Bose Ikard

Sources disagree about Bose Ikard's birth year and how many children he raised. The Handbook of Texas gives July 1843 in Mississippi and fifteen children with his wife Angelina. Enslaved by Dr. Milton Ikard, he grew up with the Ikard family and went to work for Oliver Loving in 1866. Charles Goodnight later said he trusted Ikard farther than any living man. In 1869 Goodnight persuaded him to buy a Parker County farm, since few Black people lived in Colorado. Ikard died in Austin in 1929, and Goodnight paid for the granite marker.

What the plaque says

Bose Ikard (July 1834 - January 4, 1929) Born a slave in Mississippi, Bose Ikard came to Texas as a child with the family of his owner, Dr. Milton L. Ikard. He remained as an employee of Dr. Ikard following his emancipation, but in 1866 joined a cattle drive to Colorado led by Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. Ikard became one of Goodnight's best cowboys and a trusted friend. Following his work in the cattle drives, Ikard settled in Weatherford. He and his wife Angeline were the parents of six children. When he died in 1929 at age 85, Goodnight had a granite marker erected at his grave. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 1.1 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 23 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Samuel Joseph Redgate — steps away
• Oliver Loving — steps away
• Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham — steps away
• Fred Rider Cotten — 0.3 mi