Posted on 09/25/2004 7:30:57 AM PDT by Valin
How it All Began
Just as gold made California, cattle made Texas
Along about 150 years ago, Texas was a brand "new" place... opening wide to settlers who were looking for a piece of ground to call their own, a place to build a home, a life with some fresh hope and promise. It was the new Frontier, at a time when the Wild Wild West really was wild, where a man might be called to cash it in at any time just around the next cut bank in the trail.
The new settlers huddled in close together to have the protection of their neighbors, their numbers and weapons being the only defense against the roving Indian bands. They worked at building a start on the open range land, from the dirt up. The Indian tribes were plentiful, they were being disposessed of their freedom, their lands, their food supply, and they weren't taking it lightly. The word "Cowboy" wasn't even a part of the language yet, but the seeds were sown - there were plenty of cattle in Texas.
Spanish cattle were first brought to New Spain (Mexico) in the early 1500s. Gradually, as the Spaniards pushed ever northward into what we now know as the Southwest, they came with cattle to establish missions in hope of taming the Indians of "Tejas". These missions were agencies of the Spanish crown as well as the Church. However, when Mexico won it's independence from Spain in 1821, the mission system collapsed. The Plains Indians had by then acquired the horse, and they remained wild, free and dangerous.
As the Friars abandoned more than 50 missions in Texas, they also left behind the herds of Longhorn Cattle that had prospered and multiplied in the wild grasslands. Just before the Mexican Revolution, Moses Austin had gotten approval for American colonists to settle in this part of Mexico - immigrants began to pour into the area.
These newcomers discovered around 100,000 hardy, wild cattle roaming the area of Tejas. Beefsteak on the hoof! This was a resorce too good to believe, and some of the early settlers learned from the Mexicans and Indians how to rope the long-horned beasts from horseback.
There was no transportation in early Texas - no way to move products to far-away markets. It didn't take long to figure out that cattle were the only product around that provided their own transportation to market! By the 1830s the trade in Texas cattle was booming and providing prosperity to the immigrants. Fortunes began to accumulate for hard working drovers who persevered and survived!
The first Texas trail drives were short trips. Early cowmen knew that the wild longhorns tended to stay together in herds and could be easily driven from place to place. The first drives went over safe routes to locations on the Texas coast and into Louisiana, where the cattle were generally processed into tallow that was put aboard ships for transport. It wasn't long before these routes were overworked, and the number of cattle delivered outstripped the demand. After a while, there wasn't much profit in these short drives.
Oliver Loving was one of the earliest Texas cowmen. He has been called 'The Dean of Texas Trail Drivers', a title he earned through his fearless drives of large longhorn herds through territory where no others had gone before. He came from a pioneer family and spent his whole life living dangerously, prefering to be always on the outermost edges of the advancing frontier.
Born in frontier Kentucky in 1812, he came with his wife and family by flatboat down the Mississippi River to Texas at the end of its days as a Republic. Texas entered the Union as a state in 1945, just 9 years after the fall of the Alamo. At that time, Oliver was about 33 years old and father of five young children.
Loving was the force behind many of the earlier cattle drives, long before the Glory Days of the Cowboy. Because his death came so far before the heyday of the cattle kings and the big drives that came later, his story has never been told in full.
Oliver first set down in Texas along the Red River, the northern boudary of the state, in Lamar County. For whatever reasons, the grass was greener elsewhere, and he soon took his family to Collin County, some miles outside the small town of Dallas (in the 1840s it was very small). There he applied for a land grant, and he was awarded 640 acres in 1850.
Somewhere along about that time, Loving took notice of the vast herds of wild Spanish cattle roaming the whole of Texas. He capitalized on this resource early, and he began moving herds to the east. He successfully moved herds to Shreveport and New Orleans, at that time the only safe markets for Texas cattle. Fierce tribes of Indians controlled all the areas west and north of the Texas settlements. Others were driving cattle to the east and those areas of relative safety at the time, but it was Oliver Loving who pioneered the more dangerous plan of driving herds through hundreds of miles of Indian controlled territory. With his neighbor, John Durkee, he sent the first herd of Texas longhorns to a Northern market in 1858, all the way to Illinois. The venture was a financial success, and he began trading for more cattle, building another herd for the trail.
Others followed his lead and drove herds northward, marking the dawning of the Golden Age of the Texas Cattle Drive. New trails were born with names like Chisholm, Shawnee and Western Trails. Always an innovator, Oliver came up with another idea - word of the Colorado gold strike had spread, the Pike's Peak area was booming, and no one had reached that market.
