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A Texan Article of Faith
And push will always come to shove you
On that midnight rodeo.
Lyle Lovett, “Farther Down the Line”

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Note from Coloradan Limerick to Texan Lovett:
The word “always” may be important for the song’s rhythm.
But it doesn’t fit with this particular midnight rodeo.

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I now think it’s likely that a lot of my writing about the cowboy was an attempt to understand my father’s essentially tragic take on his own—and human—experience. . . . He had attached his heart to a hopeless ideal, a nineteenth-century vision of cowboying and family pastoralism. It was an ideal he himself could never realize, but it had been kept alive, though trivialized and cheapened, by the movies and pulp literature. It had even been kept alive by my own writing . . .
Larry McMurtry, 1999

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If a seemingly knowledgeable person claimed to have created a “top ten” list of the human beings who have held the greatest fondness for books, and if the name “Larry McMurtry” did not appear on that list, that list-maker would be condemned to find another line of work.

Given Mr. McMurtry’s standing as a booklover, I feel confident in making an assertion that I cannot actually verify: surely he loved the nineteenth century custom of endowing books with very long, discursive, meandering, total-TMI subtitles.

This assumption has persuaded me—well, really,��forced��me—to take this occasion to arrange for that nineteenth-century custom to make a return visit in the twenty-first century.

So here is the title that appears above, but this time it is accompanied by its full, sprawling, circuitous subtitle.

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The Midnight Rodeo:

Larry McMurtry, Me, and an Abject Failure to Feud

or

A Narrative that Endeavors to Recount and Make Sense of the Twists and Turns of an Improbable, but Culturally Freighted Set of Exchanges between a Very Noted Western American Novelist (who Also Wrote Non-Fiction Essays and Books), and a Much Less Noted Western American Historian, a Narrative Steeped in Congeniality, though Interrupted by a Spell of Befuddlement that Is Then Resolved with a Sudden, Buzzard-Inspired Insight into Mr. McMurtry’s Ties to Elegy, an Insight that Seems Like a Fitting Conclusion Since This “Not My First Rodeo” Post Is Itself an Elegy

Thirty years ago, shifting public attitudes toward Western American history seemed to call Larry McMurtry and me to see each other as antagonists.

We turned out to be unable to accept that call.

Back in 1990, we seemed to be willing to give this a try, and we made a couple of preliminary moves on public record to arrange ourselves in oppositional categories. Mr. McMurtry was cast as the novelist who complied with the West’s and the nation’s sentimentalization of cowboys. I was cast as the historian who saw that sentimentalization as a disservice to the West and the nation.

And then, somehow, we switched sides.

Mr. McMurtry took to writing essays that proclaimed the inaccuracy and error of the cowboy myth, and consigned ranches and ranchers to a departed Western past. I took to writing essays that called attention to the resilience and persistence of ranches and ranchers, and warned that, without ranches, many Western landscapes in the future would lose the beauty of open spaces and a wide horizon.

I do not know what Mr. McMurtry thought about this transformation, or if he even noticed it.�� With his passing a week ago, the task of offering commentary on our failure to feud is left up to me.

It would not be very “Western” of me to try to dodge this strenuous undertaking in historical appraisal and interpretation. But, in the usual way of elegy, I am sad to be doing this by myself.

One of Larry McMurtry’s finest legacies rests on the joy he took in wearing a sweatshirt that identified the wearer as a “MINOR REGIONAL NOVELIST.” I dream of the moment when I can head out into a post-pandemic world, declaring our connection by sporting a counterpart t-shirt, identifying me as a “MINOR REGIONAL HISTORIAN.”

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Chapter One:

A Promising Conflict Cut Short

or

A Tale in which the Novelist and the Historian Do Their Best to Feud, but Undermine that Whole Project by Complimenting Each Other’s Writing Ability, while Still Finding Much to Lament in the Misguided “Insights” Conveyed by Each Other’s Skillfully Deployed Words, Sentences, and Paragraphs, Making Possible a Pleasant Turn of Events that Was First Noted by the Extraordinary Western American Interpreter and Translator—their Mutual Friend Molly Ivins—Who Used Her Own Gifts with Language to Ensure that their Attempted Feud Would Fail

In October of 1990, in the��Boston Globe��and the��New Republic��co-hosted a collision. The timing arose from the publication of Mr. McMurtry’s novel,��Buffalo Girls. In the��Boston Globe, I wrote a review of the book, and Mr. McMurtry, very rightly seeking opportunities to secure the visibility that would bring attention to his new book, took that occasion to write a long review essay on Western history in the��New Republic.

