The Western is the story of the American Founding once removed: how a collection of newly independent states on the East Coast sent its people into the wilderness and built a country. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, may be the closest thing the United States has to a national epic, an “American Arthuriad,” in McMurtry’s own phrase. Though he hoped the novel would “demythologize” the West, he later concluded that it instead reaffirmed the enduring core of the Western myth: “that cowboys are brave and cowboys are free.”

Its unforgettable heroes, former Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, set out on a cattle drive from South Texas to the Montana Territory in search of one last adventure. Along the trail, the novel confronts enduring questions of friendship and loyalty, courage and imagination, violence and death, law and order, civilization and wilderness.

“The winning of the West was in large measure an imaginative act,” McMurtry wrote. Taking that insight as our guide, this course will examine how the American West was both settled and imagined, how history became legend, and how the legend continues to shape our understanding of America.

Image: Frederic Remington, A Cold Morning on the Range, 1904

Faculty

Cheryl Miller

Cheryl Miller is executive director at the Hertog Foundation. Previously, she served as deputy director of research in the Office of Presidential Speechwriting and as research assistant to David Brooks at The New York Times. Her reviews and commentary have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The Weekly Standard. She graduated from the University of Dallas with Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and Politics.

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