Charles Goodnight

In September.

If you guys know anything about J.A. Ranch, this was the original homestead of Charles Goodnight, the creator of the Chuckwagon.

So it's really historic.

And we were thrilled to be able to get on this ranch.

You had so many things involved that all kind of come together and created the bottleneck, the perfect storm.

So like Charles Goodnight said, in a newspaper, I think it was probably the 1870s or something, where he said, there's not going to be any more bison.

They are doomed.

And he knew early on, he could see it, that there was going to be no more bison.

So I think that's just something, and that's true not just in the history of Bison, it's true for everywhere.

But I'm just kind of curious, you know, there isn't a lot made.

I mean, Charles Goodnight's won, but there isn't a lot made about some of the other people who have really were the founding herds of what we have today.

The people who also saw a declining population rounded them up and I mean, there was a gentleman in the Northeast who had the largest population of bison.

But, uh, my family has been running cattle in North Texas since, like throughout Martin County and all that, since the '30s.

And, um, um, my mama is the matriarch now, and she says, uh, that the stories go back to cooks for, uh, um, Charles Goodnight.

Oh, wow.

And that's kind of how it all started trickling down ranch-wise with us.

A lot of them you're gonna see in the exhibit.

You're gonna recognize some big names like Richard King and Mifflin Kennedy and Charles Goodnight and many others.

But one thing that we're focused on here in this phase now is, is making sure that we, we share the stories of those folks who you may not know, you know, uh, who don't have these iconic names, because these people were also the ones that built and sustained the ranching industry here in Texas.

Um, and they're from all different backgrounds.

[laughs]

Um, but there's also real historical figures like Charles Goodnight, who is a real rancher who was very, very prominent in the West, and one of the incredible things about the book, um, is when they just cross paths with him.

Yeah.

And he's incredibly odd.