by Mari Sandoz
The bull that received the long Toledo blade the second day was dragged out onto the prairie and left for disposal and the crowd trailed back to town to wet their dry throats. When the owner went out for the hide, planning to tan it as a souvenir for his ranch wall, the animal was gone. Not stolen or dragged off somewhere, just gone. A few days later the bull was discovered back with his herd, apparently no worse for the experience of death in the arena.
This true story, or this windy as some who never saw the bull called it, gave Dodge intense satisfaction. The honor of the cattle country had been vindicated. But a death in town that night was a little more permanent. A cattleman from down around Goliad, Texas, was shot in a quarrel with a gambler. He and his partner had 6,000 cattle on the Dodge market and, some said, he had lost most of his share to a faro dealer. Angered, he called the dealer crooked and then was too slow on the draw. The gambler was hurried off to jail and a heavy guard set to hold off the dark knots of trail drivers gathering here and there, threatening a little lynching to end up the two-day celebration of the killing of the bulls.
Although only one of the bulls seemed to have died, the rancher from Goliad was dead, dead as Dodge, the cow town of the trails, was dead.
CHAPTER V
DEEPENING DEDICATION
LONG before the settlements and quarantines pushed the cattle trail beyond Dodge City some of the dedicated men felt compelled to pull up stakes once more. Not King down in south Texas. His moves were expansion of his range, improvement in the stock, and a firmer hand on what was already called King's Kingdom, not only a kingdom whose subjects and all their lives were irrevocably in the sovereign's palm but a kingdom with a railroad that would also be in his strong hand if Richard King had to build it himself. He planned to bring everything he needed, including markets, through his own ranch gates. But in the meantime his herds were going north—well-managed stock, sleek, fine, but from deep in the tick region, and wherever they walked it seemed that the grass turned to poison, so poisonous that even the emigrant's cow plodding at the tailboard of his wagon died from merely crossing the trail.
Up in Colorado the energetic Charlie Goodnight was getting mighty restless in his fine but limited canyon leading to the Arkansas. In 1869, two years after Oliver Loving died, he settled the trust he had maintained at the request of his friend, giving the family half of the $72,000, the profit from the joint herd. With Jim Loving, Goodnight took the whole sum down the Pecos in a wagon, his faithful Negro driving. So he got through the outlaw country of east New Mexico and past the Robbers' Roost that preyed on the old Santa Fe Trail and the ranchers coming into the cornering of Texas, New Mexico, and the literally lawless No Man's Land that had somehow escaped belonging to any of the adjoining divisions. Down in Texas Goodnight sold his share in the old joint herd with his half-brother. The news of these profits and that he was carrying the money spread fast and, fearing ambush if he went back up the Pecos, he slipped out horseback through Indian Territory and by railroad to Hays, and then overland to the upper Arkansas, a long way around any robber ambush but a safe one. Unfortunately he had to leave his sweetheart behind, as so many men did when they returned to their cows.
In spite of all the outlaws threatening the Goodnight Trail and the protests from his Colorado neighbors running northern, American, cattle, Charlie Goodnight kept trailing southern stock into the state, and to market. Sometimes he used the threat of buckshot and bullets to get his herd across the Arkansas. But this wasn't enough up near Denver, where settlers shot into his bedded herds at night and stampeded them, killing some. Still he kept on, and delivered the 25,000 to 30,000 head of cattle contracted to Iliff, up in the northeast corner of Colorado in the three-year period. It wasn't up to King's great herds of a few years later, but still, Goodnight was doing very well for the times, and making enemies, too. Some called him overbearing, and trimmed the term with lurid additions and suggested destinations. Others said he wasn't above filling out a herd with stolen stock, if it was handy. But the outlaws were the hottest against him. William Coe, with his Robbers' Roost gang of around forty, fifty thieves, gunmen and general cutthroats, had long threatened to kill Goodnight at sight. Although accounts of what happened varied, plainly something was done. The story that pleased the Roost's victims the most gave Penrose, commander at Fort Lyon, Colorado, the credit. They said he marched out with a six-inch cannon and blew the stone Roost to pieces after he captured Coe. Anyway, a mob dragged Bill Coe out of the Pueblo jail and strung him up. Goodnight helped capture several of Coe's gang. Later he ran into some of the outfit hanging from telegraph poles when he was bringing his new bride out from Texas. Although Mary Goodnight had grown up in the Cross Timbers, she was shocked at this wild country and disturbed by the roughness it seemed her Charlie had acquired during his years up among these Yankees. But there was no easy road back to Texas and so he got her to stay long enough to go up to his new ranch not far from Pueblo. He worked hard to make a pleasant home for her, had canals dug for irrigation, planted apple trees, and grew corn until the railroad came through and broke the high price.
