Mary Ann Dyer was born in Madison County, Tennessee, on September 12, 1839, the daughter of a lawyer. Her husband called her Mary. Everyone else called her Molly. She was fourteen when her family came to Fort Belknap on the Texas frontier in 1854, and after her parents died she took charge of her five brothers, teaching school to support the three youngest. She met Charles Goodnight at Fort Belknap about 1864 and later taught at Weatherford. They married in Hickman, Kentucky, on July 26, 1870, and settled on his ranch near Pueblo, Colorado.
The wagon into the canyon
Colorado did not suit her. When two men were hanged from a telegraph pole, she was horrified, and her husband could think of nothing better to say than that he did not think it had hurt the pole. The Panic of 1873 and drought ended the Colorado years. She waited with relatives in California while Goodnight moved his cattle south. In the fall of 1876 he took his herd into the Palo Duro, then went back to Colorado to fetch her, and in Denver he met John Adair, a landowner from Ireland with money to invest. In May 1877 the Goodnights, John and Cornelia Adair, Molly's brother and several cowhands came down into the canyon. Mrs. Adair rode horseback. Molly drove a team and wagon. They put up a two-room cabin, and within a few weeks the Adairs left for home and the ranch to the Goodnights.
The nearest woman
For a time Molly Goodnight was the only woman on the JA. Her first neighbor was the wife of the rancher T. S. Bugbee, and the Handbook of Texas records that although neither of them saw anyone else for six to twelve months at a time, both said they were happy. A cowhand gave her three chickens, which she kept as pets. Her husband designed her a sidesaddle with a second horn to rest her knee. She doctored and nursed the hands, and the cowboys who worked the JA remembered her as the Mother of the Panhandle.
Her own herds
She was a rancher in her own right. She ran a separate herd, under the PATM brand in Colorado and the Flying T in Texas. She took in buffalo calves left behind by the hide hunters, and the Goodnight herd that grew from them helped restock Yellowstone and lives on in the state herd at Caprock Canyons State Park. She also hired the artist J. C. Cowles to paint the ranch and the canyon.
In 1879 the headquarters moved twenty-five miles east to the foot of the Caprock, to a four-room house of cedar logs. In 1887 the partnership with Cornelia Adair, by then a widow, came to an end, and on December 27 the Goodnights moved into a new two-story house in northeastern Armstrong County, now the Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site. They helped found Goodnight College there in 1898. Molly Goodnight died in April 1926. Her headstone reads, "One who spent her whole life in the service of others." The canyon where she started is Palo Duro Canyon State Park.