Derryveagh Evictions Then & Now

THE PLAYERS...

An evolving Who's Who of this Staked Plains/Palo Duro saga and its aftermaths (In progress... Please add your players!)

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On Staked Plains: "Until the Wind is a River no more..."

The "Llano Estacado" - Staked Plains - is the name affixed by the Conquistadors to an unquenchable western vastness. They were far from empty plains. Andy Wilkinson's song-poem conjures some of its spirit(s)...

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El Requirimiento: Spain's Protocol for Conquest

Spain declared the New World hers by the Vatican's Doctrine of Discovery. Read aloud to native peoples, in Spanish, by Conquistadors like Coronado, the Requirimiento voices its ultimatum: Indians must recognize the superiority of Christianity and submit, or be warred upon. It was widely read in the period when Coronado trekked through the Staked Plains and Palo Duro.

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Setting the Table....

The Adair-Goodnight saga is an irrevocable part of a lustrous ranching history; a history made possible by an inseparable siamese twin who cleanses the Plains of buffalo and subjugates the Indians who must hunt them.

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Enter Quanah: The Goodnight-Parker Saga begins

Quanah Parker was the child of a Commanche father, Peta Nocona, and Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman. Once Charles Goodnight found their encampment, Quanah would lose his mother forever...

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"Foes to Progress and the Cause of Humanity"

The eye-popping 1870 conclusion of a 6-month study of Gen. Phil Sheridan's operations against Indians on the Great Plains. Judge for yourself...

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"When We Settle Down, We Grow Pale and Die..."

Satanta, the revered Kiowa chief, fought, then tried, then died on the white road. As 1870 approaches, he speaks his poignant truths to Indian Agent Lawrie Tatum, a well-meaning but ultimately powerless Indian Agent....

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A Summer Moon Lights the Road to Palo Duro

The way through the Staked Plains to and from Palo Duro is a moonlit clash of civilizations.

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The View from Headquarters....

Drapetomania was a psychiatric diagnosis proposed in 1851 by physician Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, of the Louisiania Medical Association, to explain the tendency of black slaves to flee captivity. While not terming it a disease, Gen. Phil Sheridan helped create and enforce an involuntary "cure" for the Plains Indian Problem. Here, he prescribes the reservation system as the only way to achieve "the management of Indians"...

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Buffalo or Corn? Corn or Buffalo? Who's on First?

Hunt Buffalo! Plant Corn! Hunt Buffalo! Reap Corn! The Solutions to the "Indian Question" fly fast and furious. But wherever there is land, only one solution will do...

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Why Adair Came to America?

Accounts blandly say he opened a loan brokerage in 1866 in New York; the place where he, a presumably very landed gentleman, meets and marries his presumably very wealthy bride. But why leave Ireland at all?

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First Light, Last Refuge

Where buffalo first emerged, free Indians last migrated

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The Great Plains On the Brink

Back East, settlement required deforestation; out West, it mandated buffalo harvesting.

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Pricing the Buffalo, Setting History's Dinner Table

Before the hunters invaded Texas, the market had priced the buffalo. The slaughter was so efficient that the remaining herds panicked, and both the hunted and their hunters - outfits led by James White, Mike O'Brian and the Mooar Bros. -- turned southwest, to tragic effect.

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Rails and Trails

The Adair's were soon to enter a Texas economy ablaze with pent-up Railroad Frenzy, put on hold by the Civil War. Not only would this soon spell the end of buffalo and Indian lifeways, but, soon thereafter, would end the romantic open range and the great trail drives that had made Adair's partner, Charles Goodnight, duly famous.

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In the blink of an eye...

In May of 1871, the Army's Col. Richard Dodge, who escorted Russian Crown Prince Alexi's grand western hunt, could wade through an ocean of buffaloes. In September 1874, while he chaperones the Adair's safari, only one old bull is sighted.

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"Enormous Don’t Express It – The Word’s Too Tame"

In 1873, the year before the Adair's went West, Mark Twain published his amazing The Gilded Age, and captured the tone of inevitable private abundance at the core of the Western project...

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Their Journey Begins....

On August 30th, 1874, the Adair's take the Great Southern & Western Railway(!) train from Portarlington, Ireland down to Queenstown, to catch the SS Cuba for New York City. Their trek from Ireland to America's 'new West' begins. It's Victorians Gone Wild: let the buffalo beware!

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The Buffalo War

As the Adair's hunt buffalo, this pincer operation drives Indians back to their hated reservations, marking the first use of the Gatling gun againts Indians and history's largest recorded horse massacre...

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Missed Allliance: Buffalo Soldiers Vs. Plains Warriors

Elmer Kelton reminds us that part of the Southwest's tragedy lies in how black Buffalo Soldiers, not a few being former slaves, were deployed to fight and uproot Plains Indians from their homelands. "It would be tempting to visualize their forming an alliance..."

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At the Tule Canyon Massacre with Mackenzie

Captain R. G. Carter was there, in Tule Canyon with Mackenzie, when 2000 Commanche horses were destroyed. While barely remembered, this event broke Indian resistance on the Southern Plains and catalyzed Westward Expansion.

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Ghosts of Tule Canyon

Larry McMurtry's description of the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne in 1864 seems just as true of Mackenzie's record destruction of at least 1,500 Commanche-Kiowa horses in Tule Canyon, only ten years later (September 1874).

