Mr. Charles Goodnight, a trail blazer

The Lone Star State is known for many things including the Alamo, the Dallas Cowboys and its rich history of oil. However, ranching has played a heavy role in the state's history; from the Spanish and Mexican vaqueros to Jesse Chisholm (Chisum) who helped pave the Chisholm Trail. However, there is one man that helped build the industry into bigger and better things, Charles Goodnight.

Goodnight's desire to travel and explore the American West began as a young man. After Texas, who won its independence from Mexico in 1836 and became a state nine years later, Goodnight's parents Hiram Daugherty and his wife along with Charles' siblings left soil rich southern Illinois with their household goods, farming tools and two covered wagons.

According to J. Evetts Haley, Goodnight rode a "white faced mare called Blaze." From there became passionate about animals, particularly horses, and over time worked various jobs including whacking bulls, getting paid $25 to supervisor slaves performing their labor and splitting rails. In 1853, according to the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), his mother married Rev. Adam Sheek, a Methodist preacher and this led to the formation of the partnership three years later between Charles and his step-brother, John Wesley Sheek. Although they considered going to California, they were dissuaded by Sheek's brother-in-law, Claiborne Varner, who induced them to run about 400 head of cattle on shares along the Brazos valley for a ten-year period. In 1857 the young partners trailed their herd up the Brazos to the Keechi valley in Palo Pinto County. At Black Springs they built a log cabin buttressed with stone chimneys, to which they brought their parents in 1858. Goodnight continued freighting cotton and provisions to Houston and back for a time until Wes Sheek married, then assumed the bulk of responsibility of looking after the growing herd of scrawny, wild Texas cattle. With his acquired hunting and trailing skills, he quickly mastered the modes of survival in the wilderness. This led to his encounter with Mr. Oliver Loving.

Mr. Goodnight and Loving ran two herds of longhorn cattle. One ran from outside Fort Belknap along the Butterfield Overland Mail Route to Horsehead Cross and from there they worked up the Pecos River. According to TSHA, "In the spring of 1868 Goodnight entered into a contract with John Wesley Iliff in which he agreed to deliver his cattle to Iliff at the Union Pacific Railroad town of Cheyenne, Wyoming. From the Arkansas valley near Pueblo, Goodnight and his men struck out due north, passing east of Denver, to the South Platte River. They crossed that stream at the site of present Greeley and followed a tributary, Crow Creek, to Cheyenne, where the delivery was made. Afterward, Goodnight and his men went back to New Mexico to buy more cattle from Chisum at Bosque Grande. Returning north, Goodnight further "straightened out" the trail by leaving the Pecos north of Fort Sumner and traveling north to Alamogordo Creek and across the plains via Cuervo Creek and its tributaries to a spot on the Canadian River twenty miles west of Fort Bascom. From there he proceeded to the Cimarron Seco west of Capulin Mountain. In order to avoid Dick Wootton's toll road, Goodnight opened a new, easier passageway through Tinchera Pass into Colorado." The route became known as the Goodnight Loving Trail, but on the third trip Mr. Loving died from gangrene poisoning in New Mexico. Three later, Mr. Goodnight found his soulmate Molly Dyer.

 

Goodnight continued driving cattle and in 1871 worked with John Chisum where he made $17,000. Along with neighboring cattlemen such as Henry W. (Hank) Cresswell and the Thatchers, he formed Colorado's first stock raisers' association in November 1871 and four years later laid out the Goodnight Trail from Alamogordo Creek in New Mexico to Granada, Colorado. However, overstocked ranges, coupled with the panic of 1873, resulted in heavy losses.

After sending his wife to relatives in California, according to the TSHA, in the fall of 1875, he gathered the remnant of his longhorn cattle, some 1,600 head, and moved them to a campsite on the upper Canadian River at Rincón de las Piedras, New Mexico, for the winter. With a Mexican cowhand named Panchito (Little Frank), he investigated the Texas Panhandle, recently cleared of hostile American Indians, and decided on Palo Duro Canyon where he constructed his first temporary living quarters, a dugout topped with cottonwood and cedar logs, with abandoned Comanche lodge poles as rafters.

