As he lay dying far from home in a New Mexico fort, an old cattleman asked his partner for one last thing: do not leave me buried out here in this lonesome country. Take me home to Texas. That promise, and the long, hard journey to keep it, would one day beat at the very heart of the greatest cattle-drive story ever told.
His name was Oliver Loving, and along with Charles Goodnight he had blazed one of the legendary cattle trails of the West. In 1867, riding ahead of the herd, Loving was attacked and badly wounded, and though he reached Fort Sumner, the wound turned and took his life. He was buried there at first, but Goodnight had given his word.
The next winter, Goodnight and the cowboys came back, took up their friend, and carried his body hundreds of miles down the trail in a wagon, home to be buried at last in Weatherford, Texas. Years later, a novelist named Larry McMurtry heard that story, and it became the aching heart of Lonesome Dove, when one old cowman hauls another all the...