The name Charles Goodnight has been mentioned before in these pages and, every time that happens, we’ll remove our Stetsons in respect.
Most of y’all will recognize Charlie Goodnight as the real-life man upon whom the character of Woodrow Call in “Lonesome Dove” was based. True enough; but Goodnight was so much more than Larry McMurtry captured in his masterpiece of the American West.
I have always felt an affinity with those olden-day Texas cattlemen, and a respect for how they left their bootprints on the Big Empty. As a little kid, hearing those stories from the old cowboys, I memorized the brands that they slapped on cattle headed north.
The Turkey Track, the Four Sixes, the XL, the King and the JA. These brands adorned the hides of the first cattle brought into Wyoming after the railroad was built. These brands are registered to men like Burk Burnett, Capt. Richard King and Charles Goodnight.
In all likelihood, the first cattle to graze my home, the ID, came from these herds.
So yeah, I have a reverence for this history.
After I closed my bookstore, I took work with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in the Texas Panhandle, managing a ranch on the lip of Palo Duro Canyon. A mile or so down the canyon was the site of the McKenzie Fight, where the Comanche were finally defeated after their horses were slaughtered by the US cavalry.
Another few miles down the canyon was Charlie Goodnight’s ranch. Goodnight’s place was several thousand acres that he kept when he and Lord Adair, founders of the massive JA Ranch, divided their business interests.
I could stand outside my door and see where Quanah Parker finally surrendered, and where Charlie Goodnight rode around in the multi-colored canyon checking his cows. There is no more apt metaphor for Manifest Destiny than that.
I was able to wheel and deal a one-year option on Goodnight’s place from his family. I had dreams of preventing Cowboy Holy Ground from being turned into strip malls and titty bars.
As it turns out, Goodnight’s place is too far from civilization to be at that sort of risk. But, nevertheless, I controlled the deed to Charlie Goodnight’s ranch for a year.
I knew McMurtry from visits to Booked Up, his multi-building bookstore in Archer City, Texas. McMurtry had a significant family connection to the Panhandle, and he loved barbecue, so we had lunch in Wichita Falls.
He agreed to write a nice letter extolling the historic virtues of Goodnight’s ranch and the man himself. He then warned me to be cautious of women, and drove off in his vintage Cadillac Brougham.
Armed with my option and McMurtry’s letter, I rode horseback across Charlie Goodnight’s ranch to see what I could see.
I must mention at this point that James King, who recruited me to TNC and was five generations out of Capt. King, and I buried a quart of good whiskey on the Goodnight, vowing not to drink it until we closed on the deal.
Ok, back to the horseback trip.
Winding my way down to Spring Creek, I came upon a stock tank that Goodnight had built, and around which he had planted thirty different species or so eastern fruit and hardwood trees, to see how they would fare in the harsh Palo Duro country. They were all green and leafy a hundred years after he had last touched them.
Goodnight was an inveterate tinkerer with nature.
He saved the southern buffalo herd from extinction by market hunters, and bred them on his place until the species could survive. When the herd could stand it, Goodnight invited his Kiowa and Comanche friends to hold a traditional buffalo hunt on his ranch. He even took a home movie of the event.
There’s an old legend among cowboys that Charlie Goodnight never allowed alcohol on his ranch. I found his dump on that ride, and poked through it for old whiskey bottles to test that legend. All I found was an ink bottle, purpled by the sun.
I wonder what he wrote after dipping his pen into that bottle.
Part of me is glad we never closed on that deal, and I didn’t end up drinking whiskey on the ranch of a man who wouldn’t tolerate it.
You may put your Stetsons back on your noggins now.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
