Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove

by

Larry McMurtry

Luck, Fate, and Chance Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
American Mythology Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Luck, Fate, and Chance Theme Icon
The Good Life  Theme Icon
The Meaning of Masculinity Theme Icon
Feminine Strength Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lonesome Dove, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Luck, Fate, and Chance Theme Icon

While only some of Lonesome Dove’s characters are serious gamblers (John Tinkersley, Jake Spoon, and Dee Boot each make a living of it), the stories in the novel unanimously remind readers that no one is exempt from the forces of fate, luck, or chance. Sometimes, a person gets lucky, like when Jake shoots a Mexican bandit early in his Ranger career or when the Santa Rosa sheriff’s deputy shoots Blue Duck’s horse out from under him—or when July happens to be in the right place not only to rescue Roscoe and Janey from highway robbery but to get credit for arresting two of east Texas’s most notorious bandits. Other times, one’s luck turns bad, like when July, Roscoe, Joe, and Janey wander into Blue Duck’s territory and Blue Duck murders the deputy and the children. As a Ranger, Augustus McCrae is seemingly imperious to bullets and arrows, only to fall victim to an unlucky shot in his retirement; he has the great good fortune to be rescued and helped into Miles City by Hugh Auld, only to succumb to his wounds anyway. This mishmash of good and bad luck illustrates just how much chance factors into a person’s fortune—nobody, it seems, is destined solely for good or bad things.

Sometimes, though, it’s possible to cheat, at least in small ways. Gus convinces Lorena to have sex with him with a subtle trick of cards during a game. But in general, cheating in this way isn’t an option, and so the book suggests that the best way to approach life is to accept the good with the bad. After Blue Duck murders his companions, July frets that he made the wrong choice by bringing them with him, but Augustus reminds him that he couldn’t have predicted the outcome. Moreover, there’s no point in chasing Blue Duck. Fate will come for him, too, in the form of old age if not a bigger and meaner outlaw. It’s this same acceptance of fate and chance that allows Augustus to face his own death with composure. This is an outlook he tries to teach to Newt in the wake of Jake’s and Deets’s deaths, and, by extension, one that the book itself offers to readers in their own lives.

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Luck, Fate, and Chance ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Luck, Fate, and Chance appears in each chapter of Lonesome Dove. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Luck, Fate, and Chance Quotes in Lonesome Dove

Below you will find the important quotes in Lonesome Dove related to the theme of Luck, Fate, and Chance.
Chapter 6 Quotes

It was funny how one shot could make a man’s reputation like that. It was a hip shot Jake made because he was scared, and it killed a Mexican bandit […]. Jake shot blind from the hip, with the sun in his eyes to boot, and hit the bandit right in the Adam’s apple, a thing not likely to occur more than once in a lifetime, if that often.

But it was Jake’s luck that most of the men who saw him make the shot were raw boys too, with not enough judgment to appreciate how lucky a thing it was. Those that survived grew up told the story all across the West [… about] what a dead pistol shot Jake Spoon was, though any many who had fought with him through the years would know that he was no shot at all with a pistol and only a fair shot with a rifle.

Related Characters: Captain Woodrow Call, Augustus McCrae, Jake Spoon, July Johnson, Dan Suggs , Roy Suggs, Ed Suggs
Page Number: 71-72
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

It seemed the Irishmen were part of the outfit, though. Their total inexperience was offset by an energy and a will to learn that impressed even Call. He let them stay in the first place, because he was so short-handed he couldn’t afford to turn away any willing hand. By the time more competent men arrived the Irishmen had gotten over their fear of horses and worked with a will. Not being cowboys, they had no prejudice against working on the ground. Once shown the proper way to throw a roped animal, they cheerfully flung themselves on whatever the ropers drug up to the branding fire, even if it was a two-year-old bull with lots of horn and a mean disposition. They had no great finesse, but they were dogged and would eventually get the creature down.

Related Characters: Captain Woodrow Call, Sean O’Brien , Allen O’Brien
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

They had unpacked in the dark and made a mess of it. […] It was plain camping wasn’t a neat way of life. There was no place to wash, and they were carrying very little water, which was the main reason she had refused Jake. She liked a wash and felt he could wait until they camped near a river and could splash a little of the dust off before bedding down.

Augustus watched them eat the poor burned breakfast. It was eternally amusing to him, the flow of human behavior. Who could have predicted Jake would be the one to take Lorena out of Lonesome Dove? She had been meaning to leave since the day she arrived, and now Jake, who had slipped from the grasp of every woman who had known him, was firmly caught by a young whore from Alabama.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon
Page Number: 215
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

“I hope this is hard enough for you, Call,” he said. I hope it makes you happy. If it don’t, I give up. Driving all these skinny cattle all that way is a funny way to maintain an interest in life, if you ask me.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Call said.

“No, but then you seldom ask,” Augustus said. “You should have died in the line of duty, Woodrow. You’d know how to do that fine. The problem is you don’t know how to live.”

“Whereas you do?” Call asked.

