Thursday, July 28, 2011

Pioneers 'fort' up near Monument




Five portholes, four with sliding blocks of stone to close them

 By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com
Certainly there were many smaller forts developed in the wilds of Colorado in addition to the major landmarks. Their use, very similar to the larger outposts, was – protection, a place to meet, trade and socialization.
“The first settlers had to be alert at all times for Indians,” wrote Lucile Lavelett in her 1975 book “Through the Years at Monument, Colorado.”
“A circular stone fort was built on the McShane ranch. It was twelve feet in diameter with stonewalls two feet thick and a roof of logs. Earth covered the logs to prevent the Indians from setting the roof on fire. There were five portholes of which four of them had sliding blocks of stone to close them. The fifth porthole was really a window. It gave the only light and faced the McShane house. From this porthole the families could see if any Indians were creeping up on the house. An underground passage led from the house to the fort.”
Other precautions were taken, says Lavelett.
“Everyday a man rode out to the high hill just north and West of the fort to be on the lookout for Indians. This hill is still called ‘Look-Out.’ When the look-out man saw Indians in the distance he would inform the people, then they would all hurry to the McShane fort.”
Several families would ‘fort up’ at McShane’s for extended time.
Isabella Trigg and her brother Jack Martin were among the early pioneers to live there, wrote Lavelett.
“She saved the life of one of Jacob Guire’s children from an Indian one day. Several families had been at the fort for several days for protection from the Indians. It had been quiet and peaceful for a day, so the boy was let out to play. Isabella Trigg looked out and saw an Indian riding over the hill. She dashed out grabbed the boy, pushed him into the fort, and slammed the porthole shut just as the Indian threw his tomahawk, with the tomahawk embedding in the heavy timber.”
In February of 1950, the Zebulon Pike and Kinnickinnik Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a historical marker on Highway 105 between Monument and Palmer Lake and the fort lies 610 feet to the South.
“Old stone fort built at the pioneer home of David McShane, constructed as a defense against Arapahoe and Cheyenne raiders. It was used in 1865 to 1868 as a refuge by the following pioneer families: The Guires, Browns, Jacksons, Shielders, Chandlers, McShanes, Oldhams, Teachouts, Davidsons, Walkers, Demasters, Roberts, Watkins, Faulkners, Simpsons, Weltys.”
David McShane later became postmaster for Monument in 1869 and a prominent contractor in the area; He worked on such high-profile local projects as the creation of Monument Lake and Prospect Lake in Colorado Springs.
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Photo: Old fort, protection against Indians (1866) Monument, Colo. Gazette Telegraph. Fred Baker, photographer, Taken between 1920 to 1930.
The circular rock fort in Monument, El Paso County, Colorado, has a wooden frame window. Built by A. David McShane in 1866, it is 12 feet in diameter, and had a underground passage to the nearby house. It was used to defend the family and neighbors during Arapahoe and Cheyenne raids.
Western History/Genealogy Dept., Denver Public Library
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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

In our river valley, the devil was in the details


The other pond was for recreational purposes, I guess. 


 By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com


"When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing - just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park?" __ Ralph Marston