Subsequently, farther to the southeast in Armstrong County, where the canyon floor widened out for ten miles or more, the colonel built a comfortable three-room ranchhouse from native timber without using any nails. He also built corrals and a picket smokehouse at the site, which he affectionately dubbed the Home Ranch and is currently part of the Charles Goodnight Historical Center.

Charles Goodnight's home, which is part of the Charles Goodnight Historical Center (Charles Goodnight Historical Center). Unfortunately they are closed on Mondays.

 

After returning to Pueblo to borrow money, he remained with his men at the New Mexico campsite through the calving season before moving down the Canadian to its junction with Alamocitos Creek, near the future site of Tascosa, where they spent most of the summer. Before leaving, Goodnight made a pact with Casimero Romero in which the pastores of New Mexico agreed to limit their operations to the Canadian and its tributaries, while Goodnight would have exclusive use of the headwaters and canyons of the Red River. After securing the services of Nicolás Martínez, a one-time Comanchero who knew all of the old American Indian trails, the Goodnight outfit moved east to Tecovas Springs before turning southeast across the tableland to Palo Duro Canyon.

 

On October 23, 1876, they reached the edge of the canyon in Randall County and set up camp where he remained on the rim with the cattle while Goodnight and Martínez located a route into the canyon and a site for the ranch headquarters. Since buffalo were still fairly plentiful below the canyon walls, the cowboys were kept busy driving them back for about fifteen miles to make room for the cattle. They spent two days portaging supplies by muleback and herding the cattle down the steep, rugged trail. Leaving Leigh Dyer in charge of the outfit, Goodnight went with Martínez to Las Animas to purchase more needed supplies and provisions. In February 1877 he returned via Camp Supply and Fort Elliott to check up on his men. On Commission Creek, near Fort Elliott, he met with the outlaw gang of "Dutch" Henry Born and struck up a bargain, sealed with a drink, in which their leader promised to keep his activities north of the Salt Fork of the Red River. Goodnight returned to Colorado to secure more capital and arrange to bring his wife out to the new homestead.

 

In Denver, he met with John G. Adair at the latter's brokerage firm, from which the colonel had borrowed $30,000 in March 1876. Adair agreed to help expand the ranch into a large-scale operation, and in May 1877 the Goodnights and Adairs, along with four cowboys, arrived at the Home Ranch with 100 Durham bulls and four wagons loaded with provisions. On June 18 they drew up the five-year contract that launched the JA Ranch, with Goodnight retaining one-third interest and an annual salary of $2,500 as resident manager. During his eleven years with the JA, Goodnight devoted his time and energy to expanding the range, building up the herd, and establishing law and order in the Panhandle.

 

In the summer of 1878 he took the first JA trail herd, led by his famous lead steer Old Blue, north to Dodge City, Kansas, then the nearest railhead. The Palo Duro-Dodge City Trail, which he blazed, was well-used in subsequent years by many Panhandle ranchers. Late that fall, when destitute Indians from the reservations came to hunt the now-scarce buffalo, Goodnight made his famous treaty with Quanah Parker in which he promised two beeves every other day for Parker's followers provided they did not disturb the JA herd. In 1879 Goodnight moved the JA headquarters to its present location. Although he strictly enforced his rules against gambling, drinking, and fighting, he usually was able to hire the cowboys he needed. In 1880 Goodnight helped organize and served as first president of the Panhandle Stock Association in Mobeetie. Two years later he bought the Quitaque (Lazy F) Ranch and reportedly became the first Panhandle rancher to build fences of barbed wire.

