Charles Goodnight

Charles Goodnight was a Texas Ranger, cattleman and rancher who helped open the Goodnight–Loving Trail after the American Civil War. He developed large ranching operations, co-founded the JA Ranch in the Texas Panhandle and experimented with cattle breeding. In later life he helped preserve a small herd of southern plains bison. His career was closely connected to the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the transformation of the open range into fenced commercial ranchland.

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove does not portray Goodnight directly, but its cattle-drive world and the character of Woodrow Call draw on the history associated with Goodnight and other trail-driving cattlemen. Western novels have also used the Goodnight–Loving Trail as a setting in its own right. Fiction often celebrates endurance and enterprise while giving less attention to the military and colonial violence that made ranch expansion possible.

In Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, Encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean and Charles Goodnight place the fictional chase inside a frontier whose legendary figures are ageing, dying or becoming part of history.