Dead Man's Walk is a powerful prequel to best-selling author Larry McMurty's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. Gus McRae and Woodrow Call are still teenagers when they enlist as Texas Rangers. Soon they are roaming the untamed West, coming of age while they cheat death. Under the command of a former pirate, the young men ride for Santa Fe, where the mission is to forcibly take the city out of Mexican hands.

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow call, longtime friends and former Texas Rangers, steal over a thousand head of cattle from rustlers south of the border and recruit an unlikely crew of hands to drive the herd 3,000 miles north to Montana.