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

The novel's ending, where Woodrow Call hauls Gus McCrae's body from Montana back to Texas, reads like the most invented thing in the book. It is the part McMurtry borrowed most directly from history.

Netflix announced a new series based on Lonesome Dove on September 8, 2026, with Zoe Kazan and Jeb Stuart, the team behind the streamer's East of Eden, as co-showrunners. Teton Ridge Entertainment, which bought the rights in February 2025, is producing. There is no cast or premiere date yet. The last adaptation, the 1989 CBS miniseries with Robert Duvall as Gus and Tommy Lee Jones as Call, drew some 26 million homes over its four nights.

The two men behind Gus and Call

McMurtry modeled his pair of former Texas Rangers on two 19th-century Texas cattlemen: Oliver Loving, the basis for Gus, and Charles Goodnight, the basis for Call. In 1866 the two drove a herd west across the desert to the Pecos River and up to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where government beef contractors paid well. The route became the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Goodnight is also credited with inventing the chuck wagon for that drive.

They took a second herd out over the same route in 1867. On the Pecos, Loving was attacked by Comanches and badly wounded, and he sent his companion, a man named Wilson, back to find Goodnight and the herd.

The novel keeps the outline almost intact: a wounded partner left alone, a messenger sent for help, and a death that comes slowly from infection.

What actually happened next

Loving made it to Fort Sumner but died of gangrene on September 25, 1867. Before he died, Goodnight promised to have him buried in Texas. The sequence that followed took more than five months.

• Fort Sumner — Loving was buried there temporarily while Goodnight drove the herd on to Colorado.
• The exhumation — Goodnight came back for the body, had it dug up and loaded the coffin into a wagon.
• The road home — the coffin traveled roughly 600 miles back to Parker County, Texas. Accounts disagree on exactly who rode with it.
• Weatherford — Loving was reburied in the town's Greenwood Cemetery on March 4, 1868, with Masonic honors.

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Loving County, Texas, and the village of Loving, New Mexico, are both named for him. The cemetery in Weatherford holds a second man McMurtry drew on: Bose Ikard, a Black cowboy who rode with Goodnight for years and became the model for Joshua Deets, the scout Danny Glover played in 1989.

Goodnight paid for Ikard's headstone himself, and in 1929 the Weatherford Daily Herald quoted him saying of Ikard, "I have trusted him farther than any living man."

How McMurtry used it

In the novel, Gus is badly wounded in an attack, makes it to Miles City, Montana, and loses a leg to gangrene. He refuses to let the doctor take the second one, and before he dies he makes Call promise to bury him in Texas, in the orchard on the Guadalupe River where he used to picnic with Clara. Call leaves the body in storage through the winter, then sets out south with it the following spring.

The trip is longer and stranger than the real one. Something gets into the coffin over the winter and makes off with the amputated leg. Call stops at Clara's ranch in Nebraska, where she tells him he should be home with his son instead of hauling a corpse across the country. By the end he is dragging Gus south on the Hat Creek sign.

For the record: McMurtry put Charles Goodnight himself in the book. Near the Purgatoire River, the real cattleman rides into Call's camp to pay his respects to the fictional partner he inspired.

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