McMurtry’s Is a Wild and Very Human Old West

Larry McMurtry could have made “Boone’s Lick” an Old West epic to rival “Lonesome Dove,” but he chose not to. We are left to marvel at how much McMurtry was able to accomplish with the novelistic equivalent of a pencil sketch, and to wonder why he didn’t expand the canvas and fill in the colors.

The Cecil family’s journey by flatboat and wagon from Boone’s Lick, Mo., to Fort Phil Kearny, Wyo., in 1866 covers almost as much ground and braves as many dangers as the cattle drive from Texas to Montana in “Lonesome Dove.” And the ranchers in the latter didn’t have to bring along a near-senile grandfather, a barefoot French missionary and four children, including a nursing infant.

The main impetus in “Boone’s Lick” is Mary Margaret Cecil’s desire to “quit” her husband, Dick, who hauls freight on the Oregon Trail and returns to Missouri only for a few days every couple of years to father another child. He has left his family in the care of his older brother, Seth, an ex-Union sharpshooter who shot off his own kneecap--a typical McMurtry touch--the day after the Civil War ended.

Mary Margaret has decided that she prefers Seth to Dick. (Seth loves her, too, though he’s too shy to speak of it.) She could, of course, inform Dick of this alteration of her affections by mail, but she’s “not the sort of woman” to do that. She would rather tell him to his face, even if this means dragging her family across the plains with winter coming on and hostilities with the Sioux and Cheyenne worsening.

But although Mary Margaret’s quixotic determination is the heart of the story, we are never allowed inside her mind. McMurtry’s decision to turn away from the epic mode is most evident in his choice of narrators. “Boone’s Lick” is told by teenage Sherman “Shay” Cecil, who is mystified by his mother’s behavior and is still mystified when, as a retired judge, he looks back on events a half-century old.

Shay is a likable but unremarkable boy. He pales next to Mary Margaret; the priest, Father Villy, bound to convert the heathen in Siberia; their Shoshone guide, Charlie Seven Days, on a mission for Sacajawea, the “Old Woman” who once guided Lewis and Clark; his fun-loving, fearless sister Neva, who will grow up to translate for chiefs and generals; even Seth, who is clear-headed in emergencies, if befuddled around women. Each of these deserves a novel of his or her own, though McMurtry uses most of them as throwaways.

Shay witnesses great events, but from a physical distance or through the humorous detachment with which McMurtry deflates them. He rides in a posse with Wild Bill Hickok to capture Missouri outlaws, but in a region emptied of horses by the war, the posse has to jog along on mules, and an angry bear disrupts the gunplay. In Wyoming, 80 soldiers charging to the rescue of woodcutters, including Dick Cecil, are killed in the Fetterman Massacre of Dec. 21, 1866. Shay sees the slaughter, but from miles away.

The sparing but vivid details McMurtry does give us, along with that detachment and humor, lend “Boone’s Lick” an authority that epics sometimes lack. His characters are real in their inconsistency. Mary Margaret is often fierce, but her reaction on discovering that Dick has two Native American families in the West is human: She’s furious at him but gets along just fine with the other wives and children.

In the end, as in real life, even the most memorable actions grow misty. When Mary Margaret shoots a sheriff’s horse (with the sheriff on it) and butchers it to feed her family, did she really imagine, as she claims, that it was an elk? “Did Ma always prefer Uncle Seth to Pa?” Shay wonders. “Did Pa wander the West for years, hoping his brother would relieve him of his outspoken wife? Did Uncle Seth mean from the first to steal his brother’s wife? Did they all three know what they were doing, or half know, or just blunder on?”