"My Good Friend": Xavier Wanz
“Well, I’m going to miss Wanz.”
Augustus McCrae, Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove has its share of emotionally evocative moments. This is true for the novel and the miniseries based on it. Augustus’s rescue of Lorena from Blue Duck’s gang and her outburst at Adobe Walls, comes to mind: “They shouldn’t a’took me, Gus.” Then there’s Jake’s hanging in Kansas, Gus’s goodbye to Clara and Lorie in Nebraska, the death of Deets in Wyoming,* and, of course, Gus’s death in Montana. But one of the most intimate scenes in the story passes between Gus and Xavier Wanz, the owner of the Dry Bean saloon in Lonesome Dove, who’s heartbroken over Lorena’s departure. In the novel the scene takes up a page and a quarter but doesn’t come close to the raw emotion of the two minutes captured in the miniseries.
Gus stops by the Dry Bean for one last drink with Xavier before the Hat Creek outfit sets out for Montana. Xavier confesses his love for Lorie, telling Gus he would have taken her out of a life of prostitution and married her. Gus nods, sits, and drinks a whiskey Xavier poured for him. The two men sit in silence for a second, then Gus says, “If it helps any, it is my opinion, she made poor bark going with Jake Spoon.” Xavier looks Gus in the eye and says, almost under his breath, “Thank you.” They sit a moment more, then Gus slaps his leg and says, as he stands, “Well . . .” extending his hand. Xavier stands and take Gus’s hand in both of his and says, “Goodbye, my fine friend.” Gus reciprocates: “Goodby to you, my good friend.” In a whisper, Xavier says, “Goodbye.” As Gus pulls away, Xavier holds on to Gus’s hand a second longer. The pained expression in Xavier’s face as his friend walks away, never to see him again, is palpable and foreshadows the desperate measures he’s soon to take.
Anyone who has looked into the backstory of Lonesome Dove knows Larry McMurtry relied on the history and tales of others to quilt together his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. As the son and grandson of working cowboys whose uncles trailed some of the last herds from Texas to railheads in Kansas, McMurtry had access to a wealth of family lore. He also pulled threads from cowboy authors Teddy “Blue” Abbott and Charlie Siringo, the biographies of cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, and the histories of the outlaw Blue Duck and the black cowboy Bose Ikard to create specific scenarios and characters.
McMurtry didn’t just draw from these sources to sketch out his characters. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call were inspired by Cervantes’s characters: Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. But where did McMurtry come up with the Frenchman Xavier Wanz—a minor character with such a distinctive name? Is Xavier just a creation of a vivid imagination? Or did McMurtry find Xavier someplace else?
Well-versed in the biographical histories of early Texas cowboys, I’m convinced McMurtry stumbled upon the name Xavier Wanz in the 1924 or 1925 revised two volume The Trail Drivers of Texas. If so, McMurtry took only the name from the real Xavier Wanz. Whereas McMurtry’s Wanz moved from New Orleans, where he worked as a waiter in a fine restaurant, the real Wanz immigrated to Texas from Alsace, France as a one-year-old with his parents in 1845. They settled in Vandenburg, fifteen or so miles northwest of Castroville—a ghost town today.
He grew up raising cattle. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the First Texas Cavalry, on the Union side. At war’s end, he returned to Texas and found his livestock scattered, sold, and slaughtered. He reestablished a fine herd of cattle and horses through shrewdness and sweat.
More like his “fine friend” Augustus McCrae than the saloon owner of McMurtry’s imagination, the real Wanz became an Indian fighter. At the end of Reconstruction, Wanz became a Lieutenant in Company E of the Texas Rangers, under the command of German-born Captain Heinrich “Henry” Joseph Richarz. His exploits as an Indian fighter and his ability to recover stolen horses was celebrated in 1886 when the small town of Bullhead was renamed Wanz (sometimes written Vance).
Like his literary counterparts, Wanz retired from the Rangers and ranched for the rest of his life. Unlike his literary namesake—the heartbroken, childless bachelor who locked himself in Lorena’s room and burned down the Dry Bean around him—the real Wanz enjoyed a long life, surrounded by a loving wife and several children. He died in 1922 or 1923 at the age of seventy-eight or seven-nine.
* In the miniseries, when Woodrow F. Call returns to Lonesome Dove he tells Bolivar, their former cook, that Deets is buried in Montana. Based on the geography in the novel, however, Deets would have been buried in Wyoming. McMurtry writes, “Lippy offered to help with the grave-digging, and Call let him. . . . They were digging on a little rise, north of the juncture of where the Salt Creek joined the Powder River” (701). Salt Creek joins the Powder River in Wyoming, not Montana.
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 193.
Lonesome Dove, “Leaving” and “On the Trail,” dir. Simon Wincer (Los Angeles: Motown Productions, 1989), blu-ray.
“Xavier Wanz Came to Texas in 1845,” Frontier Times, vol. 2, no. 5 (February 1930), 201–208.
Xavier Wanz, “Medina County Pioneer,” in The Trail Drivers of Texas, ed. J. Marvin Hunter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 719–21.
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Thanks - great article.
I didn’t realise that there was a Texas cavalry regiment that fought on the Union side in the Civil War.