In 1860, with John Dawson acting as partner and guide, he drove a thousand steers to Denver - the first herd of Texas longhorn cattle to reach Colorado. The herd was moved north out of Texas up to the old, well-traveled Santa Fe Trail, then west along the Santa Fe, most likely to Bent's Fort in southern Colorado, then north. When Oliver arrived with the herd in Denver, the town was in it's infancy, wild and overrun with the gold fever. He stayed for some months peddling out the herd, but there was chaos afoot in this wild mining region, populated almost exclusively by men and guns.
There was another kind of fever in Denver in the winter of 1860-61 - Union fever. The area was controled by Loyalists to the North, and there had already been several skirmishes between Yank and Rebel groups. The Yank groups had won out and Rebel sympathizers were killed or jailed. Groups of Union men patrolled the region, nervous about a Rebel takeover. Southern states had already begun to secede from the Union at that time, and the lines were drawn; war was close at hand.
Oliver Loving was jailed for being a 'damned Secessionist' and it looked as though he may remain incarcerated for the duration of the Civil War. It was only through the loyalty and intercession of his friend, Kit Carson, that Loving was sprung. He immediately hit the back trail and hightailed it back to Texas.
Oliver Loving made it back to Texas in the summer of 1861 and spent the war years supplying beeves to Confederate forces. The sales from these contracts would have made him a wealthy man, but as the winds of war turned, he found himself holding a reported $150,000 worth of useless Confederate script, payment for the thousands of cattle he had delivered to the Confederacy. War ended in 1865, mercifully, but the post war Reconstruction years in Texas were grim. Carpetbaggers controlled local government. Oliver was in his 50s by then, rustling had been rampant while he was away, he had a wife and nine children and little to show for all his efforts. Little, that is, except for his reputation as a fearless and expert drover. He remained around his home ranch, now in Palo Pinto County, and built up his herds.
In 1866, a young man by the name of Col. Charles Goodnight, a former Texas Ranger, began gathering longhorns in north Texas to take on the trail. Goodnight had been a plainsman and Indian fighter for most of his young life. He had raised and worked cattle and had attempted a drive in 1865, only to have the entire herd stampeded and stolen by Indians. Times in Texas were so bad that Goodnight had resolved to leave the country for good, taking as large a herd as he could gather to market with him. He knew that "the whole of Texas would start north for market" that year, jamming up those routes, so he worked out a daring plan to move his herd south then west below the main Comanche territory, across the Pecos into New Mexico and then north to the gold fields of Denver
As Goodnight put together his outfit and hired hands, he happened past Oliver Loving's cow camp. Loving had heard of his plan and waved him over and asked him about it. After telling Goodnight the hazards and problems he faced and finding him still determined to go, Loving said "If you will let me, I will go with you." Goodnight replied "I will not only let you, but it is the most desirable thing of my life. I not only need the assistance of your force, but I need your advice."
Thus was formed a partnership of legend. Goodnight knew Indian fighting, was a young strong plainsman, and he knew the country of west Texas. Loving, senior by 24 years, knew cattle and knew how to manage large herds over the worst terrain. Both were men of the highest honor and character, willing to go to heroic lengths to account for every stray, every cow and willing to ride for days to see that every cent of proceeds got to its rightful owner.
The pair left the frontier of Texas on June 6, 1866 with a 2,000-head mixed herd and an outfit of 18 armed men to blaze the trail that went down large into history as the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Goodnight rode a dozen miles ahead of the herd scouting for water, grazing sites and Indians while Oliver and the men broke the herd to trailing condition and followed across the measureless plains.
Both Goodnight and Loving knew there would be huge obstacle ahead - a stretch of over 80 miles of treeless desert without water, the Llano Estacado or Staked Plains. It covers West Texas, Eastern New Mexico and parts of Mexico. It was named the Llano Estacado by the Mexicans decades before. On finding that there were no landmarks to guide travelers, they drove a series of wooden stakes (estacado) into the desert floor to mark a path. In 1865-67 this area was so desolate and so godforsaken, that there were no settlements of any sort. It was here that the Comanche, the Apache and the renegade bands ran free... in a land that the white men avoided at all cost.
A herd can only move 12 to 15 miles a day. At the Concho River, the partners held the herd at the water for a day, letting the dry beeves drink all they could hold. At the end of the first days ride, they tried to bed the cattle down, but the animals were so restless from thirst that they milled all night. Goodnight determined then to push on non-stop until they reached the Pecos, rather than risk losing the herd.
