JA Ranch survey
Historic American Buildings Survey, Creator. J A Ranch Headquarters, Paloduro, Armstrong County, TX. Armstrong County Paloduro Texas, 1933. Documentation C...
Texts
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 a...
The Bone Era Begins
Eyewitness Testimony: How the Buffalo became “The Bone Boom”
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...
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 ...
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 Regim...
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...
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 Se...
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 ...
Indian Land Makes Strange Bedfellows
“How the allure of Indian lands made partners out of Civil War opponents.”
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 unit...
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 th...
Goodnight Without Frontiers
“A purely reverential portrait of Goodnight by his famed biographer.”
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.”
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…”
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...
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.”
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…”
First Light, Last Refuge
“Where buffalo first emerged, free Indians last migrated”
Goodnight on the Trail
“Charlie Goodnight, while decidedly brilliant, ruled his great cattle drives like a feudal overlord.”
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 ...
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 fou...
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 th...
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, a...
‘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 Ame...
Indian Management
“From the memoirs of a soldier who guarded the pacified…”
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.”
The Great Plains On the Brink
“Back East, settlement required deforestation; out West, it mandated buffalo harvesting.”
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 import...
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 r...
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. wordlcat
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. The...
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...
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 presumabl...
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 Requi...
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...
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...
THE PLAYERS…
An evolving Who’s Who of this Staked Plains/Palo Duro saga and its aftermaths (In progress… Please add your players!)
The View from Headquarters…
Drapetomania was a psychiatric diagnosis proposed in 1851 by physician Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, of the Louisiana Medical Association, to explain the tendenc...
The View from Headquarters…
Drapetomania was a psychiatric diagnosis proposed in 1851 by physician Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, of the Louisiana Medical Association, to explain the tendenc...
Foes to Progress and the Cause of Humanity
Civilization is extending in opposite directions, Westward across the great Valley of the Mississippi, and Eastward traversing the auriferous regions of the ...
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.
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...
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 T...
JA Ranch Exhibition Opens
An homage to the JA Ranch will open at the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon Texas. Curated by Bill Green, it will open February 17th and run throug...
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 ...
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 Wi...
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 nep...
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 h...
The News is History’s First Draft…
The Time for Amarillo, Texas, the nearest big city to Palo Duro Canyon
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...
A Bonanza of One’s Own
America’s first Gilded Age rises from the brutal Depression of 1873-1879. Just then, two wealthy Victorians - Ireland’s John George Adair and his American wi...