I am not real sure of the details, but when I was a young buck, there were a couple of ponds near the river in the upper end of the town of Dolores, Colorado. One pond was fenced all around by a big chain-link barrier with locked gates and had something to do with the drinking water supply. The other was for recreational purposes, I guess. At least that is the way we looked at it.
My compadres and I spent fair amount of time at what we called “the town pond,” or the one sans chain-linked barrier. It was a favorite year-round destination.
In the winter, the fire department would sometimes flood it by pumping water out on the top for a refreeze and its smoothing effect to make a better skating surface. We played hockey for hours there, but later found larger and better options downstream near the bridge as you come into town.
I remember at least once, a group of high school kids dropping a small car, part of the way through the ice into the pond, while cutting doughnuts out there.
But the summer fun I recall quite fondly because of the “lively” aspect of our endeavors and the ‘nature’ of our experiments,
The ecosystem included, but was not limited to, frogs, ‘crawdads,’ snakes, salamanders, various sucker-fish, ‘mud dogs,’ carp, small trout, maybe blue gill?, or even Pike, and bugs galore. Perhaps even a small pet alligator or two, at least until the first hard freeze, may have found freedom there … I don’t know. It was a lively place.
I personally owned a seine, with a tightly meshed bow-crossed frame about three feet square, that you could drop in the shallow, crawling waters … wait a few minutes, and then pull to the surface with all manner of evil creatures on it. I remember pulling it up several times, only to drop it right back in hurry, because I was not sure what the wiggling mass discovered flopping in the netting was when I brought it to the surface.
Another favorite feature was a makeshift raft, (let’s just call it ‘The Calypso,’ Aye, I sing to your glory,) created by nailing two sheets of four’ by eight’ plywood on each side of several square wooden fence posts. You could pole it anywhere in the mucky mess of a pond and fit three or four of the delinquent, would-be life scientist passengers on at a time.
When archaeologist excavate the area 1,000 years now, imagine the significance they will ascribe to the thousands of unpaired canvas shoes they find in progressive layers of fossilized tar pits … slime, muck and goo, that would suck a Converse All Star Chuck Taylor Special, right off your feet and down deep into the mire, never to be seen again for thousands of years.
There must have been selenium, or other mutation-inducing glop filtering into the pond because, to this day, I have never seen freshwater crawdaddies, the length and girth of those Big Boys wrestled from that location.
Dam building was also a beloved activity, acquired skill, and required course of education, incumbent on students of pond-life. Small streams fed into the top end and often, an overflow ditch, cut in bank between the pond and the river, ran a healthy watercourse between the two connected bodies of water. But what flow could not stand a few modifications and improvements by a troop of adolescent human beavers?
Nearby, just downstream, on the river bank, were the Post Office is now, was a huge willow thicket with bent over clumps that made excellent lodges for the beaver army that tunneled through, and wove together, and dug under room-like caverns, hallways, and hidey holes. And then, down from there, the Big Rock with a diving hole right off the point, and long dark suckers swimming in the backwater behind.
You learned to respect the river, and love it. You cared about the pond. You lived and played in the willows. The crawdads, frogs, snakes, and mud dogs were just some of your friends. No matter how much you dammed it, altered it, slopped in it, swam through it, rafted on it, trapped creatures from it – in essence, it flowed through you. But, I guess, I am not real sure of the details.


Andy Pleasant and myself, on a makeshift raft near the river in Dolores.
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Monday, July 11, 2011

Salute in silence


By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

"I wish I could find words to express the trueness, the bravery, the hardihood, the sense of honor, the loyalty to their trust and to each other of the old trail hands. They kept their places around the herd under all circumstances, and if they had to fight, they were always ready. Timid men were not among them — the life did not fit them. I wish could convey in language, the feeling of companionship we had for one another. Despite all that has been said of him, the old-time cowboy is the most mis-understood man on earth. May the flowers prosper on his grave and ever bloom, for I can only salute him in silence."
__ Charlie Goodnight.

Photo: Charles Goodnight and W.D. Reynolds sitting on a porch. Photo taken at Reynolds' home on Summit Avenue in Ft. Worth about a year before Goodnight's death. Reynolds was a cowboy for the Loving-Goodnight cattle drives of 1866 and 1867.

End of the trail for a legend and a way of life





Goodnight owned and operated the opera house and many business properties in Pueblo, but when the panic hit, it just about wiped him out.


