2014 interview with Larry McMurtry

MJ: You felt that Lonesome Dove was misinterpreted, that you'd intended it as an anti-Western. In what sense?

LM: Would you like your menfolk to be that way? The Western myth is a heroic myth, and yet settling the West was not heroic. It ended with Custer; it was the end of the settlement narrative, which had been going on since 1620.