Historical Fiction

"Most of the Indians began to sing their death songs again… Calamity decided she should sing a death song too, and she sang 'Buffalo Girls'." (pg. 216)

Another in Larry McMurtry's hefty roster of demythologising elegies about the Old West, Buffalo Girls suffers in comparison to the author's more vigorous works. The story is rather pedestrian, lacking anything that might be called a plot, and simply follows some of the old names of the West as they mill around and glumly come to terms with the fact that the West, and the adventure that was implied in it, has now been irreversibly settled.

On the face of it, this is a compelling theme, and it's McMurtry's chosen raison d'être in much of his Western writing. Here we focus on Calamity Jane, whose admission of the shallowness of her own legend – she "hadn't done much of anything except wander here and there on the plains, the little reputation she had the result of invention… her story [was] mainly based on whiskey and emptiness" – is rather nakedly extended to all of the 'Wild West': "If every man who drank in the saloon had killed as many Indians as he claimed to have killed, there wouldn't have been an Indian west of the Mississippi; if every miner had found as much gold as was claimed, palaces would stretch down the Missouri all the way to St. Louis" (pg. 37).

The tired old legends have been put out to pasture, without even realising they were bovine, and the characters alternate between morose self-pity and a bereft self-awareness. The legends indulge in their own mythmaking, like Calamity deciding to invent an affair with Wild Bill Hickok (pg. 203), but it's about more than the big names. The trappers lament that there are no more beaver; the hunters no more buffalo; the soldiers no more Indians to fight. On each point, the connection is made: in wiping them out, they made them valuable (pp115, 293). Metatextually, the obvious point to make is that McMurtry is examining why we bother with Westerns in the first place: the fact that it's no longer reality makes it corruptible into story and consequently saleable.

It's all worthy stuff; the problem is that it's not enough to hang a story around. The decline of the old West is a bit stale as a theme, and needs some magic in order to give it life. McMurtry had that magic in Lonesome Dove, that glorious albatross around his neck when assessing any Western he went on to write, but quite frankly he doesn't have it here. I've already mentioned the lack of plot, but there's also a lack of spark in the characters. Even a minor character like the gentle giant Ogden lacks the personality given to the similarly minor role of Big Zwey in Lonesome Dove. The characters in Buffalo Girls no longer have a purpose, and to show this McMurtry delves deeply and unwisely into the trivial nature of their continued existence.

The only time Buffalo Girls rouses itself is in its middle third (its opening and final acts are a bit of a slog), when Calamity Jane and some others travel to England as part of Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West show'. These London scenes are (ironically, given the smog) a breath of fresh air. Buffalo Bill's circus act delivers most sharply McMurtry's cynical theme: the West has not only been commodified ("the big adventure's over… make a show of it and sell it to the dudes" (pp68-9)) but commodified with the connivance of those who enjoyed it as it was. Those wild men (and women) who tamed the West, and discovered with great irony that they preferred it when it was wild. This part of the book allows for some of Buffalo Girls' best writing, such as the old Indian seeing a whale breach the surface as they cross the Atlantic (pg. 150), and also allows for its most ironic, bittersweet moments, such as the fur trapper who has long lamented the decline of the beaver finally hearing the slap of their tails in a London zoo (pg. 174). It's a touching moment, but also McMurtry's starkest delivery of his theme of how irreversibly the West has been tamed: the Western trapper has to go all the way to bustling London to see beaver again.

Such moments, however, remain moments, and Buffalo Girls is unable to construct anything more substantial out of them. To meet its demythologising theme, the novel sacrifices any dynamism in the plot or vivacity in the characters. It is a circular novel of trivialities and redundancies that, however well-wrought, is too often a labour to read. It doesn't deserve to be judged too harshly, but when a story aims to show us that its characters and its world are not as exciting or as impressive as we always thought they were, it's rather shooting itself in the foot when it succeeds. ( )

This is kind of a sad tale of the ending of an era. Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, Wild Bill Hickock, and Bill Cody are just a few of the people that lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s and made their mark on the great prairies and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Times were hard. This view into how they lived and survived is probably close to what the old west was really like. The book is supposed to be fiction, but there's a lot of history in it. I found it very entertaining and educational. ( )

I had to work at this at the beginning but eventually it grabbed my interest. The main character is Calamity Jane whose real name was Martha Jane Canary and a woman who actually did live in the west and was known as a frontierswoman, scout, Indian fighter, sometimes prostitute but most of the tales about her are difficult to prove.
Through her we meet many characters including Dora DuFran (the real Calamity actually worked for DuFran) who runs a whorehouse, No Ears an Indian friend who had his cut off when he was young, & Bartle Bone & Jim Ragg last of the Mountain Men.

William Cody talks Calamity and her friends in traveling to England with his Wild West Show for Queen Victoria's Jubilee. I found McMurtry's descriptions of London of the late 19th Century very interesting as I did of the method of moving his entire show including animals across the Atlantic.

Vivid descriptions of life in Montana and the Dakotas at the end of the Wild West era. ( )

Not bad, just utterly forgettable. Some similar themes to "Lonesome Dove," so I also felt like I'd heard this story already, only told much, much better the first time. ( )