In one corner of the ring of public dispute:

Patricia Nelson Limerick, “How the West Was (Sob!) Lost,” a review of Larry McMurtry’s��Buffalo Girls, Boston Globe, October 7, 1990

And in the opposite corner of the ring of public dispute:

Larry McMurtry, “Westward Ho Hum:�� What the New Historians Have Done to the Old West,” (with a lengthy subtitle, almost in the spirit of the wordiness of the nineteenth century), “How the West Was Won or Lost: The Revisionists’ Failure of Imagination,”��New Republic, October 22, 1990.

I begin with retrospective amusement over the convergence in timing: in the Fall of 1990, Mr. McMurtry and I—never having met—both agreed to direct our life energy into poring over each other’s books. And then, he at his typewriter and I at a primitive computer, told the world what we thought about each other, which proved to be quite a memorable way for strangers to get acquainted.

Second, I will go straight to the reason why we performed so poorly as antagonists and opponents.

Here’s what I said about Mr. McMurtry’s skill as a writer:

“Words, sentences, and paragraphs cooperate with McMurtry; they—appropriately—trust him to treat them right.”

Here’s what he wrote about my writing:

Patricia Nelson Limerick . . . is a good deal more readable than most of the rest [of the other Western historians]. She’s a lively writer, she can be funny, and her case studies . . . are clear and admirably succinct.

And, with those two tributes on record, Molly Ivins enters the picture in her role as interpreter, translator, and ambassador in negotiations between her fellow Texan and me. Not long after these two documents appeared in October of 1990, she said to me, “You and Larry are all set to be friends, since you both said such nice things about each other’s writing.”

As was her habit, Molly Ivins hit that nail on the head.

Still, even though a bridge of mutual appreciation was in place, what we might call “fighting words” were still shaking that bridge.

Re-examine the words in the lengthy title that introduced Mr. McMurtry’s review essay in the��New Republic.

“Westward��Ho Hum”

“The Revisionists’ Failure of Imagination”

These word choices do not seem to show the novelist extending an olive branch toward the historian. In fact, their tone makes it safe to conclude that Mr. McMurtry and I disagreed about something.

But about what?

Since this is not an easy question to answer, it calls for another chapter with yet another endless subtitle.

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Chapter Two:

A Pitched Fight over the Chronology of the Frontier

or

A Chronicle of How the Novelist and the Historian Proved Unable to See Any Sense in Each Other’s Wrong-Headed Thinking about the Ostensible End of the Frontier, a Narrative that Requires the Reminder that Larry McMurtry Started Graduate School in a PhD Program at Rice University where He Became Conversant with Academic Dispute, and Also Requires a Related Reader Advisory: Non-Academics, as Well as Academics in Fields Other Than Western History, Should Buckle Your Seatbelts or, Better Yet, Make a Quick Stop for Caffeine

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What does a PhD stand for? To me it’s post-hole digger, guess that would be about what it would stand for with all the other old Texas cowpokes.
Larry McMurtry’s Uncle Jeff

Myself, I dislike frontiers, and yet the sense that my own has vanished produces in me the strongest emotion . . .
Larry McMurtry, 1968

In our times, most everything we want to see—and even more things we��don’t��want to see—is available online. But for mysterious reasons, the two key 1990 articles—my review in the��Boston Globe��and Mr. McMurtry’s essay in the��New Republic—are concealed in the digital world.

This is a shame because I would have liked to assign you to read those two archival documents and to figure out for yourself what on earth this novelist and this historian were fighting about.

Well, no such luck.

So here is my best shot: we were fighting because we had two very different answers to the question, “When did the frontier end?”

