Better than fiction

One of the memorable subplots in Lonesome Dove is Call's (Tommy Lee Jones) journey back to Texas with the body of his friend Gus (Robert Duvall). This was not fiction, it was based on fact.

When Oliver Loving was killed in a clash with Indians in New Mexico, his partner, Charles Goodnight, promised him he would not be buried on "foreign soil". So he took the body 600 miles back to Texas.

But where the mini-series left us with Tommy Lee Jones back in Texas pondering the cost of his "vision", Goodnight went immediately back on the trail. His cattle drive was not a once in a lifetime lark to see new country, but simply one of many he made over the trail he blazed. (That trail was called the Goodnight-Loving trail which has to be the best name ever to come out of the west).

Goodnight was a hard-charger. He knew that cattle were cheap in Texas and could be sold for a good price around the Rocky Mountain mining towns and along the railroads. So he was on the road constantly with herds. In the nine years after the Civil War he took 8-10,000 head a year to market. In that time it is said that he never stayed more than four nights in any one place.

(Read more here and here.)