A Grand Canyon
Leaving the endless miles of plains to explore Palo Duro by mule, I wondered, “What is this doing here?”
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Under a moon that was just past full in late September 1874, a column of the 4th Calvary approached Palo Duro from the south. Colonel Ranald Mackenzie had ascertained the hostile bands’ whereabouts from a Comanchero trader, after stretching him around a wagon wheel. The engagement came at the end of a twelve-hour forced march; tired soldiers peeked down over the rim at the Indian encampments just as dawn began to streak the sky. Over the centuries, first introductions to Palo Duro don’t change much. “The whole command dismounted,” Sergeant Robert Carter wrote in his vivid frontier memoir, “and each officer and man, leading his horse in single file, took the narrow zig-zag path, which was apparently used by nothing but Indian ponies and buffalo. Men and horses slipping down the steepest places, stumbling and sliding, one by one we reached the bottom.” Stretched out 110 years later on a surplus Army bunk, listening to Dorothy sleep, my joints were on fire from a mere five-hour ride. But I figured we had shared at least one thought with those bluecoats waiting to take their turn: “That thing is the trail?”
Surprised warriors emerged from their tepees with wives and children in tow, grabbed what they could, and ran like mountain goats for higher ground. Though the battle lasted all day, the only verified casualties were three dead Indians and one wounded Army trumpeter. Mackenzie set the Indian teepees, belongings, and provision on fire, and his men managed to herd more than 1500 captured horses and mules out of Palo Duro. Several miles out on the plains, his infantry set about the gory task of shooting all the animals that their Indian guides didn’t want to keep. It took them all day to kill 1100 head. (The vast pile of bones lay out there for years, until farmers finally hauled them off in wagons and sold them as fertilizer for $20 a ton.) With the Panhandle winter coming on, for the de-horsed Indians it was over, just like that. Subsisting on nuts, grubs, and rodents, Quanah Parkers’ band held out the longest, and that was little more than a year. Other Comanche warriors straggled on foot into Fort Sill, where they were locked in miserable compounds and thrown raw meat over the fence.
It was one of the choice ironies of Western U.S. history—with information procured by torture, the soldiers had sneaked up on the war’s last major engagement under a Comanche moon and struck the telling blow by resorting to the horst-thieving ways of the enemy. Of course, Mackenzie’s soldiers had no idea they had won the war. They were happy enough not to have broken their necks trying to get down to the fight. After camping one night in a buffalo wallow, they staked their horses and mules under guard near Palo Duro’s rim. The Indians had vanished. Admiring the scenic vistas below, the soldiers spread along the rim and consumed the usual field breakfast of fried bacon, black coffee, and sourdough biscuits baked in Dutch ovens over coals.
Visionary and Throwback
We woke up in the hunting shack with anticipations of the same meal steaming in our appetites and minds. The owner of this ranch, Tom Christian, retains a chuck wagon cook to prepare regular breakfasts for tourists and civic groups. Arriving on a bus chartered by the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce, they ride out to the canyon rim in the horse-drawn wagons and absorb a bit of Palo Duro lore from ranch hands who show up for the occasion, which Christian calls Old Cowboy Morning. He had invited us to join the party. As we rode out across the floor, some of the rancher’s Herefords scattered before us with inquisitive bawls and clattering hooves. Selden, in tune with his origins, blames farmers for the deterioration of the grassland plains. He says they based their hopes and dreams on the good years of rain, not the insufficient average. But the stark floor of Palo Duro lends testimony to the damage done by cattleman as well. As we crossed one particularly bare patch of red soil, Selden said he wished that the ranchers could find a way to let the canyon rest four or five years—at least see if it’s capable of ever coming back.
Drawing on my reading, I observed that when Charles Goodnight turned Palo Duro into the Panhandle’s first cattle ranch, the grassy dells were luxuriant enough to support 10,000 buffalo. Goodnight said that with the help of rifle shots ricocheted off the cliffs, he and two cowboys drove the bison herd fifteen miles up the canyon to make room for the cattle, creating a cloud of red dust that rose a thousand feet in the air. Selden squinted at the high draws and incredibly broken terrain, speculating on the difficulty of the drovers’ task. “I never quite knew whether to believe that story,” he said, with an irreverent cluck of his tongue.