Gradually Goodnight started trailing Texas Long-horns up to his ranch in the fall, when the fever danger was past. There were storm losses, and drifting, sometimes as far as southeast Kansas, but less difficulty with his neighbors. He wintered the stock on a vast expanse of the public domain he called the Goodnight range. He bought some blooded Shorthorn seed stock and worked with the Stock Raisers Association to keep Texas, Mexican, and other inferior bulls off the Colorado range. He had also joined the neighboring ranchers to organize a bank. Might as well put the interest he was laying out into his own pocket, he said. And make money off other people's needs and bad luck, some added. But the panic of 1873 left Goodnight the involuntary owner of a lot of Pueblo property barely worth the taxes. With beef prices gone down a badger hole nobody who could hang onto his cattle sold, overstocking the upper Arkansas range, too. Then, as soon as beef prices climbed a little, new ranchers moved in, and settlers. In 1875 Goodnight borrowed $30,000 at 18 per cent annually. That called for fast increase, good calf crops, good growth and fattening, which meant new grass and spreading room, freedom from the piggin string of regulation, government or association, and from rustlers and the pushing hoe men.
Early in the spring of 1876 Charlie Goodnight made a sort of treaty with the sheepmen and the few ranchers of the Texas Panhandle, bluntly announcing that he was moving in. He wouldn't touch the hundreds of miles watered by the Canadian River, rugged, with sheltered breaks for winter protection, and they were to keep off the headwaters of the Red River, out of all the colorful canyons of the Palo Duro cutting down from the Staked Plains. Here he would be 200 miles from a town or legal authority. He and the Mexican pastores would be the law, the public domain their domain, to rule absolutely.
Goodnight set a great herd on the trail, heading stock southward for the first time in his life. As the outfit neared Palo Duro, coming in across a flat tableland, Goodnight, far ahead, signaled the route from one rise after another to the heavy cook wagon rumbling over the prairie in the dust of the herd behind. Finally a bit of wind carried the man smell to the invisible canyon ahead and suddenly a far rumbling of a buffalo stampede shook the earth, and a long time afterward a mushroom of reddish dust rose from the Palo Duro. It climbed the 1,000 feet to the cap rock and the level of the plains, and the skies beyond, thinning out finally, almost like an Indian signal fire, far off.
The canyon opened before the feet of Goodnight's snorting horse, the earth falling away, a curving gash cut deep from the plain, with scattered brush and trees startlingly green against the reds and purples of the canyon walls, a narrow band of stream glistening far down, flowing through greenest slough grass, everything very clear with only a thin film of dust still in the air from the stampede down the canyon.
They took the cook wagon to pieces and packed it down the 700-foot wall on the back of mules, and the provisions the same way. The cowboys pushed the
cattle in a bawling, zigzag string down the narrow buffalo trails and let them scatter along the creek to drink. Afterward they kept meeting straggling buffaloes that had to be scared off by putting bullets into the red dirt under their feet. Finally the men stirred up the main herd again, at least 10,000 head, and moved them so they would not excite the cattle, or toll some adventuresome ones away. Even after that a few young buffaloes still loafing on the steep paths that led out of the canyon, came plunging back down through the scrub cedar, and sent a couple of little black bears loping off to find better shelter while the tired cowboys roared with dust-hoarse laughter and hooted them on their way.