By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com


Colorado had been a destination for trailblazing cowman Charlie Goodnight and his partner Oliver Loving when they first drove cattle across “the Graveyard of Cattleman’s Hopes,” “the Bitter River,” the Pecos.
For almost two decades, blazing trails through the cattle country from the Brazos in Texas, on into New Mexico, to the Arkansas and the Platte in Colorado, he was searching for his own “Shangri-La,” where he might one day settle.
“In the summer of 1868, he found “The Spot.” It was a green little valley along the Arkansas about five miles upstream from Pueblo, surrounded by bluffs of shale,” wrote Ralph C. Taylor in his Colorful Colorado column in early April of 1950. (The column was sponsored by Coors Brewing for years and aired on radio stations and published in Colorado newspapers, including the Pueblo Chieftain.)
“This, he decided should become the headquarters of his vast cattle business. Around it lay thousands of acres of uncropped Gama grass that fattened steers almost as fast as corn.”
Finally closing the partnership maintained long after the death of Oliver Loving in the winter of 1868-69, he established his headquarters at a spot (one among many) known as “Goodnight.”
“Most of the land of his new domain he acquired in partnership with Jacob and Peter Dotson and Mrs. Annie Blake. Mrs. Blake had only recently acquired from the heirs of Gervacio Nolan the 48,000 acres which the U.S. government had recognized from the 300,000 originally granted the Frenchman Nolan by the Spanish government when it controlled all the land South of the Arkansas River,” noted Taylor.
“Mrs. Blake bought the land for $10,000 and then sold one third to Goodnight for $5,000 and another third to the Dotsons for a like amount, retaining her third. The deal gave Goodnight access to most of land from the St. Charles River on the east to Hardscrabble on the west, with the Arkansas River as the northern boundary. The tract formed a triangle, the southeastern boundary going along the St. Charles and the Greenhorn Rivers to meet the western boundary along the Greenhorn Range.”
It included what was later to become the town site of South Pueblo. With big plans set in motion, he left for Kentucky to be married to Mary Ann (Molly) Dyer. Goodnight met Dyer in Texas during the Civil War in Cross Timbers and they had maintained a relationship since. She was 31 and Goodnight was 34 when they were married in Hickman, Ky., on July 26, 1870.
They went by boat to St. Louis, traveled to Abilene, Texas, by train, and then set out by stage to Pueblo.
En route to Pueblo, Goodnight had discovered the trail of two cattle thieves associated with the notorious Coe gang and alerted Colorado Vigilance committee upon his arrival in Pueblo. His alarm allowed them to quickly capture the rustlers and they were placed in the Pueblo Jail. However, the unfortunate souls were taken from the jail in the night and hanged from a telegraph pole outside the Drover hotel in which the newlyweds were staying. Goodnight first tried to keep the lynching from his new wife Molly, but was unable to do so.
“The bride accused Goodnight of associating with Yankees and ruffians and demanded to be taken back to Texas,” wrote Taylor.
In Goodnight’s own account in letters, he recalled he and his wife’s exchange.
“I understand they hanged them to a telegraph pole,” she exclaimed in her distress.
“Having been married such a short while and not accustomed to making excuses, I hardly knew how to reply, but finally stammered out in very abashed manner: “Well, I don’t think it hurt the telegraph pole.”
Goodnight agreed to return his new wife to civilized Texas, allowing she would rest a few days. But the growing and developing town in the meantime offered the promise of becoming civilized itself — and she soon forgot about going back.
Pueblo, with about 600 residents in 1870, found Charles and Molly Goodnight as good neighbors. Goodnight, intent on improving his herd, imported shorthorn bulls to the range of the plains. He also started extensive farming operations, growing corn to fatten cattle and planted several thousand apple trees. Additionally, he built irrigation ditches, and tried to improve the streambed to protect his trees and increase his land holdings.
He took an active interest in the business community as well, giving $1,000 to found an educational institution and requiring it to be independent of all sects and religious creeds. His wife was instrumental in the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church ­in Pueblo — the first of its denomination in southern Colorado.