Mr. McMurtry thought that answer was clear: “The frontier ended in 1890, and that conclusion to westward expansion through the availability of land changed everything.”

My own answer did not match Mr. McMurtry’s in clarity, since the question itself made no sense to me. But if I had to dignify a pointless question with the answer, this would have been my take: “No, the frontier did not end in 1890, because westward expansion continued and even accelerated after 1890, and, moreover, because all the issues stirred up in the nineteenth century continued without resolution into the twentieth century.”

Our disagreement may seem to have taken place on a very abstract and arcane battleground, but it does carry some consequence.

To make a big deal about the supposed end of the frontier (I thought in 1990 and still think now) was a very foolish maneuver. With this idea, Western historians had willfully diminished the value and relevance of their work, inexplicably declaring that nothing in the nineteenth century West shapes our lives in the present. On the contrary, I believed and still believe that keeping track of continuity and thematic cohesion—from one century to the next—was absolutely essential if we were to have any hope of navigating wisely in our own times.

Mr. McMurtry felt differently.

And here is my statement of why this mattered to him: against his own preferences, he was entranced by the frontier (a.k.a., the nineteenth century West), and he wanted to grieve for it, to mourn it, and to yearn for it.

Hence, the need to declare a definitive end to the frontier: if the frontier were not dead and gone, then all that grieving, mourning, and yearning lost justification and meaning, and became not only unnecessary, but maybe even overwrought.

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Chapter Three:

Projection as an Art Form:�� Just Who’s Characterizing Who as Too “Negative”?

or

A Shift in Stance by which the Historian Becomes Impatient and Issues a Heartfelt Proclamation: If You Insist on Calling Me Gloomy, Bleak, and Morose, At Least Follow Mythic Western Tradition, and “When You Call Me That, Smile.”

To prepare to write his 1990 essay, “Westward Ho Hum,” Larry McMurtry had clearly invested time and trouble in reading my 1987 book,��The Legacy of Conquest. Sharing the fruits of that labor with the readers of the��New Republic, he summed up what he saw as my central idea:

It is that our westward expansion was a mosaic of failure, financial and personal, but also in the largest sense, moral. The expansion was, specifically, an irresponsible white male’s adventure, hugely destructive of the land itself, of the native people, and even of the white man’s own women and children.

Welcome to the neighborhood of authorship, where the question, “Did I actually say that?” waits around every corner.

Bear with me for one brief moment for the irresistible activity of counter-quoting. Here is a passage that appears prominently at the end of one chapter in��The Legacy of Conquest:

In the late twentieth century, when it has become commonplace to hear denunciation of the despoiling of Western resources, of the rape of the land, the ecological and moral horror that was Western expansion, it is important to remember [the] widely varying cast of characters [among settlers], and to recall that many of these “despoilers” wanted, primarily, to find a job and make a living.

Yes, that statement does seem at odds with Mr. McMurtry’s summation.

But, really, who among us has not read a book quite carefully, and still had our attention swerve and drift and pirouette and dance hither and thither? In truth, Mr. McMurtry was far from the only reader who was primed to tell me what I had said in��The Legacy of Conquest,��with results that did not always bear a one-to-one correspondence with the actual text.

But at this point, this familiar pattern gets a lot more interesting, as stories always get when the utterly remarkable and utterly unique Molly Ivins reclaims a central place in the story.

After she performed the charitable act of pointing out to me that Mr. McMurtry and I had laid the basis for friendship by complimenting each other as writers, Molly Ivins then told me that it would be worth my while to read his early collection of essays,��In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas��(1968). I would enjoy reading these essays, she told me, because I would discover there that he had, from his earliest years as a writer, embraced exactly the position for which he now condemned me.

Well, yes, that sounded like a reading experience I would enjoy.

And it was.

Quoting a passage that appears in a later book by Mr. McMurtry, I provide a concentrated statement of what Molly Ivins wanted me to learn about him by reading��In a Narrow Grave:

I tried to subvert the Western myth with irony and paradox . . .�� [But] readers don’t want to know and can’t be made to see how difficult and destructive life in the Old West really was. Lies about the West are more important to them than truths.

