How did Lonesome Dove get its name? McMurtry called the moment an epiphany
Larry McMurtry's 843-page cattle-drive novel won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and sold more than four million copies. The title came from a sign he read while standing in a parking lot in Denton County, Texas. He was very specific about it afterward.
McMurtry took the name from an old church bus marked "Lonesome Dove Baptist Church," which he saw in the early 1980s just after leaving Ranchman's Cafe in Ponder, Texas. He'd been stuck for a title for a trail-driving book. He described the sighting as the moment the whole thing clicked.
What he said about it
Ranchman's was his favorite restaurant, and he'd drive roughly 100 miles from Archer City to eat there. He recounted the bus sighting to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which quoted him directly:
"If ever I had an epiphany it was at that moment," McMurtry said.
In a 1987 profile he added that he'd known immediately it would make a good title, and that five years passed before he attached the name to the story he'd been carrying around.
The story existed long before the title
Lonesome Dove began in 1972 as a screenplay called Streets of Laredo, written with Peter Bogdanovich after their success on The Last Picture Show. The intended cast:
- John Wayne as Woodrow Call — Wayne dropped out, and the project collapsed with him.
- Jimmy Stewart as Gus McCrae — the role Robert Duvall eventually played on television.
- Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon — later Robert Urich in the 1989 miniseries.
McMurtry bought the rights back and rebuilt it as a novel, published by Simon & Schuster in 1985. The 1989 CBS miniseries followed, and the McMurtry title Streets of Laredo was recycled for a 1995 sequel.
Is the church real?
It is. Lonesome Dove Baptist Church dates to the 1840s and still stands on Lonesome Dove Road in Southlake, in the Dallas–Fort Worth suburbs. The bus is long gone.
Ranchman's fared worse. The Ponder steakhouse, open since 1948 and known for 32-ounce T-bones and chicken-fried steak, closed in October 2023 when its owner retired, then went up for sale and has been slated to reopen since.
For the record: McMurtry drew Call and Gus from real Texas cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, and the scout Deets from Bose Ikard, who rode with Goodnight.
Loving died on the trail and asked to be carried back to Texas for burial. Goodnight did it.