There was no sleep for 3 days and nights as the exhausted troop moved westward across the scorched landscape. There was a stampede on the second day when the cattle imagined that they smelled water in a canyon. By the third day, they were almost unmanageable. At the end of that day, when the herd approached the Pecos, the crazed animals stampeded again, this time galloping right over the cliffs and banks headlong into the river.
Many of the animals were drowned in the onslaught at the Pecos, piling into the water one on top of the other. After recovering and watering the herd sufficiently, the partners headed north up the river, forced to leave over 100 head bogged helplessly in the quicksand banks where they landed. Goodnight said later that the Pecos was "the graveyard of a cowman's hopes - I hated it!"
A change of plans lay ahead for the partners. The original scheme was to move the herd north into Colorado and sell the beeves at Denver. As they worked their way north up the Pecos toward Colorado, they passed near a reservation at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory where 8,500 Navajo Indians were being held by the Army. The reservation had been set up 3 years before, with a plan to have the Navajos held there take up farming - an experiment that had failed miserably, leaving the Indians nearly starved, sick and dying.
Here at Fort Sumner, Loving and Goodnight sold all the steers for $12,000 in gold - a fortune! This left several hundred head of cows and calves that the Army declined to buy, so it was agreed that Loving would take that remnant herd into Denver for sale, as he'd been there in '61. To prevent the disaster of Indian starvation, the Army was willing to pay high prices for more cattle to be delivered. The Fort was in desparate need of beef, and Loving and Goodnight now knew what it took to deliver. So Goodnight took 3 hands and headed back to Texas to begin building a second herd with the proceeds.
Loving made the drive to Denver, sold the herd to local stockman John Iliff and returned to an area below Fort Sumner called Bosque Grande to await Goodnight and the second herd. Goodnight made that drive back successfully, learning from the experiences of the first trip, and the cattle were held there and peddled out to the Fort as needed.
Loving and Goodnight had kept their affairs separate up to this point, but at Bosque Grande, they entered into an equal partnership, agreeing to split all proceeds from buying, trailing and selling cattle. There were no papers signed, only a handshake over the campfire - they were men as good as their word; paper contracts were wasted on them.
After many incredible and dangerous experiences, Loving and Goodnight got back to Texas again and began straightaway buying up cattle for another drive in 1867 to Ft. Sumner. The partners efforts were starting to pay off, but bad luck loomed over this drive from the start.
By this time, news of their success had spread far and wide, and several other herds were being put together to be trailed over their path to the Fort. Loving and Goodnight were buying cattle with gold, and they assembled a herd quickly and got on the trail in hopes of beating the rush. Just beyond the edge of the Texas frontier, Indians stampeded their herd, but the outfit got it under control again. The word was out among the tribes now too, of all the herds moving across the Llano. Only a stampede was required to steal an entire herd. Just after that the cow camp was attacked at dawn by Indians attempting to take the herd. The men fought them off, but one of the cowhands caught an arrow in the skull behind his ear. Goodnight succeeded in pulling it out with a shoe pincher and covered the wound with mud. The man was sent back with an escort and survived. As they moved on, the herd stayed spooked and stampeded at anything - lightening, noise, Indians. There was more Indian trouble ahead. After crossing the Pecos some of the hands were chased for miles by Comanches, but they rode fast and hard and escaped.
As they trailed up the Pecos toward New Mexico, Loving began to worry that they would not be the first to reach the Army for a beef contract. It was late July, and the contracts were to be let in August. Goodnight agreed that Loving should go if he were to travel only at night to avoid Indian contact. One of the 'coolest' hands, "One-Armed Bill" Wilson, was assigned to go with Loving, and the two rode for 3 nights northward, sleeping during the day.
By the third day, Loving was restless. He didn't like riding at night, he had seen no sign of Indians, and with Wilson's consent, the two set out at mid-day. They rode some miles up the vacant Pecos tablelands in peace, but before the day was done, they saw a large band of Comanches charging toward them from the east.