Charles Goodnight was a rigid moralist. Yet in staking his claim to Palo Duro, he negotiated a nonaggression pact with the notorious highwayman Dutch Henry. He cut a similar deal with nomadic Mexican sheepherders, dividing the entire Panhandle approximately in half. The very scale of Goodnight’s life strains contemporary imagination. Migrating with him family from Illinois the year Texas joined the Union, he rode 800 miles bareback at the age of nine. In 1860, while raiding a Comanche encampment, he recognized Cynthia Ann Parker as an Anglo and saved her from the Rangers’ undiscriminating fire. During the cattle-market glut that afflicted Texas after the Civil War, Goodnight hatched the idea of driving Longhorns to the nearest rail depots in Kansas. While blazing four cattle-drive trails, he designed the first chuck wagon, lost a partner (Oliver Loving) to the Indians, and once yielded right-of-way to a buffalo herd that he estimated was 125 miles long and 25 miles across.
Nearing forty, he anticipated a life of genteel returns on that investment. Dug in and prosperous, he irrigated crops, planted apple orchards, and owned stock in the opera house of Pueblo, Colorado. But the bank panic of 1873 wiped him out. With 1600 Longhorns left to his name, Goodnight, who had never laid eyes on Palo Duro Canyon but had heard reports of the renegade Comanches’ demise, sensed the enormity of the resulting power vacuum. When he found the old Comanche trail and packed disassembled wagons and the first winter’s provisions down on mules in 1875, his closest neighbor was 100 miles away, the nearest store 250. It’s a measure of Goodnight’s character that he could be that far down on his luck and simultaneously determine that he was just the man to fill that vacuum. He seized Palo Duro because of its water, sheltered pastures, and ready-made corrals of those sheer rock walls. With the end of the free range already in sight, think of all the fence-building labor he saved.
To certify his vast homestead claim, Goodnight persuaded John Adair, an English investor, to secure the deeds to 12,000 acres the first year. Paying money its due, Goodnight named his dream ranch the JA. Adair drove a hard bargain: on a salary of $2500 a year, the famous trailblazer had to return his haughty partner’s investment at the end of five years, plus interest and two thirds of the profit. Goodnight assembled the Panhandle’s first great cattle ranch by snookering the speculators who held the paper title to Palo Duro. With no other buyers in view, they accepted his offers of 20 to 75 cents an acre. By 1882 Goodnight held 93,000 acres and went right on buying. As a cattle king he functioned like a stern Baptist overlord. Decreeing prohibition forty years before the idea caught on nationwide, he fired or blacklisted any cowhand caught drinking, gambling, or fighting. At the same time, he rewarded employees such as Tom Christian’s grandfather with bargain-price homesteads of their own. Goodnight asserted that during the years of his management, the JA books showed a 72 per cent profit. But the eighties brought another economic depression, and Goodnight foresaw the demise of the huge cattle ranches. In 1887 he sold his share of the JA to Adair’s widow and settled on a smaller ranch a few miles out from Palo Duro.
On that ranch Goodnight participated in a poignant ritual: paunchy and winded Comanche horsemen, whose absence from the reservation no longer threatened anybody, visited so they could run down a few head of his buffalo in the old way. Goodnight became the friend of Quanah Parker, by then a celebrity who partied with cattlemen in Fort Worth and hunted wolves with Teddy Roosevelt. An amateur naturalist, Goodnight maintained one of the country’s largest herds of buffalo, which he shared with the national parks and zoos. He devoted his last years to the breeding of cattalo, a cross of Polled Angus cattle and American bison that he ballyhooed, to a rather skeptical international audience, as the solution to world hunger. Late in life Goodnight allowed a photographer to juxtapose his white-haired and —goateed profile against that of a buffalo. Except for the darker figure’s horns, the resemblance was uncanny. Visionary and throwback, Goodnight died in 1929.
Though much of the original acreage has been sold off, the JA Ranch sails on with continuity and stability today under the management of one of Adair’s descendants, M. W. H. Richie. On some of the Palo Duro spreads, around the turn of the century an ambitious breed of cedar choppers tried to exploit the canyon’s juniper for the growing needs of Amarillo. Timber never boomed, because of logistics; to get the logs up those cliffs, the men had to use unwieldy pulleys and derricks. Oil, of course, was the industry that could have changed Palo Duro forever. A sign in the state park recalls the 1919 drilling project that reached a depth of 26,000 feet. With a roar of Pleistocene repudiation, an air pocket blew the bit and drill stem up through the derrick with such violence that people heard the ruckus nine miles away. The wildcatters scrapped that project fast. Palo Duro has a way of taking care of itself. Human claimants tend to be incidental.
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