Streets of Laredo
Encyclopedia
Streets of Laredo is a 1993 western novel by Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas...

. It is the second book published in the Lonesome Dove series
Lonesome Dove series
The Lonesome Dove series refers to a series of four western novels written by Larry McMurtry and the four television mini-series based upon them.-Novels:# Lonesome Dove # Streets of Laredo # Dead Man's Walk...

, but the fourth and final book chronologically. It was adaptated into a television miniseries in 1995.

Plot introduction

The book follows the adventures of Captain Woodrow F. Call as he tracks a Mexican bandit who is preying on the railroad. It was later made into a television miniseries starring James Garner
James Garner
James Garner is an American film and television actor, one of the first Hollywood actors to excel in both media. He has starred in several television series spanning a career of more than five decades...

 as Captain Call.

Explanation of the novel's title

Streets of Laredo takes its name from a famous cowboy ballad
Streets of Laredo (song)
"Streets of Laredo" , also known as the "Cowboy's Lament", is a famous American cowboy ballad in which a dying cowboy tells his story to a living one. Derived from the English folk song "The Unfortunate Lad", it has become a folk music standard, and as such has been performed, recorded and adapted...

. The title was originally used by Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas...

 for a screenplay that he wrote with Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola...

, but which never materialized as a movie. He rewrote as the original Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove is a 1985 Pulitzer Prize–winning western novel written by Larry McMurtry. It is the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series, but the third installment in the series chronologically...

.

Between Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo

Between the events of the two books, quite a bit has happened. Lorena, lover of Gus McCrae, has left Clara and married Pea Eye Parker, of the former Hat Creek Outfit. They have several children, and own a farm in the Texas panhandle. Pea Eye is thoroughly devoted to Lorena, and Lorena has learned to reciprocate and become almost equally as attached to Pea Eye. Lorena teaches in a nearby schoolhouse. The cattle ranch (set up by the Hat Creek outfit in Montana) has collapsed. Newt is dead, thrown by the Hell Bitch. Call has finally admitted to himself that Newt was his son. July Johnson is dead, and Clara lives alone. Call has gone back to being a Ranger and a gun-for-hire. Trains have greatly expanded the reach of civilization and have pushed back the frontier. The American West is no longer rough and tumble and Captain Woodrow F. Call has become a relic, albeit a greatly respected one. 19-year old Joey Garza and his deadly German rifle (capable of killing a man at a distance of half a mile) are not about to let law and order close the book on the Wild West just yet.

Part I: A Salaried Man

The book opens with former Ranger Captain Woodrow F. Call (now a bounty hunter) and Ned Brookshire, the "salaried man" of the title. Brookshire has been sent to Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

 from New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 by his boss, railroad tycoon Colonel Terry to contract Call's services in apprehending a bandit. The bandit in question is a young Mexican named Joey Garza, who has cost Terry significant business and money through his deadly train robberies. Brookshire is surprised that the old man he encounters has such a reputation, though he notes that Call does have a rather dangerous and respect-demanding aura about him. Brookshire himself does not strike a particularly imposing figure, and soon proves not to be cut out for train or horse travel, inexperienced in the ways of the west or violence, and very homesick for his bossy but loving wife, Katie. Call, on the other hand, is the very picture of experience. Though he is old and seems almost to have trouble lifting his foot into the stirrups, his reputation speaks for him. He has spent forty years on the border and the frontier, many of those with his more talkative but equally respected late partner, Gus McCrae. Protecting settlers in innumerable skirmishes with hostile Indians, rustlers, and dangerous gangs has earned him a great deal of respect and a reputation that generally strikes fear into the hearts of criminals.
Family is a focal point of McMurtry's book, with the emphasis on two very different families. One is that of Pea Eye Parker, Call's corporal, a fellow former-ranger who assists Call in his bounty-hunter duties. Pea Eye is now married to Lorena Wood, the whore heroine of Lonesome Dove and now a school teacher and mother of five. Pea Eye is increasingly pressured by his wife and children to stop following the captain in pursuit of bandits, but his loyalty and devotion to Call usually prevails. Though he initially refuses to accompany Call and Brookshire in the hunt for Joey Garza, his guilt wins out and he soon sets out after Call, accompanied by the celebrated Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes.
The second family that dominates the plot of Streets of Laredo is the family of Joey Garza. Joey's mother, Maria, is the midwife of a small Mexican village on the Rio Grande. She has had a string of brief, failed marriages and has three children, of which Joey is the oldest. Of the other two, her daughter, Teresa, is blind from birth, while her other, Rafael, is very slow. One of Maria's husbands sold Joey to the Apache
Apache
Apache is the collective term for several culturally related groups of Native Americans in the United States originally from the Southwest United States. These indigenous peoples of North America speak a Southern Athabaskan language, which is related linguistically to the languages of Athabaskan...

