Goodnight-Loving Trail

The first drive paid in gold. Goodnight and Loving went into partnership in June 1866 and pushed some two thousand longhorns southwest from Young County, Texas, to cross the Pecos at Horsehead Crossing, then up the river past this stretch to Fort Sumner. The army there paid eight cents a pound, about $12,000 in gold, for beef to feed the Diné (Navajo) held at Bosque Redondo. Later drives carried the trail through Colorado to Cheyenne. Loving made his last trip the next summer, wounded by Comanches on the Pecos downstream from here.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Goodnight- Loving Trail This famous old cattle trail, running 2,000 miles from Texas to Wyoming, was blazed in 1866 by Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. In New Mexico, the trail followed the Pecos River north to Fort Sumner, where the government needed beef to feed the Navajos at the Bosque Redondo Reservation.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bottomless Lakes State Park — 6.3 mi
  Nine sinkhole lakes under red bluffs east of Roswell, named by vaqueros whose ropes never touched bottom, and set aside in 1933 as New Mexico's first state park.
• International UFO Museum and Research Center — 12 mi
  A 1930s movie theater on Roswell's Main Street turned into a museum by two men who had been part of the 1947 story, one of them the officer who announced the flying disc.

More markers nearby

• Bottomless Lakes State Park — 2.1 mi
• Louise Massey Mabie (1902-1983) — 2.1 mi
• Roswell — 9.8 mi
• Roswell — 12 mi