The Goodnight-Loving Trail: A Cattle Route Blazed in 1866

What was the Goodnight-Loving Trail?

The Goodnight-Loving Trail was a cattle route from North Texas into New Mexico and onward to Colorado and Wyoming. It was laid out by Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving in 1866 to supply beef to the U.S. Army at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. About 8,000 Navajo were being held at the Bosque Redondo reservation there, and government provisioning was poor, so the army needed beef.

The route began in Young County, Texas, and ran southwest to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River. From there it turned north to Fort Sumner, then continued through Colorado and ended at Cheyenne, Wyoming, a Union Pacific railroad town.

The timing explains the opportunity. After the Civil War, Union blockades had cut off eastern beef while longhorns multiplied unattended on the Texas plains, and cattle worth about $2 a head in Texas could bring far more in northern markets. Goodnight and Loving looked west and north instead of east, where Missouri and Kansas had banned Texas cattle over Spanish fever, and found buyers at a federal post and later in Denver and Cheyenne.

The first drive in 1866

Goodnight and Loving left Fort Belknap, Texas, on 6 June 1866 with about 2,000 Texas longhorns and 18 cowhands. At Fort Sumner they sold beef to the army for eight cents a pound, roughly $12,000 in gold. The army took only the steers, which left them with about 800 stocker cattle.

Goodnight went back to Texas for a second herd. Loving drove the remaining 800 head north to Denver, paying Richens Lacy Wootton ten cents a head to use his toll road at Raton Pass, and sold the herd to John Wesley Iliff.

How did Oliver Loving die?

In summer 1867 Loving rode ahead of the herd to negotiate contracts with one trusted scout and was seriously wounded in an attack by Comanche. He reached Fort Sumner, but gangrene set in his arm and it had to be amputated. He died of complications from the surgery on 25 September 1867. Goodnight later returned for the body and buried Loving in Greenwood Cemetery in Weatherford, Texas, and he carried on with the drive to Colorado.

From Fort Sumner to Cheyenne

The route did not stop at the fort. In spring 1868 Goodnight contracted with Iliff to deliver cattle to Cheyenne, and he made several trips along a straightened route. Ranches stocked with longhorns later spread across Wyoming. The venture also led to further drives and a partnership with John Chisum, though the sources used here do not detail that partnership.

Trail versus ranch: the Chisum connection

John Chisum is often confused with Jesse Chisholm of the Chisholm Trail. According to the National Cowboy Museum, Chisum built a ranching empire along the Pecos River in New Mexico in 1873 that stretched about 150 miles.

Costs and context

The trail's first market existed because of the Navajo confinement at Bosque Redondo, where about 8,000 people were held and poorly fed. The same route crossed Comanche country and cost Loving his life, and later ranches on the northern plains grew from the herds it moved.

Learn more

Read the Legends of America article on the trail and the companion Legends of America page. The National Cowboy Museum blog covers Chisum. See ranching stories on farm.FM and a farm.FM story on Charles Goodnight.