“Money was a costly matter to borrow. Goodnight was paying one and a half to two percent per month. He joined others in 1873 in organizing the Stock Growers’ Bank, which advertised six percent on three month deposits, and eight percent on 12 months,” noted Taylor.
“Goodnight owned and operated the opera house and many business properties in Pueblo, but when the panic hit, it just about wiped him out. (He) turned again to the cattle ranges to regain his panic losses and formed a partnership with John W. Prowers, the lower Arkansas valley stockman who was the father of Lamar and Prowers County. Prowers & Goodnight started a meat packing business at Las Animas, which in the early seventies was the end of the Santa Fe Railroad. Goodnight's aim was to improve the quality of the range cattle by using better bulls; by slaughtering inferior stock and sending it to eastern markets.”
But he became discouraged by the slow financial recuperation process and the increasingly crowded southern Colorado range. He decided once again to relocate. This time back to Texas and the Palo Duro area he knew as a Texas Ranger and scout.
“In the fall of 1875, he took was left of his Colorado outfit and herded it past Two Buttes to the Cimarron, past the ruins of Robber’s Roost and down the Canadian River… Goodnights established their home ranch, 100 miles from their nearest neighbor, 250 miles from Las Animas were supplies were packed,” wrote Taylor.
Using his land near Pueblo as security, he borrowed $30,000 from George W. Clayton. He paid 18 percent interest per year and eventually befriended Clayton’s agent, John Adair, who had a large estate in Ireland but wanted to get into the cattle business. Adair and the Goodnights formed partnership, which became widely known as the JA Brand.
With Adair’s money and Goodnight’s know-how, the operation flourished and had nearly a quarter million acres under fence by Adair’s death in 1885.
The JA has survived, and today is still run by descendants of the Adair family. Today, it has 1,335,000 acres of land and 100,000 cattle on range, and includes operations in six Texas counties, and a ranch near Larkspur, Colorado.
Two years later, Goodnight dissolved the arrangement and moved to a smaller spread of 140,000 acres with 20,000 head of cattle in nearby Goodnight, Texas, his namesake.
In later years he dabbled with breeding experiments designed to produce better beef cattle ... as well as the ill-fated “Cattalo.”
“The latter resulted when his buffalo bull ‘Old Sikes’ became enamored with longhorn cows,” wrote Mike Flanigan of the Denver Post in a 1986 article.
In addition to all these accomplishments, he is credited with the inverntion of the Chuck Wagon, when he converted an old military Studebaker wagon during his early trail days, by building shelves and compartments on the wagon to make cooking on the trail easier.
He invested (with little or no success) in mining operations in Mexico, and once even tried his hand at producing a movie to show how he remembered the West. Shown only at a cattleman’s convention and at a dinner in New York, the flick never caught on with the viewing public because of its decided lack of gunfights, and the Indians portrayed were as likely to be friends as they were to be hostile.
His first wife, Mary Ann or “Molly,” as she was known, died in 1926.
After her death, a sick and despondent Charlie Goodnight was nursed backed to health by a 26-year-old nurse and telegraph operator from Butte, Montana, that he first came in contact with because of their shared surname.
In March of 1927, right after Charlie turned 91, the two un-related Goodnights, Charlie and the very young Corrine, married. Charlie died of a heart attack two years later in Tucson, Arizona, after selling and delivering Buffalo roasts to butcher shops in Phoenix, on Dec. 12, 1929.
Years later, Ralph C. Taylor captured the sentiment of the moment.
“The great, driving spirit of the old cowman had gone on, but the civilization he had blazed in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado has remained. The cowboys, with tears streaming down their leathery cheeks, laid his body under the verdant grass on the edge of Palo Duro Canyon. It was the end of a long and famous trail — the Goodnight trail.”
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Sunday, July 10, 2011