For a long time, I had no idea how to explain what was going on here. I will give explanation a try soon, but for now I will just present a fact of Western literary history.

If we were to conceive of the activity of speaking forcefully about sorrow, loss, and disappointment in Western history as a horse race, Larry McMurtry had crossed the finish line while I was still saddling up.

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Chapter Four:

Congeniality Rides the Range

or

A Quick Summary of a Series of Episodes in which a Very Famous Writer with a Huge Following Exceeded Regulatory Standards for Kindness and Good Nature in Offering Help from the Established to the Aspiring-to-Get-Established, with a Book Jacket Endorsement and a Generous Review in the��New York Review of Books, Culminating in a Moment When a Smart and Alert Reporter Couldn’t Tell Whether He Was Hearing the Words of the Novelist or the Historian

I see a great advantage to the adoption of nineteenth century subtitles, since I have now said nearly everything that I was planning to say in this chapter. However, at the risk of vanity and self-indulgence, I will still insert the book jacket endorsement Mr. McMurtry provided on my behalf, since it offers conclusive evidence of our failure to feud:

Patricia Nelson Limerick is an original, learned, passionate writer. Everything she writes about the history of the American West deserves attention.

And having not only risked but paraded vanity and self-indulgence, I will include a��article , in which kindness did not require him to suppress critical appraisal that was well-worth my attention, and yours.

And that brings me to an unforgettable moment when a reporter was tricked by the performance of a Vulcan mind meld that surprised me more than it surprised him.

Headed off on a speaking trip soon after the 1999 publication of Mr. McMurtry’s book,��Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,��I took the book with me to read on the plane. Checked into some distant hotel room, I returned a phone call from a reporter who was writing a story about Hollywood’s portrayals of the West. Mr. McMurtry’s book was open beside me when I made the call.

Early in the conversation, I mentioned to the reporter that I had been reading Mr. McMurtry’s book. In the first minutes, I answered the reporter’s questions from my own point of view. But then a passage from the book seemed directly relevant, so I read aloud from it. I tried to signal that I was shifting from my words to Mr. McMurtry’s words. But I moved a little too fast, and the reporter lost my trail.

As a torrent of words declaring the inaccuracy of the myth of the West rushed by, the reporter had to interrupt me for a clarification. “When did you stop speaking as yourself,” he asked me, “and when did you start reading from McMurtry?”

Ten years before this conversation, back when the prospects for a full-out literary feud loomed on the horizon, this moment of scrambled authorship would have seemed unimaginable. Distinguishing the perspective of the author of��Lonesome Dove��from the perspective of the author of��Legacy of Conquest, I once thought, would be one of the easier literary detective acts to perform.

As I contemplate Mr. McMurtry’s passing, just as I am about to turn seventy myself, the word “unimaginable” has lost a lot of its power to capture reality.
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Chapter Five:

Buzzards in Defiance of Hollywood

or

An Exploration of How an Episode of Enormous Frustration in Movie-Making Continues to Shed a Bright Light on the Origins and Dynamics of the Difficulty of Adjusting to Change Manifested by Sentient Beings of Every Species, While Also Illuminating the Power that Elegy—the “Expression of Sorrow and Lamentation for Someone Who Is Dead” [Merriam-Webster’s Definition]—Exercised over Mr. McMurtry’s View of Key Western Populations

Of the various gifts I received from Mr. McMurtry, this is the one for which I have found the most use.

He gave me the best story in my repertoire for making an audience laugh while also inviting that audience to��think. And, once again, it was Molly Ivins who carried this gift from Mr. McMurtry to me, when she told me to read his collection of essays,��In a Narrow Grave.

I happened to read the first essay in the book, “Here’s HUD in Your Eye,” as I was taking the bus to a meeting in Denver. Having put this to a test, I would not recommend reading this essay in a public place.

Why?

If you are sitting by yourself on a bus and you begin to laugh uncontrollably, you will make your fellow passengers very uneasy. This will make you want to share the story that has convulsed you with the people who are alarmed by your solitary hilarity. Permitting everyone in sight to hear this story is clearly the right thing to do, but it is simply not viable on a bus.