Loving and Wilson hot-tailed it about 4 miles to the banks of the Pecos and dove into a wash that provided a small defense. Several hundred Indians piled onto the site, took the horses and then surrounded them on both sides of the river. The two cowmen had landed in a lucky spot - they were protected by the bank overhang from above and by a rising sand dune on the river side. There was no easy access for the Comanches, and Loving shot the first of them trying to enter the ditch, putting a stop to that approach and creating a stand-off. That evening the Indians began calling out in Spanish for a parley. The pair saw their situation as nearly hopeless but knew the Indians couldn't be trusted. Oliver had a rifle that had just been developed - one of the first repeating Henry rifles, with waterproof cartridges - the forerunner of the Winchester. The Comanche had nothing that could compare to this rapid-fire weapon. Loving covered for Wilson from the rear as he stood to talk, and they stepped onto the dune. The moment they got up there a shot flew, shattering Loving's wrist and entering his torso at the side. The men fell back into the ditch where Wilson did his best to attend to Loving's wounds. The intense danger continued through the evening and night. The Indians fired volleys of arrows at high angle attempting to strike the cowmen from above, but they snuggled tight into the overhang.
A rattlesnake came into the ditch and lay right on the motionless pair for a time before slithering off. Loving was bad off that night, feverish and weak. He felt he was dying, and he begged Wilson to escape down the river in the dark to get word back to the drive and to his family of his fate.
When darkness fell, after some argument, Wilson agreed, leaving Loving with 5 pistols and a rifle to defend himself. Oliver said he would not be taken alive. The one-armed man shed his boots and clothes, slipped into the river and made it out.
Wilson had an unbelievably tortuous barefoot walk back to the herd, wearing only long underwear, but made it barely alive and informed Goodnight of the tragedy.
Goodnight and his men saddled instantly and rode hard all night to get to Loving's side. They found the spot, found an Indian drawing on a page from Loving's notebook stuck to a bush, but no Loving. Goodnight searched the area ready to do battle, finding much evidence of Indians and the fight. He finally made the awful conclusion that his partner had killed himself to avoid capture, and his body floated down the river. After dark, they rode back to the herd in deep sorrow.
Loving was alive though, if barely. He had stayed in the gulley two days and nights. The Comanches had attempted to tunnel in, had pelted the hole with large boulders but had not gotten to him. Finally, he figured Wilson had been killed and there would be no rescue. On the third night, hearing no sound of Indians, he got into the river and went some miles upstream to a crossing where he might find some passerby. There he had lay under a tree for two nights and a day, starved and weak. He had no food, tried to eat his gloves but could not, and he eased his fever by dipping his handkerchief on a stick into the river. He had been unconscious for some time when three Mexicans with a boy stopped at the place with their wagon. They took him to Fort Sumner for a fee, where he was put under the care of the post doctor.
Facinating story! What happened to Loving at Fort Sumner?
Could this story have been the basis for the movie, Lonesome Dove?
http://www.txbooks.com/books/bookindex/indians/warfare.htm
Good books on this era, here especially the one on the Smith brothers.
Steak tonight in honor!
Good history and a good read but needs some review on dates. I doubt publik school history on the subject is as good.
Some of this sounds like the inspiration for "Lonesome Dove".
Thank you. Always looking for more to read.
I loved it! Thanks. Those interested in this segment of western american history would enjoy Ralph Compton's books about the cattle drives and the various trails.
Great story. Thanks!
bump
Texas entered the Union as a state in 1945, just 9 years after the fall of the Alamo.
I hadn't realized the Alamo fell in 1936.
Love true stories of the old west.
Such a short time in our history but so much happend in those 30 some-odd years. From right after the Civil War untill the invention of the automobile was one of the most storied times of our past.
Those men changed our lives and the way we see things didn't they?
Thanks
RB
A great read. Thank you
And about this time my Great-Grandfather was conceived and born in 1868. He lived as a rancher and farmer in the wilds of Oklahoma, Texas and NM.
He lived from the time a man could be scalped to the nuclear age and died in 1955. He is buried on the lone prarie in a little cemetery near the Santa Fe Trail.
He saw more changes in life in his 87 years than most of us will ever see.
I always enjoy the stories of the trail drivers as they didn't have to beg off the government when things got rough.
Read the history of Nelson Story and his cattle drive to Montana sometime.
Charles Goodnight lived till 1929.
So9
I hope you were able to hear first hand from him stories of his life at that time. My great-grandmother was born in 1861 and died in 1955. She came to Texas in a covered wagon from Tenneesee. They wound up in Tulsa,Oklahoma, only after it had become a state. My other grt. Grandmother and Grt grandfather came to Texas before 1880.
I love this niche in history!
Sounds like it.
Sounds Just like Lonesome Dove.
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