Leather-tough trailblazer had a tender side





By Rob Carrigan,
robcarrigan1@gmail.com

The Comanche were skilled horsemen operating in loose-knit bands that ranged through New Mexico, Southern Colorado, Oklahoma, Southern Kansas, Northern Texas and Northeastern Arizona. As a people, it is estimated that nearly 50,000 roamed the plains in the early 1800s. Most language experts think the word “Comanche” is a Spanish corruption of their Ute name, Kohmahts (those who are against us). The Sioux word ‘Padoucah’ was often used interchangeably by the early French traders for both Comanche and Plains Apache.
After riding 800 miles bareback when he was just nine years old in his family’s migration to Texas, an experience that left him permanently bowlegged, Charles Goodnight appeared destined to become a cowboy, renowned Indian fighter, and legendary trailblazer.
Brief stints as a horse jockey, mustang breaker, and freighter prepared him additionally. As a very young man, he and his half brother J. Wes Sheek, partnered to help a neighbor, and as a result of tending 430 cows, they received every fourth calf that dropped. By 1860, the two counted 180 head in their herd in the Keechi Valley of Texas.
The Civil War however was not far off on the horizon.
“Soon after moving to Keechi, Charlie met Oliver Loving, the most experienced cowman upon the northwestern fringe…” wrote J. Evetts Haley in his 1936 biography “Charles Goodnight – Cowman and Plainsman.”
“Loving was then running a small country store on the Belknap road. He owned a few slaves and good-sized herd of cattle, and, though Cross Timbers were not yet producing vast herds of beef, most of what were produced found a market through him. He usually trailed them to Shreveport, Alexandria, or New Orleans.”
In 1858, Loving trailed a herd to markets back in Illinois.
“Then the gold rush to Colorado began, and he learned that the Denver country was swarming with people.”
In August of 1860, Loving with his then partner, John Dawson, started out with a herd of 1,000 head for Colorado. Charlie helped them clear passed Cross Timbers to the Red River and they headed for Indian Nation. They reached the Arkansas River below the Great Bend and followed it up to Pueblo where they wintered the herd on the very grass where, ten years later, Charlie himself would establish a ranch.
“When spring came and melted the snows, Loving drifted into Denver and peddled his cattle out to miners and prospectors. Whole thus engaged, the Civil War broke out and the authorities refused to let him return to Texas. He had made friends with Kit Carson, Lucien Maxwell, and other prominent mountain men, and through their intercession, was allowed his freedom. He left his outfit, staged it to St. Joseph, and reached home on August 9, 1861, full of plans for Southern aggression. However, the destinies of war decreed that he should feed, rather than lead men who fought, and these plans were forgotten,” wrote Haley.
A few years prior, Texas had established Indian reserves that in theory, were designed to stem attacks from Comanche and Kiowa raiders in areas near the Brazos and Red Rivers.
Just before the Civil War broke out, Sam Houston, called out of retirement to serve as governor, recognized that Indian raiding on the Texas Frontier was as bad as it ever had been. He immediately called for Federal troops and supplies, dispatched Texas Rangers, and authorized organization of Minute Men in the border counties.
It was the Minute Men, and later with the Rangers, that Charlie Goodnight became an accomplished Indian fighter and scout of uncommon skill and knowledge.
In one particularly violent episode involving a chase and fight of Comanche raiders who had killed ranchers in the Pease Valley, Goodnight was present when Cynthia Ann Parker was ‘rescued’ by a combined group of Rangers and Minute Men. Parker had been abducted as a child and after Comanche raiders killed her parents, she lived among the Comanche for years. Quanna Parker, her son was notable historically as the last Comanche chief, and years later Goodnight would negotiate with him to end raiding in the Palo Duro area of Texas.
Goodnight describes the meeting of Ms. Parker in a letter later.
“The squaw was in terrible grief. Through sympathy for her, thinking her distress would be the same as that of our women under similar circumstances, I thought I would try to console her and make her understand that she would not be hurt. When I go near her I noticed that she had blue eyes and light hair, which had been cut short (symbolic among Comanche women as a sign of mourning). It was difficult to distinguish her blond features, as her face and hands were extremely dirty from handing so much meat.”
