Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lonesome Dove.

there are stories about lee marvin around tucson. It seems he had rather a fondness for alcohol.

Loved that movie! I have been fortunate to hunt adjacent to the "Montana" ranch (at the end of their journey) located in Angel Fire, New Mexico. Here is a pic I took last year of the ranch where the movie was shot while I was snooping around looking for elk. Got a pretty 5x6 that week.



Another view of "Montana"

If it would have been such it would have been for the better as far as I am concerned. It was a classic by itself and everything else on both ends weakened it for my money.

If he had written the others without tying them to "Lonesome Dove" I probably would have actually been more interested in them especially "Dead Man's Walk" and "Streets of Laredo".

I also feel the same way about "Return to Lonesome Dove". I am surprised that several people I know who have watched both consider the "Return" the best of the two. I just couldn't get into it myself.

Idared,
I agree with your on the idea that Dead Man's Walk and Streets of Laredo would have been better as stand alones without ties to Lonesome Dove. I never thought of it like that, but with different characters, the stories might have been better.

Return to Lonesome Dove was not better than the original in my opinion, but the fact that it carried on the story with the same characters in the same basic time frame as the original helped it. I also think most fans of Lonesome Dove were quite disappointed that McMurtry killed off Newt with little explanation or depth in Streets of Laredo and always wished it would have been different, thus Return to Lonesome Dove. I thought John Voight did a bang-up job as Call, especially considering he was stepping into a character already made iconic by Tommie Lee Jones. The rest of the characters were facimiles of their former selves, such as Pea Eye, Newt, and Clara and the new characters didn't add much. I did think the shootout scene at the end was done fairly well. The acting, other than Voight, left a lot to be desired, IMO.

History[edit]
While some form of mobile kitchens had existed for generations, the invention of the chuckwagon is attributed to Charles Goodnight, a Texas rancher, the "father of the Texas Panhandle,"[2] who introduced the concept in 1866. After the American Civil War, the beef market in Texas expanded. Some cattlemen herded cattle in parts of the country that did not have railroads which would mean they needed to be fed on the road for months at a time.[3] Goodnight modified the Studebaker wagon, a durable army-surplus wagon, to suit the needs of cowboys driving cattle from Texas to sell in New Mexico. He added a "chuck box" to the back of the wagon with drawers and shelves for storage space and a hinged lid to provide a flat cooking surface. A water barrel was also attached to the wagon and canvas was hung underneath to carry firewood. A wagon box was used to store cooking supplies and cowboys' personal items.[4]

Chuckwagon food typically included easy-to-preserve items like beans and salted meats, coffee, and sourdough biscuits. Food would also be gathered en route. There was no fresh fruit, vegetables, or eggs available and meat was not fresh unless an animal was injured during the run and therefore had to be killed. The meat they ate was greasy cloth-wrapped bacon, salt pork, and beef, usually dried or salted or smoked. The wagon was also stocked with a water barrel and a sling to kindle wood to heat and cook food and so the chuckwagon was created.[5][6] On cattle drives, it was common for the "cookie" who ran the wagon to be second in authority only to the "trailboss". The cookie would often act as cook, barber, dentist, and banker.[7]

The term "chuck wagon" comes from "chuck", a slang term for food, and not from the nickname for "Charles".[8]

If one man had to be picked to represent Texas....... Captain Goodnight should be that man.