The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker

Review

If the cattle drive in the far-better-known Lonesome Dove, from the Rio Grande to Montana, was long, the drive in Clair Huffaker's The Cowboy and the Cossack is far, far longer. The cowboys in this novel must cross an ocean with their beeves, to Vladivistok, Russia, and then push on deep into Siberia with them.

Once on Russian soil, however, the Slash-Diamond outfit is met by a Cossack named Captain Rostov who informs the cowboys that his own men will drive the cattle onward from that point. The outfit's leader, Shad, refuses, insisting that they will complete the job they were hired to do themselves. Thus begins a prickly alliance between the cowboys and Cossacks who will make the grueling trek together to a starved town called Bakaskaya.

Told entirely from the point of view of the youngest cowboy in the outfit, Levi (whose parents named him after the jeans), the novel is a traditional coming-of-age story. It's also an out-and-out men's adventure story. The only women in the tale are glimpsed while serving food and drinks in one of the rare towns but always remain remote, mysterious, and yearned for.

But as manly adventure yarns go, it's a corker. The men of two worlds, suspicious and hostile to each other at first, develop mutual respect and even friendship as they battle weather, imperial soldiers, wild animals, and even wilder men in the form of Genghis Kharlagawl and his Tartars. Adding to the complications, Shad and his men eventually learn that they were brought to Russia under false pretenses.

Much of the fun, of course, derives from our learning about the world of 19th century Russia through the young protagonist's eyes. This is not the Russia of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, though; it's the remote outposts of Eastern Russia and the no-man's land of the Mongolian border. I have no idea how much Russian history Huffaker may have studied to pull this off, but it comes across with complete believability. The writing is clear and compelling, pulling you through the 300 or so pages in a flurry.

Huffaker was a successful novelist, writing mostly Westerns in the 50s and 60s, and a sought-after screen writer with more than a dozen movies credited to him. Many of his Western novels were turned into movies, though, oddly, not the one that was undoubtedly his best.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Over the course of his life, McMurtry
managed or owned 26 bookstores.

It certainly took me long enough to get around to reading this one-time bestselling novel from 1985. (I've still never seen the TV miniseries.) I'm glad I finally did read it, though, because it's a wonderful, old-fashioned novel filled with a Dickensian cast of characters, life-and-death perils, and deep emotions. What more could you ask for with your morning coffee?

Review

Prior to reading this, I only knew McMurtry through the movie adaptations of Hud and The Last Picture Show. Those stories were set in modern small-town Texas. By contrast, Lonesome Dove is a full-on Western set in the 1870s. And whereas the movies I mentioned focused on domestic affairs (a failing ranch and failing love affairs), Lonesome Dove follows a Quixotic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to the upper reaches of Montana. Indeed, our main protagonists, Call and Gus, have much in common with the Don and Sancho.

The book features enough hair-raising adventures to keep any fan of traditional genre Westerns entertained for its nearly 900-page length. McMurtry proves to be a masterful conjurer of dramatic confrontations, narrow escapes, and heartbreaking deaths. The book is as male-dominated as you'd expect in a Western about a cattle drive, but two of the novel's most important characters are women. Their stories are hard and unsentimental -- and just as gripping as the men's stories.

As if all that weren't enough, the novel also encompasses a coming-of-age story. While Lonesome Dove is the name of the town where the story begins and ends, the teenaged boy named Newt can also be thought of as the "lonesome dove" at the heart of the tale. The son of a prostitute who died when he was a boy, not knowing who his father is, Newt is offered a place to live on the ranch that belongs to Call and Gus. As he endures the hardships and bitter lessons of the cattle drive to Montana, he is also searching for his place in the world, trying to understand who he is and where he belongs.

I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not enjoying its many twists and turns or appreciating its fully imagined characters. But its mood is elegiac throughout, its affairs all lacerating, its outcomes all tragic. As with life itself, you won't make it through to the end unscarred.