"Yes, a Hell of a Vision"
“You have been a man of vision.” “Yes, a hell of a vision.”
J. Frank Dobie
Few men are more identifiable with Texas than the famed cowman Charles Goodnight—the blazer of the Goodnight-Loving trail, the founder and range boss of the JA Ranch, and the Texas Ranger scout who helped “rescue” Cynthia Ann Parker from Comanche captivity, whose son, the Comanche chief Quanah, Goodnight befriended. For all his achievements as a frontiersman and rancher Goodnight had never attended the annual gathering of the Old-Time Trail Drivers of Texas. But in October 1928, at the age of ninety-two, he remedied that. It was the first and only one he attended. He died a year later, on December 12, 1929.
Texas chronicler, J. Frank Dobie was there and interviewed Goodnight. The two had met a couple of years earlier when Dobie was writing an article on the then ninety-year old rancher. “He was plainly not elated at my arrival” at Goodnight’s Panhandle ranch, Dobie wrote, “though courteous enough. He told me right off that he did not care a damn for any ‘publicity’ that I or any other writer could give him.” But in 1928, when they sat down in the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Goodnight had warmed to Dobie. “For hours through two days he sat,” Dobie wrote, “wide and thick, on a long lounge in the big hotel lobby.” As the two men talked, they were often interrupted by admirers. One of them said, “You have been a man of vision.” Goodnight looked at the man and responded, “Yes, a hell of a vision.” When the man left, Goodnight turned to Dobie: “My life has been mostly a failure.” Dobie doesn’t tell us what Goodnight meant by that, but does say:
That self-depreciation did not keep him from feeling superior in a you-be-damned way to all hypocrites, liars, pretenders, leeches and bootlickers, even when it was his own boots they tried to lick. I have never, however, known an authentic earth-man who licked anybody’s boots.
Larry McMurtry was nobody’s bootlicker—neither Goodnight’s nor Dobie’s—though he made Goodnight’s comment famous when he put it in the mouth of Woodrow F. Call in his novel Lonesome Dove. A few pages before the ending, Call, on his return trip from Montana to Texas to bury his friend Augustus McCrae, learns that the outlaw Blue Duck is scheduled to be hanged in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Call decides to attend the spectacle. While there, he’s approached by a young Denver reporter covering the hanging. “They say you were the most famous Ranger,” the newspaper man says, in hopes of getting an interview. “They say you’ve carried Captain McCrae three thousand miles just to bury him. They say you started the first ranch in Montana. . . . They say you’re a man of vision.”
Call’s response is word-for-word Goodnight: “Yes, a hell of a vision.” McMurtry then writes, “He was forced to put spur to the dun to get away from the boy, who stood scribbling on a pad.” Nothing more is said.
Bill Wittliff, who wrote the teleplay for the Lonesome Dove miniseries, however, couldn’t just ride away from the Goodnight quote. In his annotated copy of the novel he underlined the passage and scribbled in the margin: “Use at very end.” On the last page of his copy, Wittliff wrote: “End with ‘A man of vision . . . yes a hell of a vision—’”
If you’ve watched the 1989 miniseries you know how powerful the exchange between the young reporter, in this case from San Antonio, and Call is. After the reporter says, “They say you’re a man of vision,” the script reads: “Call stops and looks at the Young Man. For just an instant, the past comes flooding back, the images of hardship and death washing through Call’s mind like so many waves on a beach.” At this point a montage of images flash over Call’s weatherbeaten face. When the images fade, Wittliff writes, “Call blinks, bringing himself back to the present. He stares at the Young Man a long moment. He’s never felt so old . . . so tired . . . so bereft of dreams and purpose.” And then he delivers that famous line: “Yes, a hell of a vision.”
“Call turns and slowly walks away as swirls of windblown dust dance through the little town of Lonesome Dove,” Wittliff concludes, and the picture fades.
It is a wonderfully evocative ending. But that’s not how the novel ends, and it’s not the last word from McMurtry on Goodnight’s quote.
In his 1968 essay, “Take My Saddle from the Wall: A Valediction,” McMurtry used the quote as an epigraph. Though Goodnight doesn’t appear in the essay, reading McMurtry’s words you can’t help but be struck that he viewed the old trail boss with a bit of sadness. That’s certainly the case with how Dobie presented Goodnight’s “Yes, a hell of a vision” statement along side of his self-assessment that “My life has been mostly a failure.” When asked what he thought Goodnight meant by that last comment, McMurtry said, “He had seen terrible things. He saw farms where settlers had been tortured and killed, scalped. . . . He saw the end of the Comanche and Kiowa way of life.”
In McMurtry’s eyes, Goodnight was a tragic figure—so was Call.
In his meditation on cowboys, many of whom were in his family line, McMurtry wrote of his ambivalence toward Texas—Old and New—and the West that produced men like Charles Goodnight, men of tragic vision:
What in this book [In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas] appear to be inconsistencies of attitude are the manifestations of my ambivalence in regard to Texas—and a very deep ambivalence it is, as deep as the bone. Such ambivalence is not helpful in a discursive book, but it can be the very blood of a novel.
