Two decades ago, my fellow reporters and I were sitting in the Dallas Times Herald offices--or maybe we were in a sleazy bar near the newsroom--debating the casting of the forthcoming miniseries Lonesome Dove.
Nobody had any problem with Robert Duvall. “But he should be Woodrow Call, not Gus McCrae,” was the general consensus. “He’s all wrong for Gus.”
And Tommy Lee Jones as Call? “Sure, he was excellent in The Executioner’s Song, but he’s way too young. He doesn’t have t

June 2009
In This Issue:
Features
Western Books & Movies
- The Dark Border (Fiction)
- North Star (Fiction)
- Cowboy Park (Nonfiction)
- Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West (Nonfiction)
- Mormonism’s Last Colonizer (Nonfiction)
- The Last Indian War (Nonfiction)
- Dark Spaces: Montana’s Historic Penitentiary at Deer Lodge (Nonfiction)
- Full-Court Quest (Nonfiction)
- Wallace Stegner and the American West (Nonfiction)
- Word Gets Around (Fiction)
- Buried Lies (Fiction)
- Western Writers Pick Top 100 Westerns
- Sam Houston: Standing Firm (Children’s Book)
More In This Issue
- Revisiting Lonesome Dove
- Two Oregon Naturals Make A Team
- Steve Shaw
- Shoot-Out at Cottonwood Springs?
- Preservation: Indians on the Internet
- Following Mountain Man Jim Bridger
- Good As Gold
- Gold Fever
- “Fight of My Life”
- Survival in the Cold Old West
- The Chuckwagon Cooky
- Collecting Geronimo
- Why are the rear wheels of stagecoaches larger than the front ones?
- What do we know about Lottie Deno?