Finding myself unable to share this story when I first read it, I have wanted to tell it many times since then. For several years, trying to avoid excess, I rationed myself. But I am through with that rationing now. There is no justification for denying this story to the millions who could benefit from it. [The version I use here first appeared in my essay,����that made the front page of the��New York Times Book Review��in 1993.]

Here we go.

Mr. McMurtry had gone to the Texas Panhandle in order to watch his first book,��Horseman Pass By, become the movie��Hud. When he arrived, he learned that the filming of a scene involving buzzards had left everyone rattled. In that scene, Paul Newman was supposed to ride up and discover a dead cow, look up at a tree branch lined with buzzards and, in his distress over the loss of the cow, fire his gun at one of the buzzards. At that moment, all of the other buzzards were supposed to fly away into the blue Panhandle sky.

But when Mr. McMurtry asked people how the buzzard scene had gone, all he got, he said, were “stricken looks.”

The first problem, it turned out, had to do with the quality of the available local buzzards who proved to be an excessively scruffy group. So more appealing, more photogenic buzzards had to be flown in from some distance and at considerable expense.

But then came the second problem: how to keep the buzzards sitting on the tree branch until it was time for their cue to fly.

That seemed easy enough. Wire their feet to the branch, and then, after Paul Newman fires his shot, pull the wire, releasing their feet, thus allowing them to take off.

But, as Mr. McMurtry said in an important and memorable phrase, the film makers had not reckoned with the “mentality of buzzards.” With their feet wired, the buzzards did not have enough mobility to fly. But they did have enough mobility to pitch forward.

So that’s what they did: with their feet wired, they tried to fly, pitched forward, and hung upside down from the dead branch, with their wings flapping.

I had the good fortune a couple of years ago to meet a woman who had been an extra for this movie, and she added a detail that Mr. McMurtry left out of his essay: namely, the buzzard circulatory system does not work upside down, and so, after a moment or two of flapping, the buzzards passed out.

An array of buzzards hanging upside down from a tree branch: this was not what Hollywood wanted from the West, but that is what Hollywood had produced.

And then we get to the second stage of buzzard psychology. After several episodes of pitching forward, passing out, being revived, being replaced on the branch and pitching forward again, the buzzards gave up. Now, when you pulled the wire and released their feet, they sat there, saying in clear, nonverbal terms: “We tried that before. It did not work. We are not going to try it again.” Now the filmmakers had to fly in a high-powered animal trainer to restore buzzard self-esteem. It was all a big mess, but Larry McMurtry got a wonderful story out of it; and we, in turn, get the best possible parable of the workings of habit and loyalty to customs that made sense in their origins, but make less sense with the passage of time and with changing circumstances.

And how do we get from this parable to a reckoning with the power that elegy—“the expression of sorrow and lamentation for someone who is dead”—exercised over Mr. McMurtry’s perspective on two key populations in the American West?

Tracing that connection probably requires its own chapter.

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Chapter Six:

A Mystery Resolved, or Possibly an Uncomfortable Conflict Evaded

or

A Sympathetic, but Critical Portrait of the Historian—Who Has Considered it a Professional and Personal Priority to Remind Non-Indians of the Presence, Resilience, Resourcefulness, and Constant Negotiation between Tradition and Innovation of Indian Peoples in the Past, Present and Future—As She Wrestles with Her Affection and Appreciation for the Writer who Sometimes Yielded to the Gravitational Pull of the Infinitely Inaccurate Idea of the “Vanishing Indian”

If we return to Mr. McMurtry’s essay, “Westward Ho Hum” in the��New Republic, we come upon several passages that demonstrate my dilemma.

When he raised questions about my assertion of a fundamental continuity between the nineteenth-century West and the twentieth-century West, Mr. McMurtry wrote this, “Then we had Indian wars; now we have an Indian remnant.”

Remnant?

Here is another passage to contemplate: “There is no shortage of victims out West: you have the native people (destroyed) . . .”

Destroyed?

