What is the historical accuracy in the movie lonesome dove?

Actually a TV Mini-series, Lonesome Dove is based on two historical figures from the late 19th Century West America. Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving.

The author of the original novel (who won the Pulitzer Award for Fiction), Larry McMurtry, has deep roots in the American West. As such, his books of the period, including Lonesome Dove are very accurate regarding the daily lives and times of the period. Although the town of Lonesome Dove is fictional, few other locations and reflections of the time are.

Oliver Loving, an acknowledged lover of women and whiskey, did in fact have to "fort up" in a shallow creekbed during a brawl with Native Americans and on his subsequent death, Charlie Goodnight took his body far overland (but not solo), back to Texas.

Charles Goodnight became Woodrow Call. Oliver Loving, Augustus McCrae.