How did Gus die in Lonesome Dove? A doctor could have saved him — Gus threatened to shoot him instead

Gus McCrae dies of blood poisoning from an arrow wound after refusing to let a doctor amputate his second leg. When the doctor tried to bring in help to hold him down, Gus drew his pistol.

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was published in 1985, and the CBS miniseries aired over four nights, February 5 to 8, 1989, with Robert Duvall as Gus and Tommy Lee Jones as his partner, Woodrow Call. Directed by Simon Wincer from a teleplay by Bill Wittliff, it won seven Emmys, and Duvall took home a Golden Globe. Gus's death, near the end of the cattle drive from Texas to Montana, is the scene most people remember.

Spoilers for the novel and miniseries follow.

How Gus gets hurt

Gus and Pea Eye are scouting ahead of the herd in Montana when they're ambushed. Gus takes two arrows in the leg. The two men dig into a shallow cave along a creek bank, and Gus works the arrows out of his leg until he passes out from the pain. Pea Eye goes for help.

Then Gus gets lucky. An old trapper, Hugh Auld, finds him, sees how badly infected the leg is, lends him a horse and ties him into the saddle. Gus rides into Miles City, fires his pistol in the air to get attention, asks for a doctor and collapses.

The doctor's office

He wakes in a hot little room to find his left leg gone. The doctor, a drunk named Joseph Cincinnatus Mobley, took it off while Gus was unconscious, without anesthesia. The infection has spread to the right leg, and Mobley wants that one too. Here's how the standoff plays out:

• The refusal — Gus won't allow it, and promises to shoot Mobley if he comes too close.
• The muscle — Mobley brings in a big young man to hold Gus down. Gus levels his gun at him, and the man leaves fast.
• The regret — Mobley wishes he had taken both legs while Gus was out cold. Gus would probably have shot him for it anyway.
• Call's arrival — Call finally reaches Miles City and tries to talk Gus into the amputation. Gus cocks his pistol again, and Mobley tells Call it's too late to try.

Read more: Who is Lonesome Dove based on? Before Netflix 's remake, meet the real cowboy who carried his dead partner home to Texas

Strictly speaking, the second amputation was never a sure thing. It offered Gus a chance, against what the doctor saw as certain death without it. Gus chose the certainty.

Call accuses him of vanity. He also tries the practical argument: all Gus ever liked to do was sit on the porch drinking whiskey anyway.

"It don't take legs to do that," Call tells him.

Gus doesn't move.

How he dies

Gus spends his last hours settling accounts. He writes letters to Lorena and to Clara, the woman he loved and never married, and leaves his saddle to Pea Eye. He makes Call promise to carry his body back to Texas and bury it in a grove by the Guadalupe River. Then he closes his eyes. Call sits watching, nods off from exhaustion, and Gus dies while he's asleep.

Mobley agrees to pack the body in charcoal and salt through the Montana winter, amputated leg included, so that Call can haul it nearly the length of the country in the spring. When Call comes back for it, the storage shed has been ransacked and the leg is gone.

In the miniseries, Duvall gives Gus a last line that Wincer still singles out decades later.

Wincer recalled that Gus's final words to Call are: "It's been quite a party."

The trip back to Texas with Gus's body takes up the rest of the story.

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