 Indians as a slave when he was a small boy; by the time he came back to Maria and her family, he was a bitter, angry, silent boy who was obsessed with killing and stealing (unknown to Maria, Joey killed her third husband, the only one who was kind to her or her children). Joey possesses a fine German rifle with a telescopic sight, which enables him to shoot his victims from a half-mile away. At the on-set of the novel, Joey is hiding out in Crow Town, an outlaw village deep in the borderland desert. One of the other notorious denizens of Crow Town is the legendary Texas gunfighter, John Wesley Hardin. Maria travels by horse to Crow Town to warn Joey that Call is on his trail. Joey disappears, stealing his mother's horse, and rides to Langtry, Texas, where he shoots and hangs Judge Roy Bean, the "Law West of the Pecos."

Part II: The Manburner

As Call and Brookshire search for Joey Garza, they discover that he is not the only outlaw preying on the railroad. A string of strange murders soon leads Call in the pursuit of a ghost from the past - Mox Mox (or, as the Apache call him, "The Snake You Do Not See"). A former flunky of Blue Duck, of Lonesome Dove fame, Mox Mox is known for burning his captives alive. Mox Mox was thought to have been killed years before, but had just been in hiding at sea, and has now returned at the head of a murderous gang. The news is especially traumatic for Lorie, who herself had nearly been burnt by the villain while she was a captive of Blue Duck. Fearing for the lives of her children, Lorie sends them to Nebraska, to the protection of her friend Clara Allen. She then sets off to find Pea Eye to warn him. Pea Eye and the Kickapoo Famous Shoes, unaware of the threat of Mox Mox, continue south to find Captain Call. They are thrown into the Presidio jail when the sheriff accuses Famous Shoes of being a horse thief (he came across Famous Shoes eating a dead horse several years ago and decided that it was stolen) and decides to hang him. Captain Call hears of their plight and frees them from jail (near-killing the sheriff in the process in a furious beating) and continues in pursuit of Mox Mox. He ambushes the gang just as they are about to burn two children alive, killing outright all but two - Quick Jimmy, a renegade Cherokee
Cherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...

, who escapes unscathed, and Mox Mox himself, who limps off to die.

Part III: Maria's Children

After rescuing Pea Eye and Famous Shoes from a corrupt bordertown sheriff, Call and his gang close in on Joey Garza. Ned Brookshire is killed in a scuffle; the anticipated confrontation between Call and Joey leaves Call seriously wounded; Lorie must amputate a leg to save him. The Mexican bandit is instead shot and mortally wounded by Pea Eye. Garza then drags himself back to his native village and attempts to kill his younger siblings, Teresa and Rafael, for whom he has long reserved his greatest hatred. Maria, mother of the three children, attempts to stop Joey; he stabs her. A local villager then shoots Joey dead. Maria dies from her wounds, and at her request, Pea Eye and Lorie adopt Maria's two surviving children, return with them to their farm. Call, crippled and no longer able to pursue bandits, goes to live with them. He becomes increasingly attached to Teresa, Maria's blind daughter, demonstrating for the first time an attachment to anyone besides Gus McCrae.

Characters in "Streets of Laredo"

  • Augustus McCrae
  • Captain Woodrow F. Call
    Woodrow F. Call
    Woodrow F. Call is a fictional, Scottish-born Texas Ranger who appears in all four books of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series. Much of the books revolve around his relationship with his Ranger partner Augustus McCrae...

  • Pea Eye Parker
    Pea Eye Parker
    Pea Eye Parker is a fictional Texas Ranger appearing in three books in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series.-Comanche Moon:Pea Eye is played by Troy Baker in the film version of Comanche Moon. In this volume, he, Gus McCrae, Woodrow F...

  • Lorena Wood (Parker)
    Lorena Wood Parker
    Lorena Wood Parker is a fictional character who appears in two of the novels and films in the Lonesome Dove series-Lonesome Dove:She first appears in Lonesome Dove, the first book published, but the third chronologically....

  • Clara Allen
    Clara Forsythe Allen
    Clara Forsythe Allen is a fictional character who appears in the Lonesome Dove series. The novels were written in a different order than the chronology of the narratives: Lonesome Dove , Streets of Laredo , Dead Man's Walk , and Comanche Moon .-Dead Man's Walk:Clara makes her first chronological...

  • Ned Brookshire
  • Joey Garza
  • Mox Mox
  • Famous Shoes
    Famous Shoes
    Famous Shoes is a fictional Kickapoo tracker who appears in two books in the Lonesome Dove series.-Comanche Moon:Famous Shoes makes his second appearance in the series, though his first chronologically, in this book. In the film, he is played by David Midthunder...