He didn’t know it when he wrote those words but the novel in which McMurtry poured his blood of ambivalence was Lonesome Dove, the vehicle he chose to demythologize the West—“the myth of the Cowboy, the ground of whose divinity was the Range.”
In the novel, and in the public mind, McMurtry sought to put men like Goodnight in his proper place. Goodnight might have been a visionary, but he was also a failure. From McMurtry’s perspective, Goodnight was witness to a harsh and deadly way of life, and in noway heroic. Nevertheless, during his lifetime the unheroic morphed into a heroic mythology, wholly devoid of reality.
This is a clue as to why McMurtry ended his novel as he did, to show that “cowboys broken in body and twisted in spirit, bruised by debt, failure, loneliness, [and] disease” were, by and large, hardened and embittered men. Call certainly is, making the novel’s ending one of failure, not vision.
After Call returns to Lonesome Dove he notices the Dry Bean is gone. He asks Dillard Brawley, the one-legged barber, what happened to Xavier Wanz’s saloon.
“Burnt,” Dillard whispered. “Burnt near a year ago.”
“What started the fire?”
“Wanz started it. Burnt up in it, too. Locked himself in that whore’s room and wouldn’t come out. . . . When she left, Wanz couldn’t stand it. He sat in her room a month and then he burnt it.”
“Who?” Called asked, looking at the ashes.
“The women. The woman. They say he missed that whore.”
Aside from the fact that this ending closes the story of a relatively minor character—Xavier Wanz—while leaving open the story of two major characters, the two lonesome doves in the novel—Newt and Lorena—it subtly indicts Call as a failure by Dillard’s failure to name the whore: Lori. Years earlier, Call had visited another whore, Maggie, “out of curiosity to find out what it was that he had heard men talk and scheme about for so long. It turned out not to be much, in his view—a brief, awkward experience, where the pleasure was soon drowned in embarrassment and feeling of sadness.” And yet, Call was drawn to Maggie, returning to her again and again.
The one thing she wanted from Call was for him to say her name. “Can’t you just say my name? Can’t you just say it once?” she asked. “I don’t know what that would amount to,” Call said. She sighed: “I’d just feel happy if you did. I’d just feel so happy.”
After this encounter, Call stopped going to her. When she died and the Hat Creek outfit adopted her son, Newt—Call’s son, so Gus said—the remembrance of Maggie became Call’s “bitterest memory of his life.” Even after so many years, “the memory had lost none of its salt and sting, for what had happened with her had been unnecessary and was uncorrectable.” That was the greatest sting of all—that Maggie’s need produced, in Call’s estimation, a weakness in his character. “He knew at once that he had forever lost the chance to right himself, that he would never again be able to feel that he was the man he had wanted to be. The man he had wanted to be would never have gone to Maggie in the first place.”
In Call’s eyes, the man who shouldn’t have gone to Maggie but did couldn’t (and wouldn’t) be the man to acknowledge the son that came from having gone to her: Newt. Gus understood that, criticizing Call:“It ain’t a mistake to behave like a human being once in awhile. Poor Maggie got her heart broke, but she gave you a fine son before she quit.”
Gus said to Newt as to why Call wouldn’t or couldn’t acknowledge him as his own, “[Call] had a chance to be [like other people] once. He turned his back on it, and now he ain’t about to admit that he made the wrong choice. He’d as soon kill himself. He’s got to keep trying to be the way he thinks he is, and he’s got to make out that he was always that way—it’s why he ain’t owned up to being your pa.”
A man like Call could never understand a man like Gus, who would have lovingly called Maggie by name and enthusiastically acknowledged Newt as his own. Call would not do that because Call could never understand a man like Wanz, who would give his life for the love of a woman. In the end, we are left with two visions of Call. The miniseries reveals Call as a tragic figure—a visionary whose vision led to the deaths of his closest campañeros. The novel reveals Call as a pitiful and pathetic figure—a failure who could have known love but walked away from it.
In his essay, McMurtry wrote, “I would not wish to make the point crudely, but I do find it possible to doubt that I have ever known a cowboy who liked women as well as he liked horses, and I know that I have never known a cowboy who was as comfortable in the company of women as he was in the company of his fellow cowboys. . . . I do not believe this was the result of repressed homosexuality, but of a commitment to a heroic concept of life that simply takes little account of women.”
That was certainly true of Call—a visionary and a failure.
J. Frank Dobie, Cow People (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964), 285, 293, 294.
Larry McMurtry, “Take My Saddle from the Wall: A Valediction,” In a Narrow Grave: Essay on Texas (New York: Liveright, 2018), 170, 175; Lonesome Dove (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 325, 340–41, 725–6, 815, 820–21.
Bill Wittliff and Larry McMurtry in Jeff Salamon, “A Tale of Two Endings,” Texas Monthly, vol. 38, issue 7 (July 2010), 90.
Bill Wittliff, Lonesome Dove, teleplay, Part Four: “Return,” scene 284, 372–3.
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Been a while since I read Essays in a Narrow Grave, should probably revisit. Remember how his family reminded me of my own— though South Texas ranch families like mine felt a little more antebellum and his on the plains a little more western. But I understood the ambivalence.
"Lonesome Dove " is a classic must read novel in my opinion. Great to learn more about what inspired that famous line.