she chases him off with a gun, then tells Zwey when he returns. Someone shoots at them from the dark that night but misses. Luke returns two days later and acts normally.

Elmira wakes to Luke on top of her. Zwey grabs him and smashes his head against a wagon wheel, almost tearing his ear off. Luke is then quiet for four days. Elmira tries to sew his ear back on. He has a fever for two weeks. Luke says he wasn’t the one who shot at them in the dark, and Elmira thinks he might be telling the truth.

Part 2, Chapter 67 Summary

Po Campo gets a reputation as a fortune teller. Gus asks how many times he’ll marry, and Po says there will be no more wives for Gus. Five men from the Wichita tribe arrive and talk with Call, who is cordial and gives them some food.

At night, Call often rides with Gus to take Lorena supper. Gus thinks about the strangeness of life; Jake accidentally shot a dentist, which eventually resulted in Gus being here with Lorena and a cattle herd. He blames Jake for everything bad that has happened to them.

Lorena starts to worry that Gus will leave her. They all get caught in a grasshopper storm. It takes hours for them to pass, and Newt is miserable and becomes lost. Five men from the Wichita tribe eventually approach and lead Newt back to his men and the herd.

Part 2, Chapter 68 Summary

It’s evident to Jake that he is traveling with killers, but he can’t figure out how to get away. Dan wants to steal a herd and sell it. In town, Jake is talking with a beautiful girl when her husband approaches and hits him with a rifle. Reflexively, Jake shoots the man twice before he can strike him again.

The girl smiles at him as Jake rides out of town with the Suggs brothers. At least thirty people see them go. As they travel, they rob a family of farmers. Jake is increasingly worried about Frog Lip, who radiates a sense of cold and danger despite rarely speaking.

Part 2, Chapter 69 Summary

July quickly realizes that Elmira is not in Dodge City. He tries to write a letter to her, but he doesn’t know how to summarize the losses their family suffered. He writes to Peach instead, telling her that they might need to find another sheriff. He gets drunk in a saloon, where he talks to a woman named Jennie, who knew Elmira. She tells him that Elmira is probably looking for Dee Boot, who is still alive and gambling in Ogallala. Jennie and Elmira were both married to Dee. July is drunk enough to go upstairs with Jennie, but he starts vomiting over the rail before they can get to her room. Jennie says she is like his wife, and that even if he finds Elmira, it won’t help.

Part 2, Chapter 70 Summary

A cow gores Mouse and fatally wounds him. Dish shoots the horse for Newt, and Newt cries all night. He has coffee with Lorena and Gus in the morning. Lorena dreads the day when they reach the other woman Gus refuses to tell her about. She wants to marry Gus. At camp, the men pester Newt for descriptions of Lorena.

Deets is homesick, but Call doesn’t plan on ever going back. He wants to catch Blue Duck and is relatively happy to have a new project. He is surprised when Deets says they have crossed the tracks of Jake’s horse. Call doesn’t tell Gus because he doesn’t want to agitate Lorena.

Part 2, Chapters 66-70 Analysis

Despite Jennie’s protests that finding Elmira will not give him a satisfactory result, July can’t stop looking for her. These chapters contain a sense of inevitability and mounting dread. July searches for Elmira despite having no reason to do so. Elmira continues to hunt for Dee, despite placing herself in the wilderness with a predatory man like Luke. Call squashes his doubts about the drive and turns his thoughts to Blue Duck instead as if he cannot even consider changing his plans. Lorena’s fixation is increasingly on how she can keep Gus with her. The theme of Honor, Principles, Duty, and Purpose takes on new depths as the main characters become more obsessively committed to their goals while simultaneously losing touch with why they cared about the goals in the first place. Like the cattle stampedes that punctuate the novel, the characters grow increasingly determined and yet purposeless.

Looming over all these obsessions is Po Campo’s seemingly harmless remark that Gus will not have any more wives. The fortune need not mean that Gus will die, but it does mean that Gus will not get what he wants, which is to marry Clara.

These events were all put in motion by Jake’s return to Lonesome Dove. Had he not managed to shoot a dentist, none of them would have experienced the losses of the journey. As Jake’s situation grows more complicated, he is not the only one who will suffer the consequences of his actions. Everyone makes their own choices, but Gus is not wrong when he gives Jake the responsibility for everything that fate has put in their paths on the cattle drive.