My Own Soil

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


This book [Goodnight’s biography] is more than the biography of a man– it is the background of my own soil, a part of my own tradition. Every wind that drifts the alkali dust from the Goodnight Trail across my home range sussgests a land of cattle and horses; every damp breeze carries the penetrating fragrance of greasewood, suggestive of the bold life that rode along it. Yet the land and its life have hardly changed with the years. Today, our trails are still the trails of cattle; our problems those of aridity, of grass and water along the bitter Pecos - ‘graveyard of the cowman’s hopes.’

J. Evetts Haley
Charles Goodnight, Cowman & Plainsman
1949