Indian people who had mobilized resistance to the federal policy of tribal “termination,” and organized lawsuits and protests and reservation-based economic revitalization and who had written novels and memoirs and earned law degrees and PhDs in history and transformed the writing of Western American history? Tribes (now there are 574 federally recognized tribes) that had their sovereignty recognized in Supreme Court decisions from the 1960s on?

Remnant? Destroyed?

Here is one small, personal dimension of this mystery.

It is clear from his 1990 essay that Mr. McMurtry had spent quality time with my book,��The Legacy of Conquest. But did he simply skip Chapter Six, “The Persistence of Natives”? And did he skip the section in a concluding chapter on the resurgence of Indian activism and the legal assertion of sovereignty? Or did those statements just seem irrelevant in the big picture of the end of the frontier and the disappearance of the West that existed before 1890?

There is the question that brought me to a halt.

On other occasions, Mr. McMurtry did not hold back in expressing his dismay over the injuries done to the indigenous people of North America by European invaders and their descendants. It is important to note that he wrote a biography of the Lakota leader Crazy Horse, and he wrote another book about massacres in the nineteenth century. But when he wrote about the West of his times, Indian people seemed either absent or diminished to the point of irrelevance. To borrow a phrase from the very quotable writer Richard Rodriguez, in writing of Indian people, Mr. McMurtry wielded “a very sharp rhetorical tool called an ‘alas.’”

To a degree, this pattern of dismissal may seem easy to explain. Mr. McMurtry’s view of the Western past was always tied to the close connection he felt to his ancestors and to the stories of their settlement in Texas. In the scholarly terms of our times, when he wrote about his line of descent, he offered himself as a prime example of the mindset of descendants of “settler colonialism.” From the position of his ancestors, he wrote, “there remained the chance that one might awaken in the night in that lonely country to find oneself and one’s family being butchered by a few pitiless, reactionary warriors . . .”

Even with that passage before me, I am not, myself, finding the historical framework of “settler colonialism” to offer a complete explanation of McMurtry’s susceptibility to the idea of the vanishing Indian.

Here’s why.

He had an equal, if not greater, susceptibility to the idea of the vanishing cowboy, the vanishing rancher, the vanishing of the occupation—the��calling,��to use his word—that had provided meaning to his relatives.

In 1999, the writer Jonathan Miles offered this crucial observation: “McMurtry has always been an elegist.” In fact, he was the West’s premier elegist, and he did not discriminate by race, ethnicity, or occupation in his allocation of elegy.

If you are feeling twinges of skepticism or cynicism toward my assertions here, find a copy of the haunting essay, a group portrait of his aged father and uncles, that concludes the collection,��In a Narrow Grave. In passages beyond counting, Mr. McMurtry offered obituaries for ranching. This essay, “Take My Saddle from the Wall: A Valediction,” is the summation of those obituaries. In case the title he chose for that whole book didn’t make this point on its own, he declared explicitly that he chose that title,��In a Narrow Grave, “because I wanted a tone that was elegiac rather than sociological.”

But for now, before you seek out that essay, contemplate this passage from��Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:

Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality, I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds. The first thing I wrote that had any value at all was a story about a cattleman’s funeral. My interest in the melancholy of those who practice dying crafts has been lifelong and is evident in many books.

So now we arrive at the proposition I have come to believe: when he wrote of Indian people and when he wrote of ranchers, Mr. McMurtry tied himself to the branch of human reflection called “elegy.”

And this is where he and I part ways.

The dynamic presence of Indian people in the nation is always at the center of my attention, and I continue to seize every opportunity to speak or write about the continued importance of ranchers in the preservation of the open spaces and wide horizons of the West, as well as in the sustaining of cultural traditions that enrich the heritage of every Westerner.

I am a failure at elegy, though I have tried to write one now.

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Larry McMurtry

Born June 3, 1936, in Archer City, Texas

Died March 25, 2021, in Archer City, Texas

May he rest in peace.

Follow this link to encounter the full resonance of the title of this post, “The Midnight Rodeo,”
in Lyle Lovett’s song,��“?

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Larry McMurtry banner image courtesy of:����

Patty Limerick banner image courtesy of: Honey Ashenbrenner,��