“After speaking a few words to her, I turned back the creek where there was great excitement over the fight, come in contact with Judge R.W. Pollard and told him we had captured a white woman. His reply was ‘No!’”
“Go see for yourself,” I said, wrote Goodnight in the letter.
“Cynthia Ann was sent to relatives in the piney region of Texas, where she was oppressed by strange terrain as well as crowded by strange people. No longer of the race of the hated Tejanos, she yearned for the treeless plains where Nocona and her sons still hunted the buffalo, and sinking in with grief and loneliness, she died, apparently of a broken heart, in 1864 – an expatriate among people of her own blood. Her tragic story is a part of the Texas tradition,” wrote Haley.
Because of his recognized skill at finding water, understanding Indian ways and providing advance knowledge of the plains, Goodnight became a trusted scout for the Texas Rangers satisfying his obligation to the Confederacy.
“Released in 1864, he returned to find his portion of the herd had grown to 5,000 head of roaming cattle. He and Sheek negotiated with Varner, bought the entire Varner herd, and by 1865, had 8,000 head,” wrote Mike Flanigan in a 1986 article for the Denver Post.
After the war, Longhorn cattle, like Goodnight’s, had roamed free and fattened like the Buffalo in central and south Texas. Those returning from the war looked to them as a livelihood by both legitimate and nefarious means.
But there wasn’t a local market.
“During the war, herds were driven east and south to Memphis and New Orleans to feed Confederate armies. But now the money was in the North. Thousands were trailed to St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago to satisfy a growing appetite for beef. Later Abilene, Dodge City and other Kansas towns became target for Texas Cattle. With the need for stock on the northern ranges, cattle drives stretched to Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, and Goodnight herds were in the Vanguard,” wrote Ray Pomplun in a 1974 piece for the Denver Post.
“Lack of local markets led Goodnight to blaze cattle trails, but fearing the northern towns were flooded by other herds, he first looked west to the mining camps and Army installations in New Mexico and Colorado. The code for his cowboys was strict. He once trailed a herd three days alone after firing his help for violating rules. He trailed 10,000 cattle a season for nine years. Other drovers handled more but none branded the frontier with character and personality as did Charlie Goodnight.”
In 1866, after creating a new partnership with Oliver Loving, Goodnight, the two of them and 18 cowboys crossed the alkali desert east of the Pecos, and completed a drive deemed impossible by other cattlemen.
“The last 90 miles to the river they were parched by heat and no water, but Goodnight, with superior knowledge of Texas cattle, pushed his herd 72 hours without rest. Ten miles from Horsehead Crossing, the cattle smelled water. Goodnight pushed the strongest to the front, taking them to the river without losing a hoof. Then he returned to help Loving with those half dead from thirst. One hundred head drowned at Horsehead, later called “the graveyard of the cattleman’s hopes,” and 300 perished on the hot, dusty trail,” wrote Pomplum.
They sold most of the herd to the government and with the drive already a financial success, Loving trailed the rest on into Denver and sold them to a Colorado legend in his own right, John Wesley Iliff.
“Before the end of the cattle driving era, 300,000 head traveled this route, remembered as the Goodnight Trail, and quarter million more went on to Denver. The complete route west from Belknap to Fort Sumner, then north to Denver, is known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail.
Always there was a threat from the Comanche, and to some extent Arapahoe, along the trail.
“Years afterward, a trail outfit engaged in battle with Indian near present site of Roswell, so the story still runs, in which another cowboy was killed. He was buried beside the Goodnight Trail, and the cow-camp poet, deficient in Biblical allusion, arranged a couplet to be carved in sandstone so that all who passed might read that:
He was young, and brave, and fair.
But the Indians raised his hair.
