Cities of the Plain

The Last Cowboys

Harmon Watson’s ranch sits near the New Mexico-Texas border in the early 1950s. John Grady Cole, who rode across Mexico in All the Pretty Horses, is twenty years old and working as a hand. Billy Parham, who made three journeys into Mexico in The Crossing, is in his mid-thirties. The ranch is the last of a certain kind of world: the land is being sold off, the army is acquiring the range, and the life of the cowboy is ending.

Cities of the Plain is the most plot-driven of the three Border Trilogy novels. John Grady crosses into Juárez and falls in love with Magdalena — a young woman with epilepsy who works in a brothel controlled by a knife-fighter named Eduardo. The plot has the clarity of tragedy: you can see what is coming from a long way away, and the knowledge does not diminish the force of the arrival.

The Ending

The epilogue is set decades later, in the 1990s, and follows Billy Parham as an old man. It is one of McCarthy’s most explicitly elegiac passages — a meditation on the experience of having outlived your time and the things that gave your time its meaning. The conversation with a stranger at the end of the novel is as close as McCarthy gets to direct statement.

The trilogy as a whole — three novels about young men trying to act with honour in a world that is being reorganised around different values — is one of the great sustained achievements in American fiction of the last century.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A worthy conclusion to the Border Trilogy: more accessible than The Crossing, more emotionally direct, devastating in its final pages.

Reading Guides

• All the Pretty Horses — Full Review
• The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy — Full Review

The Border Trilogy’s Conclusion

Cities of the Plain completes the arc that All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Crossing (1994) established across nearly a decade of writing. McCarthy published the three novels over six years, and they represent his most sustained single project: a meditation on a particular American landscape and a particular American code of honour at the moment both were being rendered obsolete.

The title refers to the biblical cities destroyed in Genesis — Sodom and Gomorrah among them — an allusion that connects the novel’s setting to a theological register of loss and consequence. McCarthy is not a conventionally religious writer, but the Biblical resonances in his work are consistent and deliberate: this is a world where choices have costs and the universe does not forgive.

John Grady Cole’s Final Act

John Grady Cole’s decision to pursue Magdalena despite the impossibility of the situation — she is controlled by Eduardo; the relationship cannot be made legitimate; everyone around John Grady can see the trajectory — is not stupidity but something closer to tragic fidelity. He knows what he is doing. He chooses to do it anyway. This is consistent with the John Grady we first met in All the Pretty Horses: a young man whose relationship to commitment is absolute, who does not moderate his feeling by calculating consequences.

The knife fight with Eduardo is the novel’s climax, and it has the formal structure of tragedy: two men who represent incompatible codes of honour, meeting at the point where their incompatibility produces violence. Eduardo is not a simple villain; he has his own code, his own logic. McCarthy gives him enough interiority that the fight does not feel like good versus evil but like two irreconcilable systems of value destroying each other.

Billy Parham’s Epilogue

The epilogue — set decades later, in the 1990s — follows Billy Parham as an old man, homeless, moving through a changed Southwest. The conversation he has near the end with a stranger he encounters is McCarthy’s most direct engagement with questions of dream, memory, and the persistence of the self. Billy is the one who survives the trilogy, outlasting both Blevins (from All the Pretty Horses) and John Grady, and his survival is not triumph but duration: he is still here, still carrying the weight of what he lost, still trying to understand what it meant.

The Border Trilogy as a whole — published between 1992 and 1998, set between 1938 and the early 1950s — is one of the great sustained achievements in American fiction. Its three novels are best read in order, as a single argument about what it means to try to live with honour in a world that is being reorganised around different values.

The Ranch and What It Represents

The cattle ranch setting of Cities of the Plain is not incidental. The ranch is being squeezed: the army is acquiring adjacent land, economic pressures are making the old model of cattle ranching unviable, and the cowboys who work there know that their way of life is ending. McCarthy is precise about the specific historical moment — the early 1950s, when the postwar American economy was transforming the Southwest in ways that would eventually make ranching either industrial or impossible. John Grady and Billy are not just individuals trying to live well; they are representatives of a way of life that the economy has made a relic. Their individual choices occur within that larger context of obsolescence, which is what gives the novel its elegiac quality.

McCarthy and the Western Tradition

In the context of American literary history, the Border Trilogy represents McCarthy’s most sustained engagement with the Western as a literary form. He does not simply write genre Westerns — he takes the genre’s deepest preoccupations (the landscape, the code of honour, the horse, the border, the passage from innocence to experience) and subjects them to the kind of philosophical scrutiny that the entertainment Western avoided. The result is a trilogy that simultaneously occupies and critiques its genre, honouring what the Western understood about American life while refusing the mythology the genre constructed around it.