Woodrow F. Call: The Ranger Who Drove a Herd to Montana

Who Is Woodrow F. Call?

Woodrow F. Call is one of the two protagonists of Larry McMurtry's novel Lonesome Dove, published in 1985. A former Texas Ranger, he runs the Hat Creek Cattle Company in the border town of Lonesome Dove, Texas, with his friend and fellow ranger Augustus McCrae. A plot summary from Texas Monthly describes Call as taciturn, the quiet half of the partnership.

Call is fiction, and this profile treats him as a character in a work of art. He earns a place in a cattlemen's hall of fame because the novel is among the most widely read pictures of a Texas trail drive, and its trail boss shaped how readers see the work.

The Hat Creek Cattle Company and the Lonesome Dove Outfit

Hat Creek is a small outfit just north of the Rio Grande. Alongside Call and McCrae the hands include Joshua Deets, a Black scout, Pea Eye Parker, and a teenager named Newt Dobbs, who does not know that Call is his father. Dish Boggett and Jasper Fant join later.

The operation is modest, and it is Call's refusal to settle for modest that drives the story. When an old ranger friend, Jake Spoon, arrives and mentions that Montana is ripe for exploitation, Call insists on driving a herd north.

The Drive to Montana

The trip is the spine of the book. Call leads the herd and the outfit north, and on the way the party loses people to snakes in the Nueces River and to Indian attacks. Gus and Call hang Jake Spoon for horse thieving, a decision that costs both of them.

Trail drives from Texas were a real part of the cattle business after the Civil War, and an Encyclopedia.com entry on the novel places the story among the historic cattle trails, including the Goodnight-Loving route from west Texas to Denver. The sources reviewed do not say that Call is based on a specific real person, and nothing here should be read that way.

Call's Last Promise and the Return to Texas

Gus dies after an attack by Indians. Deets is killed in the same stretch of the trip. Before dying Gus asks Call to carry his body back to Texas, and Call reluctantly does. The return journey turns the book from a story about reaching Montana into a story about what a man owes a friend.

The ending stays with Call's character, which is why readers often rank the closing chapters among the most affecting in American western fiction.

The Novel, the Pulitzer and the Miniseries

Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which Encyclopedia.com dates to 1986. McMurtry, born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1936, also wrote Horseman, Pass By and Terms of Endearment.

The 1989 miniseries starred Robert Duvall as McCrae and Tommy Lee Jones as Call. It won a Golden Globe for best miniseries and another for Duvall, and seven Emmys, with twelve more nominations. Readers can find the book's publication history in the Lonesome Dove reference page.

More on Trail Drives and Ranching

To place Call's world in the real history of cattle work, start with the ranching section on farm.FM. A farm.FM story that fits the theme is a story about Texas cattle drives.