It was the Comanche that eventually took Goodnight’s partner in the fall of 1867. Loving, impatient about bidding on government stock contracts in Santa Fe, convinced Goodnight that he needed to go on ahead. He and another longtime hand, “One-armed Bill Wilson” left but ran into serious Indian trouble when a band of about 100 raiders charged them near the Pecos. Loving’s wrist was shattered early in the fight by a rifle shot, and after locating a hole to hide in near the river, “One-armed Wilson” set out for help, swimming past watching Comanche on the river, walking barefoot through Cactus in desert for miles and days in his underwear.
“His eyes were wild and bloodshot, his feet were swollen beyond all reason, and every step he took left blood in the track,” wrote Goodnight later in letters about one-armed Wilson's discovery on the trail days later.
Regardless, after feeding him and provide additional clothing, Goodnight and several others set out immediately to try and save Loving. Wilson precise instructions guided them back to where he left the older gentleman, but he wasn’t there. The rescue party assumed he was a goner.
But he wasn’t.
“… For two days and nights he fought the Indian at bay while enduring the pangs of hunger and fever of his wounds. And when help did not come, he concluded the Indians had captured the herd and killed the hands, and he decided he must follow Wilson’s lead. Though the wound in his side had not proved serious, few could endure a shot-shattered three foodless days and sleepless nights without collapse, but in spite of his age, Loving was blessed with a constitution of iron. The Indians had continued to shower his positions with rocks, and tunneled through the dune to within a few feet of where he lay, but lacked the courage to break in upon him. On the third night he crawled into the water and started upstream, instead of down, hoping to reach the trail crossing about six mile above, where with good fortune, some passer by might lend him aid,” according to Goodnight’s account to Haley.
“At last he gained the crossing and lay down in the shade of a clump of wild china, only about four feet above the water. He attempted to shoot some birds that came into the trees, but the river had soaked his powder and caps and his guns were useless. He tried to eat his buckskin gloves, but could not kindle a fire to parch them to a crisp, and again he settled back to wait. For two days and nights he stayed there, too weak to move, but satisfying his thirst by tying his handkerchief to a stick and dipping it in the river below. On the third day his superb endurance broke and he sank into a stupor.”
He was found there by four boys and taken in to Fort Sumner by wagon. When Goodnight finally discovered Loving was still alive, he set out to make the long trip there. Gangrene had set in and his arm needed to be amputated but Loving didn’t want the operation performed until Goodnight arrived. The arm was removed but an artery proved troublesome. After 22 days following the amputation and relapse, Loving, sensing his time had come, summoned his partner the night before he died, and he asked Goodnight to preserve the partnership for two more years.
“The Confederate Government owed him a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for cattle he had delivered, which financially ruined him, and he asked me as a Mason to give my word to continue the partnership for at least two years, until his remaining debts were paid and his family provide for. I told him that while I was willing to do this, his oldest son, who would be executor of his will, knew me only as an illiterate cowboy, and would certainly object to my going on with the business,” said Goodnight in later interviews.
“I know that, but James does not know you, and I do. Ignore him. Your promise is all I want.” Goodnight gave him the promise and another. That he would return his body to Texas eventually. Loveing died September 25, 1867, and was temporarily buried at Sumner.
Several months later after finishing trailing the herd and establishing a ranch in southern Colorado, Goodnight returned to Fort Sumner, exhumed Loving’s body, and after a number of cowboys beat oil cans flat and soldered them together to make a huge tin casket. Haley described the process in his book.
“They placed the rough wooden one inside and, packed several inches of powdered charcoal around it, sealed the tin lid, and crated the whole in lumber. They lifted a wagon bed from its bolster and carefully loaded the casket in place. Upon February 8, 1868, with six big mules strung out in the harness, and the rough-hewn but tenderly sympathetic cowmen from Texas riding ahead and behind, the strangest and most touching funeral cavalcade in the history of the cow country took to the Goodnight and Loving Trail that led to Loving’s home.”
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Saturday, July 9, 2011

