Larry McMurtry · 1995 · overland

The Lonesome Dove prequel, written last and set first. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are nineteen and newly signed to the Texas Rangers when they join a two-hundred-strong expedition to annex Santa Fe - and forty of them survive to be marched across the Jornada del Muerto by the Mexican army, which is where the title comes from.

1. 1
   San Antonio

   1842, and two nineteen-year-olds sign on with the Texas Rangers - Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, forty years before Lonesome Dove, knowing nothing and about to be taught by a country that does not intend them to survive it.

2. 2
   The Pecos

   Scouting a road west toward El Paso, and Buffalo Hump - a Comanche who does not simply kill the party but hunts them one at a time, and scalps a man alive who then shoots himself. The troop turns back.

3. 3
   San Antonio

   Back to town having learned what the frontier is - and Gus talks Call into signing up for the next thing going, which is a volunteer expedition to take Santa Fe off Mexico under a man called Caleb Cobb.

4. 4
   Austin

   Two hundred adventurers assemble under a pirate and soldier of fortune with no maps worth the name, no supplies to speak of and a plan to annex a province - McMurtry's version of the real Texan Santa Fe Expedition of 1841.

5. 5
   The Llano Estacado

   The staked plains, where the expedition comes apart - starvation, bears, Comanches and Cobb's judgment, and two hundred men reduced to about forty before they have got anywhere near New Mexico.

6. 6
   Anton Chico

   The survivors are arrested by the Mexican army almost without a fight - and told they will be marched to El Paso, which is where the title of the book comes from.

7. 7
   The Jornada del Muerto

   Two hundred miles of waterless desert that the Spanish named the journey of the dead man - walked by Texan captives and Mexican soldiers alike, and killing both. The Texan party is down to ten by the end of it.

8. 8
   El Paso

   What is left arrives, and Gus and Call are alive - and everything the two of them will be for the next four novels was made on this walk, which is why McMurtry wrote the prequel last.