Charles Goodnight

Before the Pease River and the trail, Goodnight was a young partner in a cattle deal with his stepbrother. In 1856 he and John Wesley Sheek agreed to run about 400 head on shares along the Brazos for ten years, after Sheek's brother-in-law Claiborne Varner talked them into it. They trailed the herd to the Keechi Valley in 1857, built a log cabin with stone chimneys at Black Springs, and brought their parents there in 1858. Goodnight kept freighting cotton and supplies to Houston until Sheek married, then took over the growing herd himself.

What the plaque says

Charles Goodnight Here at Black Springs in the Keechi Valley in 1857, the celebrated pioneer open range cowman and trail driver Charles Goodnight (1836-1929) located his first ranch on the extreme Indian frontier of Texas. From here he took part in the 1860 Pease River fight when Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured from Comanches, he served as scout and guide for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War and in 1866 he laid out the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail, over which thousands of longhorns were driven to market in New Mexico. In 1867 at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, his partner Oliver Loving died from wounds suffered in an Indian attack. Without the aid of an undertaker, Goodnight carried the body by wagon through hostile Indian territory for burial at Weatherford (24 miles southeast). Goodnight extended his cattle trails to Wyoming and to Colorado, where he started a ranch near Pueblo. In 1876 he established the first cattle ranch in the vast Texas panhandle, which became the internationally known JA Ranch. Involved in the preservation of the the area's native buffalo, he also bred the first herd of cattalo by crossing buffalo with range cattle. Goodnight's pioneer efforts led to the development of the frontier and the Texas cattle industry. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 12 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.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 18 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.
• Chandor Gardens — 25 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.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 27 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.

More markers nearby

• Black Springs — steps away
• Site of the Home of Oliver Loving in 1855 — 5.3 mi
• Whitt Seminary — 8.2 mi
• Whitt Cemetery — 8.3 mi