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Hardships

On September 28, 1874, Mrs. Adair writes this piqued diary entry. Her travel snafus come on a day, when, to the south, "Bad Hand" Mackenzie's troops surprise the Indians and drive them from Palo Duro forever, their last free home on the Southern Plains...

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What the Indians Tell the Adair's

In early October 1874, the Adair's meet formally with a band of starving Ogalala Sioux. The couple asks permission to follow behind, so that John can watch how they hunt and bag his own trophy. The Indians' reply is more than they bargained for...

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"Unfolding like the book of Genesis..."

Charlie Goodnight's dream is to ranch the Palo Duro. Hitched to Goodnight's voracious savvy, John Adair's voracious wealth makes it possible. Goodnight's nephew, poet-songwriter Andy Wilkinson, portrays the "man born thirsty for this place"...

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Goodnight on the Trail

Charlie Goodnight, while decidedly brilliant, ruled his great cattle drives like a feudal overlord.

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Trail-Blazing: The Dark Side

Charles Goodnight was a legendary trailblazer before Adair arrived on the scene with financing. For all the romance of his great cattle drives, they have a little known dark side...

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Goodnight Without Frontiers

A purely reverential portrait of Goodnight by his famed biographer.

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"If God believed in fences, We would not have the wind."

The Adair-Goodnight Project barbed-wires the land. In the Panhandle and beyond, it first eclipses the Indian's hunting grounds, then the Cowboy's free range as well. Andy Wilkinson's song-poem for Standing Bear laments the passing...

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Art Therapy

After the Red River War, 73 Indians were designated as ringleaders of the rebellion and transported, in a reverse Trail of Tears, to Ft. Marion Florida. There, 23 would produce images of their former free lives, known today as Ledger Art...

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General Sherman's Credo

In 1879, Gen. William "Tecumseh" Sherman, took time out from fighting Indians out West to go East and address the Centennial of Gen. Sullivan's 1779 victory over the Iroquois.

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Young Charlie's Credo

Goodnight's admiring biographer records the inscription engraved on the barrel of young Charlie's "fine rifle" from his days as a Confederate Frontier Regiment member and Indian fighter...

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Harley True Burton's History of the JA Ranch (1927)

In 1927, Harley True Burton submitted his classic JA Ranch History for his MA Degree.

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The "I-word": Missing In Action

The official online description of the current exhibit, "JA: The Paloduro Ranch," forgets the "I-word". (Check back for our coming review of the most important exhibit to date on the JA's legacy and significance...)

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Cornelia's Credo

"So every time has its own special joys, and the great thing is to miss as little as possible, and to share as much."

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Indian Land Makes Strange Bedfellows

How the allure of Indian lands made partners out of Civil War opponents.

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Indian Management

From the memoirs of a soldier who guarded the pacified...

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The Kill, Phase I: Last of the Southern Herds

"They caught the scent of water on the air and began a great motion, until the broad shadow lake became a wallow of virtually all the southern herd... The hide men followed a few days later."

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The Kill, Phase II: The End

The great herds of the middle region were wiped out then, and the kill moved south to Texas for its second major phase...

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"This West of Ours": The Great Beef Bonanza

Adair and Goodnight were five years ahead of their time. In 1881, a "Beef Bonanza" was proclaimed by General James S. Brisbin, who stampeded English and American investors with overripe passages from his huge bestseller, The Beef Bonanza, or, How to Get Rich on the Plains...

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The Bone Era Begins

Eyewitness Testimony: How the Buffalo became "The Bone Boom"

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A Cowboy's Ode to What the Indians "Lost"

"I delighted in a plunge at the big spring, formerly a watering place of the Indians..."

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How the Land Question was Answered

Speculators Jot Gunter and Bill Munson got a law through the Texas Legislature authorizing a man to file on a whole county for one dollar and a half; and, at the end of the year he could renew it. To get the JA, Adair and Goodnight had to go through Gunter and Munson. Here's Goodnight's blow by blow...

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Surveyed Land / Paper Values

Crony legislation, unappropriated holdings bought with land scrip, and loan-fueled survey teams carved up Indian Country into the Almighty grids and lots that launched the great Cattle Empires.

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"My Own Soil"

All the romance and passion of a landed tradition that eclipsed - but doesn't refer to - the Indian tradition that it supplanted.

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Don't Mess with Texas

"The historic existence in Texas of these people [Indians and Tejanos] will always live on in John Wayne films and the distorted history created by Anglo founding fathers such as John Henry Brown. But let us remember that the conqueror first tells the tale of his success. In its retelling, heroism and myth soon dominate. But the truth's reemergence is always in the offing."

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Cherokee Commission 1889: Pulverizing Indian Country

After dispossessions - east and west - Indians were shoe-horned into "Indian Country." The next step was to legally atomize it into individual saleable units and destroy collective landholding as the basis of tribal life.

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From Indian Country to "Free Land" to Railroad Country

Charlie Goodnight grew large on massive cattle drives and trail blazing. When the Santa Fe Railroad reached Amarillo, it marked the end of that trail. Then again, the RR enabled "cattle-harvesting" at an industrial pace, just as it had cleared off the buffalo. And, as the JA Ranch rapidly expanded toward a million acres, it was well-positioned to reap that Bonanza.

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Bottom Line$: The JA'$ Return on Investment

To maintain their landed Victorian lifestyle, the Adair's required a Bonanza. Their JA Ranch investment did not disappoint.

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