  • Charles Goodnight
    Charles Goodnight
    Charles Goodnight, also known as Charlie Goodnight , was a cattle rancher in the American West, perhaps the best known rancher in Texas. He is sometimes known as the "father of the Texas Panhandle." Essayist and historian J...

  • Judge Roy Bean
  • John Wesley Hardin
    John Wesley Hardin
    John Wesley Hardin was an American outlaw, gunfighter, and controversial folk hero of the Old West. He was born in Bonham, Texas. Hardin found himself in trouble with the law at an early age, and spent the majority of his life being pursued by both local lawmen and federal troops of the...

  • Ben Lilly
    Ben Lilly
    Benjamin Vernon Lilly or Ben Lilly , nicknamed Ol' Lilly, was a notorious big game hunter, houndsman and mountain man of the late American Old West. He remains famous for hunting down large numbers of grizzly, cougars and black bears...


Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

It was later made into a US TV miniseries starring James Garner
James Garner
James Garner is an American film and television actor, one of the first Hollywood actors to excel in both media. He has starred in several television series spanning a career of more than five decades...

 replacing Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones is an American actor and film director. He has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive....

 (from the Lonesome Dove miniseries) as Captain Woodrow F. Call, Sissy Spacek
Sissy Spacek
Sissy Spacek is an American actress and singer. She came to international prominence for her for role as Carrie White in Brian De Palma's 1976 horror film Carrie for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination...

 replacing Diane Lane
Diane Lane
Diane Lane is an American film actress.Born and raised in New York City, Lane made her screen debut at the age of 13 in George Roy Hill's 1979 film A Little Romance, starring opposite Sir Laurence Olivier. Soon after, she was featured on the cover of Time magazine...

 as Lorena, and Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...

 replacing Tim Scott as Pea Eye. Also featured were Randy Quaid
Randy Quaid
Randall Rudy "Randy" Quaid is an American actor perhaps best known for his role as Cousin Eddie in the National Lampoon's Vacation movies, as well as his numerous supporting roles in films, including his Oscar nominated performance in The Last Detail, Independence Day, Kingpin and Brokeback Mountain...

 as John Wesley Hardin
John Wesley Hardin
John Wesley Hardin was an American outlaw, gunfighter, and controversial folk hero of the Old West. He was born in Bonham, Texas. Hardin found himself in trouble with the law at an early age, and spent the majority of his life being pursued by both local lawmen and federal troops of the...

, Ned Beatty
Ned Beatty
Ned Thomas Beatty is an American actor who has appeared in more than 100 films and has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain and a Golden Globe Award; won a Drama Desk Award....

 as Judge Roy Bean, Wes Studi
Wes Studi
Wesley "Wes" Studi is a Cherokee actor, who has earned notability for his portrayal of Native Americans in film. He has appeared in well-received Academy Award-winning films, such as Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans, the award-winning Geronimo: An...

 as Famous Shoes
Famous Shoes
Famous Shoes is a fictional Kickapoo tracker who appears in two books in the Lonesome Dove series.-Comanche Moon:Famous Shoes makes his second appearance in the series, though his first chronologically, in this book. In the film, he is played by David Midthunder...

, Charles Martin Smith
Charles Martin Smith
Charles Martin Smith is an American film actor, writer, and director.-Early life:Smith was born in Van Nuys, California. His father, Frank Smith, was a film cartoonist and animator, while his uncle Paul J. Smith was an animator as well as a director for the Walter Lantz Studios...

 as Ned Brookshire, George Carlin
George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, actor and author, who won five Grammy Awards for his comedy albums....

 as Billy Williams, Alexis Cruz
Alexis Cruz
Alexis Cruz is an American actor, known for his performances as Rafael in Touched by an Angel and as Skaara in Stargate and Stargate SG-1. Cruz was born in The Bronx, New York of Puerto Rican descent. His mother, Julia, was a songwriter. He currently resides in Los Angeles. He went to Boston...

 as Joey Garza, Kevin Conway as Mox Mox, James Gammon
James Gammon
James Richard Gammon was an American actor, known for playing grizzled "good ol' boy" types in numerous films and television series.-Early life:...

 as Charles Goodnight
Charles Goodnight
Charles Goodnight, also known as Charlie Goodnight , was a cattle rancher in the American West, perhaps the best known rancher in Texas. He is sometimes known as the "father of the Texas Panhandle." Essayist and historian J...

, and Sonia Braga
Sônia Braga
Sônia Maria Campos Braga is a Brazilian actress. She has been nominated for both a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award.-Early life:...

 as Maria Garza.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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