By the time of Adair's death in 1885, the JA had reached its maximum of 1,325,000 acres, on which grazed more than 100,000 head of Goodnight's carefully bred cattle. In addition, Goodnight was a pioneer in the use of artificial watering facilities and the ownership of permanent ranges in fee. As an early believer in improvement through breeding, he developed one of the nation's finest herds through the introduction of Hereford bulls. With his wife's encouragement, he also started a domestic buffalo herd, sired by a bull he named Old Sikes, from which he developed the "cattalo" by crossing bison with polled Angus cattle. He also invented the first practical sidesaddle, with an additional horn to rest the left knee, for his wife. In 1886, Goodnight began investing in the Inter-State Land Company, for which he sold shares in land along the Texas-New Mexico border purchased from the Beales-Royuela grant, an old Spanish land grant. At the same time he became involved in the Grass Lease Fight, from which he emerged as a leader for the big cattlemen's interests. For his efforts in that controversy, Goodnight was severely censured by the press and accused of robbing money from the schoolchildren of Texas. What was more, he felt pressured to reduce his holdings to cope better with the rapid changes that were being imposed on the cattle industry from the recent drought, falling beef prices, and the advent of railroads and farmers to the Panhandle.

For these reasons, along with a stomach ailment that almost proved fatal, Goodnight decided to sell out his interest in the JA after the second contract expired in 1887 and limit his ranching activities. In the division of the properties, he retained interest in the Quitaque Ranch, half of which he sold to L. R. Moore of Kansas City. Even so, Mrs. Adair retained his services as manager of the JA until 1888, when John C. Farrington succeeded him. Soon after his exit from the JA ownership, Goodnight bought 160 sections in Armstrong County near the Fort Worth and Denver City line, including the Sacra-Sugg Ranch on the Salt Fork and some school land.

Near the town that bears his name he built his spacious, two-story ranchhouse, into which he and his wife moved on December 27, 1887. This small ranch, to which he relocated his buffalo herd of 250 head, was formally organized as the Goodnight-Thayer Cattle Company, with J. W. (Johnnie) Martin as foreman and later as a junior partner. After selling his remaining interest in the Quitaque to Moore in 1890, Goodnight, in association with William McCamey and Avery L. Matlock, invested heavily in a Mexican gold and silver mining venture deep in the mountains of southern Chihuahua; that enterprise proved a failure. Furthermore, his investments in the Inter-State Land Company reduced his fortune considerably after federal courts declared the Beales-Royuela grant invalid.

In 1893 he was among the cowmen compensated in part for losses they suffered to the Comanchero trade during the 1860s. As civic leaders and promoters of the higher education he was denied, the colonel and his wife opened Goodnight College at Goodnight in 1898. After selling out his interest in the Goodnight-Thayer Company in 1900, Goodnight limited his ranching activities to sixty sections surrounding his house and near the railroad. There he continued his experiments with buffalo and also kept elk, antelope, and various other animals in zoo-like enclosures, as well as different species of fowl. The Goodnight Ranch became a major Panhandle tourist attraction and featured buffalo meat on its menus. Buffalo from the Goodnight herd were shipped to zoos in New York and other eastern cities, Yellowstone National Park, and even to Europe, and Goodnight's wildlife-preservation efforts gained the attention of such naturalists as William T. Hornaday, Edmund Seymour, and Ernest Thompson Seton. As a friend of Quanah Parker and other Plains Indian leaders in Oklahoma, Goodnight staged occasional buffalo hunts for former braves. He also exchanged visits with the Pueblo tribes in New Mexico, endorsed their causes in Congress, and gave one tribe a foundation buffalo herd. In addition, he grew Armstrong County's first wheat crop and conducted other agricultural experiments with the encouragement of the pioneer botanist Luther Burbank; indeed, the colonel was often called the "Burbank of the Range."

Today, one can explore the fascinating amount of Charles Goodnight's impact on ranching along with his relationship with John Adair and the JA Ranch at the Armstrong County Museum in Claude, TX.
Armstrong County Museum

"When the ranch is in peace, no other life is more perfect.” Charles Goodnight.

Sources:
Charles Goodnight TSHA
Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman