Among the most enduring images of Texas lore are the big cattle ranches, complete with cattle, cowboys, windmills, relaxing around a campfire, eating a meal the cook threw together using ingredients from the chuck wagon, etc.
These images, however cozy and nostalgic, belie the fact that Texas ranches were actually business operations, often financed with out-of-state or out-of-country money from absentee investors. They were expected to churn out profits; failure to do so led to real problems. And there was the predictable strife between labor and management, as evidenced by the cowboy strike of 1883.
Along with the ranches were the legendary individuals, perhaps most notable of them all was Charles Goodnight.
Goodnight's story is well known in Texas circles and hardly needs repeating here. However, few of his biographers, seemingly more in love with the legend than the reality surrounding the man, dare to mention that he benefited immensely from government assistance in his ranching operations. First, there is the fact that federal soldiers, sometimes in conjunction with Texas militia officials (often referred to as Texas Rangers), helped to clear West Texas of the native Indian tribes and, later, their number one meat source, the bison, thus opening the door for cattle ranching.
Secondly, once the Indians were herded onto government reservations, federal officers in charge had to purchase meat from cattle ranchers since the bison population was shrinking. The whole arrangement was a dual plus for Goodnight: the land was cleared, and a ready market for his beef was created (with Goodnight selling cattle that he drove into New Mexico to the reservation at Fort Sumner). I am not overlooking the obvious time and dedication that Goodnight put into his operation; any one who has carefully studied the world of cattle raising and trail driving knows it was hard and often dangerous work. However, substantial assistance from federal and local governments, what today is accurately called corporate welfare, certainly made things easier.
During the Civil War most of the soldiers that were stationed at the many forts on the West Texas frontier, for the purpose of protecting settlers, were sent east to fight in places like Shiloh, Antietam , Gettysburg and Vicksburg . Kiowas and Comanches saw their absence as an opportunity to resume raiding on settlements. To them such raids were not unfair inasmuch as the settlers were part of the body that had forced them off of lands that they had occupied for many generations. The Indians considered their claim to the land much more legitimate.
(Goodnight apparently came to agree with the Kiowa-Comanche view of access to the land. He once bluntly told author J. Frank Dobie that the Indians "held for ages the land I and other white men controlled. By all laws of justice, it was theirs. We wanted it, fought for it, took it." Moreover, there is evidence that Goodnight felt at least some pangs of guilt over the land issue. Biographer J. Evetts Haley wrote that Goodnight, at some point late in his life, was entertaining a group of Kiowa and Comanche Indians from Oklahoma. "He carried some of the Comanches," wrote Haley, "to the Palo Duro, saw them look upon their old camp grounds, watched their mingled emotions, and felt his soul quake for having taken the gorge from them.")
With the soldiers gone, the settlers turned to the Texas Rangers as their protection against the Indians. Working with them as a scout, perhaps even considered a full-fledged Texas Ranger himself, was Charles Goodnight. Goodnight's scouting activities on the West Texas plains during the war years familiarized him with the land he would one day call home.
By the end of the war, most Americans were sick and tired of fighting, at least temporarily. With reference to West Texas , federal officials decided rather than fight the native tribes of the area, they would simply offer most of it as a reservation to them. While this seemed acceptable in the short run, over time the desire to settle the area regained momentum, fueled in part by the desire of the railroads and their powerful owners to expand into the area. The fate of the tribes was doomed.
By the mid 1870s the federal government's policy of attacking the tribes of West Texas with the intent of driving them onto reservations was again in full swing. This time, however, it was a two-pronged approach: Not only would they engage the Indians directly in battle, but they would also attack their main food source, the bison. The word went out to soldiers and buffalo hunters alike from none other than Gen. Phil Sheridan himself: Kill all the buffalo you can. It was indeed an awful and brutal policy. By creating its scarcity, food was used as a weapon.
What followed became known as the Red River War. It basically culminated in late 1874 when the U.S. military, led by such notables as Randolph Marcy and Nelson Miles, managed to drive the Comanches, led by Quanah Parker, and the Kiowas, led by Lone Wolf, out of the Palo Duro Canyon. Those not killed in battle eventually ended up on the Fort Sill reservation.
The war had the desired outcome. Perhaps no one put it better than historian Robert Utley: "The Red River War of 1874-1875 crushed the southern Plains tribes."
Once the land was cleared, it was up to ambitious speculators to start grabbing it - and grab they did.
Among the first and most successful speculators to start claiming acreage in the Panhandle area was the Sherman-based surveying firm of Gunter, Munson and Summerfield (GMS). Jot Gunter, for whom Gunter, TX was named, William Benjamin Munson, among his many credits was the founding of Denison, and John Summerfield mastered the game of obtaining certificates from the state that allowed them to lay claim to lands that they later surveyed. According to J. Evetts Haley, Gunter and Summerfield did the surveying work in the field while Ben Munson remained in Sherman overseeing the legal end of it all. (In addition to selling land to aspiring ranchers, the GMS firm established a spread of its own known as the T Anchor Ranch.)
In addition to the GMS trio came tons of out-of-state and out-of-country speculators, chiefly British and Scottish firms that were used to investing and profiting on cattle. Much of the land in west Texas and the Panhandle area came under the control of people hailing from Chicago, New York, Boston and Baltimore as well as Dundee, Scotland and London, England.
"It was," wrote J. Evetts Haley, "the day of foreign investment."
Author Lawrence Clayton, in his book Historic Ranches of Texas, adds: "As much as thirty million dollars of foreign capital, mostly from England and Scotland, was invested between 1875 and 1885. In other cases the money flowed from commerce and finance within the United States."
In other words, those famous Texas ranches were not, for the most part, home-grown affairs.
In the midst of the speculators was Charles Goodnight, looking to secure a Panhandle spread of his own. In 1876 he set up shop in the very Palo Duro Canyon that Lone Wolf and Quanah Parker had been chased from just two years prior. Once again Goodnight benefited immensely from government assistance.
Long on ambition yet short on funds, Goodnight needed outside capital if he was to realize his dream of a large cattle ranch. He found it in John Adair, a British-born businessman who headed a brokerage firm in Denver. The spread they established became known as the JA Ranch.
Over time Goodnight and Adair began expanding the JA. Doing so wasn't easy since much of the land around them was owned by the GMS firm of Sherman.
"They virtually cornered the market," wrote J. Evetts Haley, "and Goodnight found that the firm had surveyed him in."
Goodnight dealt mainly with Jot Gunter in buying more land for the JA. His efforts were successful, and over time the ranch covered well over one million acres.
By December 1887 Charles Goodnight had grown tired of managing the JA. John Adair died in 1885, and Mrs. Adair leaned heavily on Goodnight to manage the ranch wisely. Goodnight yearned for something simpler, and so he sold his interests in the JA and established the aptly named Goodnight Ranch in Armstrong County.
By the time Erwin Smith began snapping his photographs of life on the West Texas plains, Goodnight's status was firmly fixed in Texas ranching history. Smith, therefore, wanted to photograph him, a feat that proved much easier said than done.
It was at the Goodnight Ranch that Smith and his writer friend, George Pattullo, found Goodnight in 1905. Having teamed up on previous articles, both men thought they would be able to chronicle and photograph the legendary cattleman with few problems. According to Smith biographer B. Byron Price, Pattullo got his interview, but Smith was less successful in his efforts for a photograph.
Goodnight's "aversion to being photographed," wrote J. Evetts Haley, "approached ferocity, but his figure was so striking and his background so colorful that he was frequently importuned."
In the end, Erwin Smith left the Goodnight Ranch and returned to his studio in Bonham empty-handed.
Fate, however, would eventually reverse his bad luck.
1925 was a busy year for the Woman's Auxiliary of the Old Trail Driver's Association. They commissioned sculptor Gutzon Borglum, of Mount Rushmore fame, to do a bronze monument to old Texas trail drivers.
B. Byron Price notes that the ladies also summoned Erwin Smith "to San Antonio to consult on the sculpture design." (Price further notes that, "During the sculptor's subsequent lecture tour in North Texas, Smith may have hosted Borglum at his ranch near Bonham.")
As Smith and Borglum worked together in the Alamo City, many activities were planned to honor the state's erstwhile cattlemen, including a "three-day reunion of the Old Trail Drivers Association." Among the more than one thousand people in attendance were Smith, Borglum and, as fate would have it, Charles Goodnight. (It seems appropriate that many of those attending were hosted at San Antonio's famous Gunter Hotel, named for one of its chief investors, Jot Gunter.)
"Smith," writes Price, "renewed his two-decade old acquaintance" with Goodnight. More importantly, Price notes that Smith "managed to photograph the legendary rancher for the first time." Even better than that, through some sort of wizardry – delayed timer? - Smith managed to be in the photo himself.
For Smith it had been twenty years in coming, and it undoubtedly was a crowning moment, for it permanently linked, at least in a small way, his name with that of the legendary "patriarch of Panhandle ranching."
Tim Davis teaches for Bonham ISD.