What happens after the conquest? When Indians are dead or on reservations, cattle are in ranches, and rangers become ranchers? What's left is the Earp family, Doc, Charlie Goodnight (now a rancher) and dulled glories. Once again, everything is over; everything is always being over. An uneasy vacuity remains.
The writing is very different from the Lonesome Dove series. Everything is refined, minimalist: interior life is briefly sketched (while LD would offer paragraphs and repetitions on the matter), and in the end, the book barely reached 200 pages (LD installments average around 600).
I couldn't tell if this economy of words works because of the relative celebrity of the characters (even a non-American would have met them in quite a few western films), which fills in the blanks, or if it works only because the author manages to say a lot with few.
As a McMurty diehard, would you recommend reading the series in chronological or publication order?
Publication order is fine for Lonesome Dove. As I said elsewhere, the last published book is only the second in chronological order, but it feels like an ending. By then, the two main characters are already old rangers; "afterwards", they are former rangers, so this is a different life.