Robin Hunter

Charles Goodnight invented the chuckwagon, blazed one of the great cattle trails, hauled his dead partner hundreds of miles home in a coffin because he had promised he would, and helped save the American bison from extinction because his wife asked him to. He died in 1929. He was born March 5, 1836, in Illinois, and the family moved to Texas in 1846 when he was ten. He grew up on the frontier and spent his early adulthood as a scout and Ranger out on the Texas plains. In 1866 he teamed up with an older cattleman named Oliver Loving, put together a herd, and drove it out of Fort Belknap, Texas toward Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where the Army needed beef. That route became the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and it opened the whole Southwest to Texas cattle. The drive included about ninety miles of waterless country before they reached the Pecos. Cattle died on it. They went anyway. On that same drive, Goodnight invented the chuckwagon. He bought a surplus Army wagon, rebuilt it with iron axles, and bolted a hinged box onto the back fitted with drawers and shelves and a lid that folded down into a work surface, with a water barrel underneath. A cook could run an entire kitchen out of the back of it a hundred miles from anything. Every trail outfit in the West copied it within a few years, and the rigs people still build for chuckwagon cooking competitions today are essentially the same design. He solved the biggest logistics problem in the cattle industry with a piece of carpentry. On the second drive in 1867, Loving rode ahead and was ambushed and wounded by Comanches along the Pecos. He made it to Fort Sumner, but the wound went gangrenous and he died there. Goodnight had promised him he would not be left in New Mexico. So after the burial, Goodnight came back, had the body taken out of the ground, and hauled it in a coffin across hundreds of miles of plains to Weatherford, Texas, so Loving could be buried at home. If that sounds familiar, it is because Larry McMurtry built Lonesome Dove on these two men. In 1876 Goodnight moved into the Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle and founded the JA Ranch with an Irish investor named John Adair. By 1885 it covered 1,325,000 acres and ran 100,000 head of cattle. Six years earlier he had married Mary Ann Dyer, a schoolteacher from Weatherford that everyone called Molly. She went out to the Panhandle with him, where for long stretches she was effectively the only woman for a hundred miles in any direction. And in the late 1870s she looked hard at what was happening on the plains around her. The southern bison herd was being wiped out. Millions of animals killed in a handful of years for their hides, the bodies left where they dropped. Molly kept coming across orphaned calves standing next to their dead mothers. She asked her husband to save some of them. So Goodnight went out into the canyon and roped a few bison calves and brought them home, and Molly set aside six hundred acres of the ranch as a buffalo park. From that handful: thirteen animals by 1888, around forty five by 1903, over a hundred and sixty by 1914. And then they went out into the world. Bison from the Goodnight herd went to Yellowstone in 1902, to the National Bison Range, to parks in Montana, to Canada, to the New York Zoological Park, to zoos all over the country, and to Buffalo Bill Cody. Along with four other private herds and the protected animals at Yellowstone, that is the reason the species still exists. Nearly every plains bison alive today descends from that small group of founding herds. Descendants of the Goodnight animals are standing in Caprock Canyons State Park in Texas right now. Molly died in 1926. Goodnight died on December 12, 1929, at ninety three. He was born before Texas was a state and lived to see automobiles, airplanes and talking pictures. One more thing happened in 1929. In January of that year a man named Bose Ikard died. He had been born into slavery in Mississippi in 1843 and brought to Texas as a boy. After the war he went up the trail. He rode for Oliver Loving, and then he rode four years for Goodnight. Goodnight said he trusted Bose Ikard farther than any living man, and that out in Colorado and New Mexico, Ikard was his detective, his banker, and everything else. When Ikard died, Goodnight, then ninety two years old, paid for a granite marker over his grave in Weatherford and wrote the words himself. "Bose Ikard served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches, splendid behavior." He signed it with his own name, and died eleven months later.