When the camp was well settled, Charlie Goodnight went back up the canyon until he came to the widening park he sought, where the broad bottoms were cut by a little side stream that started in a spring near the cap rock, far above. There he set his home ranch, the first within the bounds of the Staked Plains, set far up the Palo Duro canyon that drained into the Prairie Dog Town Fork. Together the streams cut a colorful stretch of canyons nearly sixty miles long and generally almost 1,000 feet deep, varying from a few hundred yards in width to extensive badlands fifteen miles across. Here was shelter from the blue northers that swept down the winter plains, with water and grass for thousands of cattle. The cedars, hackberry, Cottonwood, and chinaberry trees had been fuel and shade for generations of Comanche camps. Goodnight had been told that as many as 10,000 even 12,000 Indian horses had grazed in the canyon. It was unexcelled as winter range, the high bluffs and cap rock fine storm protection and more effective fencing for animals than even the new barbed wire advertised so highly, with salesmen coming through the settlements like snake-oil peddlers showing their samples.
By the spring of 1877 times were a little better. That money Goodnight had borrowed was from John George Adair, of a New York brokerage firm. On a hunt to Kansas in 1875 the Irishman and his wife were so pleased with the open prairie that Adair moved his business to Denver. There he caught the cow fever, as infectious as any carried north by the walking herds. By the spring of 1877 he was in partnership with Goodnight and the two men were taking their wives to the canyon. Goodnight had loaded four great freight wagons with half a year's ranch supplies, got a light ambulance for the comfort of the ladies, bought 100 of the best Shorthorn bulls he could find in Colorado, and hired some cowboys to drive them along. The cowboys joked among themselves about starting a ranch with a bull herd and about the handsome Cornelia Adair starting the long trip south on a sidesaddle, yards of veil flying from her hat, whipping in the wind. But they underestimated both Goodnight as a rancher and the lady as a sidesaddler. Mrs. Adair was one kind of horsewoman these cowboys had never seen.
With Mary Goodnight driving the ambulance they reached the Canadian River and crossed its spring flood at the new little cow town of Tascosa, still mostly tents and hide shacks, but already very wild, with enough saloons, gambling dens, and prostitution for all the cattlemen, border outlaws, and comancheros of the Panhandle.
Once out of the broad, flat, sand-scarfed valley of the Canadian, the Goodnights were on the great unwatered plains. After two dusty, burning days without water the women were worn and drawn, the stocky, short-legged Shorthorn bulls wild with thirst. Goodnight knew he must strike ahead for a water hole he believed he could locate about ten miles out, leaving his wife to straw-boss the outfit and to follow the point on the horizon where he disappeared. But the cowboys, unaccustomed to mirages, took their first one for Indians, and circled the stock and the wagons and prepared for a siege. When evening was coming on, Goodnight backtracked as hard as his horse could go, uneasy that the others hadn't covered the ten miles long ago to the relief of the water hole. He found them barely a mile from where he left them in the morning.
Furious, he moved them out into their evening shadows, knowing he must get the blooded bulls to water or lose the entire investment and, worse for a good cowman, watch a critter die. But these were no rangy Longhorns to go three days without water and make an eighty-mile march to the Pecos. He took only one wagon, for supplies, leaving the rest standing together, the horses unhooked and driven with the bulls. It was a hard night push and the water hole wasn't fresh but it was wet and apparently not dangerous, judging from the antelope, rabbits, and buffaloes around it at dawn, even a little herd of mustangs, almost as choosey as stock horses about water. Goodnight rested his party here a couple of days while the rest of the wagons were brought up. By now the cowboys looked with admiration upon this city wife of Adair, still cheerful, still sitting her sidesaddle in heat and dust and wind, although the flying yards of veiling had disappeared into her pocket.
They reached the vicinity of Palo Duro canyon just ahead of an electric storm but the loud rumble was doubled by the noise of a buffalo herd in rutting time, the bulls roaring, running, and fighting. Suddenly the canyon lay before the weary party, the spotting of dark cedars along the top, the walls red and rose and deep purple in the sun slanting under the jutting blackness of the storm, and turning the rising dust golden off downstream where the buffaloes were. There were between 1,000 and 1,500 in the herd, the canyon walls echoing with their noise and the rising thunder of the storm. When they caught the smell of man they broke into a gallop, tails up, sweeping this way and that but not leaving the sheltered Palo Duro.