Larger than life: Even cowboys need heroes

He knew the West of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Dick Wooten, St. Vrain and Lucien Maxwell.

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

To steal a line from Willie Nelson, “my heroes have always been cowboys, and they still are it seems.” But whom do cowboys choose as their hero? I think it just might be Charlie Goodnight.
“I was on the frontier carrying a gun when I should have been in school,” an aging Charles Goodnight told his biographer years later.
Goodnight was born in the farming region of Macoupin County, Illinois, (three days after the forming of the Republic of Texas) on March 2, 1836.
His exploits are legendary and are woven into the very fabric of the West in general, and the histories of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and the cattle industry in specific.
“He rode bareback from Illinois to Texas when he was nine years old. He was hunting with Caldo Indians beyond the frontier at thirteen, launching into the cattle business at twenty, guiding Texas Rangers at twenty four, blazing cattle trails two thousand miles in length at thirty, establishing a ranch three hundred miles beyond the frontier at forty, and at forty-five, dominating nearly twenty million acres of range country in the interest of order. At sixty, he was recognized as possibly the greatest scientific breeder of range cattle in the West, and at ninety, he was an active international authority on the economics of the range industry.”
So wrote J. Evetts Haley in his 1936 book “Charles Goodnight ­– Cowman and Plainsman.’
“He always rode beyond the borderlands, upon the ranges of unspoiled grass. He knew the West of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Dick Wooten, St.Vrain and Lucien Maxwell. He ranged a country as vast as Bridger ranged. He rode with the boldness of Fremont, guided by the craft of Carson. The vast and changing country which he moved, the fertility of a mind that quickly grasped the significance of climate and topography, the inexhaustible energy of his mind and body, and the long period of time which he constantly applied himself to the Western World, operated to produce in this man an ample nature surpassing many more famous characters of frontier history… Now, a hundred years after his birth, his massive frame looms strong among the horsemen of the storied West,” wrote Haley.
Much of Charlie Goodnight’s early experience was in fighting Indians, particularly Comanche raiders on the edge of the Texas frontier. First serving in the local militia, then as a Texas Ranger, and with the onslaught of the Civil War, as part of the Confederacy.
But that was only the start.
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Monday, July 4, 2011

Fire crackers, barbecues, tight ropes and parades






Legendary celebrations held here in the Centennial State


By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

I know the rest of the country is entitled to celebrate Independence Day but there seems to be something uniquely tied to Colorado and Fourth of July, in my mind. 

Maybe it is just fond recollections from July Fourths of the past, in places like Telluride, and Monument, and Dolores, and up in Teller County.
Legendary celebrations have been held here and after all, we are the Centennial State.
Congress had approved Colorado admission to statehood in March of 1875 and laid out provisions and conditions of statehood but it wasn’t until August 1, 1876, when President Ulysses Grant ratified admission. Communities all over the state had already begun celebrating, and really, have never slowed down.
In Denver in 1890, in celebration of the Fourth and the completion of the Capitol building, reportedly five miles of tables were set up for the barbecue attended by over 60,000.
“There were no greedy gluttonous displays, but every man, woman, and child clamored for food until they had their fill. Just think of it! Three hundred and fifty sheep, 75 calves, 237 fat steers, 13,000 loaves of bread, 3,000 pounds of cheese, 10 barrels of pickles, not to mention a 1,000 gallons of lemonade,” itemized the Rocky Mountain News at the time. “The run on the beer saloons was unprecedented.”
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Ouray Teamsters and Packer Union, Fourth of July, 1906
Float in front of the Munn Brothers Assay Office, Second Avenue, Ouray. The float consists of an eight-horse team hitched to a wagon decorated with stars and stripes and young girls in white dresses. The horses have tassels on their heads and blankets with the letters O.T.P.U. Western History and Genealogy Dept., Denver Public Library
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Palmer Lake on Independence Day, Fourth of July, 1893
Three photographers photograph the Palmer Lake resort on Independence Day. Two men and a boy stand behind them and watch, water squirts out of the lake fountain and Denver & Rio Grande passenger parks at the depot water tank.
Western History and Genealogy Dept., Denver Public Library.
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Celebration in Victor, Fourth of July, 1898 or 1999
Man on tight wire walking between commercial buildings in tights, and with a balance pole. Western History and Genealogy Dept., Denver Public Library.
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