“Most certainly,” Augustus said. “I’ve lived about a hundred to your one. I’ll be a little riled if I end up being the one to die in the line of duty, because it ain’t my duty and it ain’t yours, either. This is just fortune hunting.”

“Well, we wasn’t finding one in Lonesome Dove,” Call said.

Related Characters: Captain Woodrow Call (speaker), Augustus McCrae (speaker)
Page Number: 227-228
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

“Well, I’ll say a word,” Augustus said. “This was a good, brave boy, for we all saw that he conquered his fear of riding. He had a fine tenor voice, and we’ll all miss that. But he wasn’t used to this part of the world. There’s accidents in life and he met with a bad one. We may all do the same if we ain’t careful.”

He turned and mounted old Malaria. “Dust to dust,” he said. “Let’s the rest of us go to Montana.”

He’s right, Call thought. The best thing to do with a death was to move on from it. One by one the cowboys mounted and went off to the herd, many of them taking a quick last look at the muddy grave under the tree.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Captain Woodrow Call, Jake Spoon, Deets, Sean O’Brien , Maggie
Page Number: 286
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 37 Quotes

He began to feel more and more of a grievance against more and more people. […] It seemed to him that a chain of thoughtless actions, on the part of many people he knew, had resulted in his being stuck in a cabin in the wilderness with a difficult widow woman. Jake should have kept his pistol handier, and not resorted to a buffalo gun. Benny Johnson should have been paying attention to his dentistry and not walking around in the street in the middle of the day. July shouldn’t have married Elmira if she was going to run off, and of course Elmira certainly had no business getting on the whiskey boat.

In all of it no one had given much consideration to him, least of all the townspeople of Fort Smith. Peach Johnson and Charlie Barnes, in particular, had done their best to see that he had to leave.

Related Characters: Jake Spoon, July Johnson, Elmira, Roscoe Brown, Peach Johnson , Louisa Brooks , Charlie Barnes
Page Number: 298-299
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 58 Quotes

July didn’t want to see it. He knew he had to, but he didn’t want to.

He felt a terrible need to turn things back, all the way back to the time when he and Roscoe and Joe and Elmira had all been in Arkansas. He knew it could never be. Something had happened which he would never be free of. He had even lost the chance to stay and die with his people, though Captain McCrae had offered him that chance. “I’d feel better in my mind if you’d stay with your part,” he had said.

He had not stayed, but when he had gone, he hadn’t fought, either. He had done nothing but ride twice over the same stretch of prairie, while death had come to both camps.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Blue Duck , July Johnson, Elmira, Roscoe Brown, Janey , Joe Boot
Page Number: 462
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 66 Quotes

It occurred to her that she had taken a hard route, just to escape July Johnson. Her own folly amused her: she had one thought of herself as smart—but look at where she was. If Dee Boot could see her he would laugh his head off. Dee loved to laugh about the absurd things people did for bad reasons. The fact that she had done it because she wanted to see him would only amuse him more. Dee would tell her that she ought to have gone back to Dodge and asked one of the girls to get her work.

Instead, shew as driving a mule wagon across northern Kansas. They had been lucky and seen no Indians, but that could always change. Besides, it soon developed that Luke was going to be as much trouble as an Indian.

Related Characters: July Johnson, Elmira, Big Zwey , Luke , Dee Boot
Page Number: 504
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 88 Quotes

Sitting in the kitchen with the girls and the baby, Lorena felt happy in a way that was new to her. It stirred in her distant memories of the days she had spent in her grandmother’s house in Mobile when she was four. […] It was her happiest memory, one she treasured so, that in her years of travelling she grew almost afraid to remember it […] She was very afraid of losing her one good, warm memory. […]

But in Clara’s house she wasn’t afraid to remember her grandmother and the softness of the bed. Clara’s house was the kind of house she thought she might live in some day—at least she had hoped to when she was little. But […] she had started living in hotels or little rooms. She slowly stopped thinking of nice houses and the things that went with them, such as little girls and babies.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Clara Allen , Sally Allen , Betsey Allen , Mosby , John Tinkersley, Martin
Page Number: 707
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 93 Quotes

“I like to keep Woodrow feeling that he’s caused a peck of trouble,” Augustus said. “I don’t want him to get sassy. But I wouldn’t have missed coming up here. I can’t think of nothing better than riding a fine horse into a new country. It’s exactly what I was meant for, and Woodrow too.”

“Do you think we’ll see Indians?” Newt asked.

“You bet,” Augustus said. “We might all get killed this afternoon, for all I know. That’s the wild for you—it’s got its dangers, which is part of the beauty. ’Course the Indians have had this land forever. To them it’s precious because it’s old. To us it’s exciting because it’s new.”

Newt noticed that Mr. Gus had a keen look in his eye. His white hair was long, almost to his shoulders. There seemed to be no one who could enjoy himself like Mr. Gus.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Newt (speaker), Captain Woodrow Call, Deets
Page Number: 756
Explanation and Analysis: