Charles Goodnight and the JA Ranch

In the fall of eighteen seventy-six, less than two years after the Comanche had been driven from Palo Duro Canyon, Charles Goodnight rode in to look at what they had left. He was forty years old, a former Texas Ranger, a veteran cattle driver who had already blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail west to New Mexico and Colorado. He had tried ranching in Colorado. The winters had broken him financially. He came south looking for shelter, grass, water, and a place to start again.

He found it in Palo Duro Canyon. The canyon provided everything the open plains could not, wind protection in winter, reliable water from the Prairie Dog Town Fork, sheltered grass, and cedar timber for building. He brought a small herd and set up camp. The next year he formed a partnership with John George Adair, a wealthy Irish investor who supplied capital while Goodnight supplied knowledge and management. The JA Ranch took its initials from Adair's name.

Over the next several years Goodnight continued acquiring land in and around a seventy-five-mile stretch of the canyon. By eighteen eighty-five the JA Ranch covered one million three hundred and twenty-five thousand acres and held one hundred thousand head of cattle. It was one of the largest ranching operations in American history at that moment.

Goodnight's wife Mary Ann, who came to live at the canyon headquarters, is credited with something equally significant. She persuaded her husband to rescue several orphaned bison calves that the hide hunters had left behind. From those calves Goodnight built a captive bison herd. His herd, and the descendants it produced, became the last surviving population of southern plains bison. Those animals are now the Texas State Bison Herd, maintained at Caprock Canyon State Park roughly one hundred miles south. Charles Goodnight died in nineteen twenty-nine at the age of ninety-three. The JA Ranch is still in operation.