The rain moved in a curtain down the far bluffs, the lightning glowing in a constant explosion of violet and rose, cut by great branching bolts that reached for the earth, the thunder crashing, shaking the ground so even the worn wagon teams had to be held from breaking away in terror. Occasional storm-set fires blazed for a bit in the cedars of the canyon, for all the rain, until the pouring increased so the water leapt down the walls in streams and the creek boiled up over the bottoms. The storm's roar and thunder, trapped in the canyon this first night, prepared even the Adairs for almost anything this raw and torn land could produce.
In a few days a trail four miles long was cut to get the wagons from the cap rock into the deep bottoms. A two-room log cabin was put up immediately. Here, despite the hard trip, John Adair signed a five-year agreement, he to furnish the capital, Goodnight the foundation herd, to manage the ranch at $2,500 a year and plan the expansion of the cattle under the JA brand and buy up 25,000 acres of land out of Adair's cash, all to be repaid with interest. At the end of five years the property was to be divided, one third to Goodnight, the rest to Adair.
Because the money the Irishman advanced now would buy only 12,000 acres from the Texas public lands, Goodnight hoped to get another 12,000 next year. To keep others out he bought the first allotment in a sort of crazy checkerboard, covering all the water and hay lands and the good building sites, leaving the dry range free and grazable only by his stock. The first purchase cost from twenty to thirty-five cents an acre. The largest purchase, the Tule ranch of 170,000, cost twenty cents an acre, but that was years later.
In 1878 Goodnight pointed his first beef herd north to market. He went late, with the fat of fall grass on their ribs. The Adairs returned to Denver or New York for the winters but Mary Goodnight stayed, patching the clothing, doctoring the sick and the hurt. For a long time the nearest woman neighbor was the wife of Bugbee, eighty miles to the north. The first women Mrs. Goodnight saw after the Adairs left were the Comanches of Quanah Parker's band.
Once more Charlie Goodnight had turned out a trail breaker, a ranger opener. By the fall of 1877 there were half-a-dozen other ranchers in his region of the Panhandle: Bates and Beals, Cresswell, Littlefield, Hays, the Reynolds, old-time cowmen pushed farther out by the settlements, and some others up around Tascosa. The troops at Fort Elliott represented such law as the Panhandle possessed. Near it was Sweetwater, the Hide Town of the remaining buffalo hunters. Later Mobeetie was established, and finally the much nearer colony of Clarendon, led by a Christian minister, a strange settlement for the wild Panhandle, a prohibition community named for a preacher's wife.
Goodnight bought cattle off the range and the tra
il to add to the herds at the Palo Duro. The serviceable cows were thrown into the main herd for calving, the inferior ones spayed, fattened, and trailed to fall market with the beef herds. He kept his blooded cattle separate in the upper reaches of the canyon, with the best bulls. Each year he culled out the inferior stock and threw it into the main, the common herd.
Other Colorado cowmen followed into the Panhandle, bringing well-bred Shorthorns. Some bought fine herd bulls. In 1881 Goodnight got 500 more registered Shorthorns, 200 bulls and 300 heifers, at Burlingame, Kansas, and trailed them down from the railroad. Near Wolf Creek they got too close to a south Texas trail herd. To avoid the fever, the blooded stock was driven up the middle of Wolf Creek until far beyond the contaminated range.
The Shorthorn's susceptibility to Texas fever was discovered early. Back in 1848 Colonel Tom Shannon was given two fine cows by Queen Victoria from her own herd, delivered at New Orleans. He hauled them all the way to north Texas in ox wagons, which, fortunately, was beyond the regular tick region and out of the path of the trailers. The ranchers on the way scoffed. A man had no business with cows that couldn't light out and walk from New Orleans to Texas and across even the noble distances of that new state.
Shannon's neighbors were particularly furious. They wouldn't have that squat blood loose on the range. Too short-legged to get over the ground that a good grazer had to cover to keep alive. The cows and their calves did well but some of the bulls Shannon brought in were apparently shot on the prairie to keep their blood from spreading. Blooded sires probably were walked to death by the Texas cattle or killed by the native bulls, although it seems that the Spanish fever might have had a part in their easy dying.