Charles Goodnight brought the first cattle into Palo Duro Canyon in 1876 and ran the JA there with John and Cornelia Adair. After eleven years, worn by drought, falling prices and a stomach illness that nearly killed him, he sold his share. He bought land beside the new Fort Worth and Denver City line in Armstrong County, and on December 27, 1887 he and Mary Ann Goodnight moved into the two-story Victorian house here, headquarters of the Goodnight-Thayer Cattle Company. The Texas Historical Commission runs it under both their names.
Mary Ann, called Molly, had urged him in 1878 to save orphaned bison calves from the hide hunters. The Goodnights moved their bison here, and the ranch became a tourist stop where visitors could eat buffalo meat. Animals from the herd went to zoos in the East, to Yellowstone and to Europe, and descendants still graze below the second-floor porch. The Goodnights also opened Goodnight College nearby in 1898; Charles himself had six months of schooling.
The ranch tells a harder history too. In 1860 Goodnight scouted for the Texas Rangers who attacked the Comanche camp on the Pease River where Cynthia Ann Parker was taken from her Comanche family. In the fall of 1878 he made an agreement with her son, Quanah Parker, promising two beeves every other day to his hungry people if they left the JA herd alone, and the two men stayed in contact for years after. Mary Ann died in 1926, Charles in 1929, and both are buried in the Goodnight community cemetery.
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