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The Cushing Memorial Library of Texas A&M University is fortunate to possess Goodnight's letters to friends and acquaintances which date from the first decades of this century. Acquired through the instrumentality of the Friends of the Texas A&M University Library, Goodnight's letters provide tangible evidence of his restless intellect, his fascination with breeding improved stock, his friends, his adopted Texas homeland and especially buffalo.
Many of his letters were to Martin S. Garretson who was one of the founders of the American Bison Society. The American Bison Society was very active in preserving the buffalo from extinction. Goodnight, who had owned a buffalo herd for years, had always been a buffalo booster and regularly and eagerly corresponded with others of the same disposition. Garretson is perhaps best known for his The American Bison published in 1938. He also published articles and reports in the Report of the American Bison Society, which was published more or less annually beginning in 1908 with the 1905/1907 report.
This year's keepsake reproduces one of Goodnight's letters to Garretson (Goodnight often confused the name with Garrison) and also the text of a couple of letters to Edmund Seymour, another influential member of the American Bison Society. The letters to Seymour provide, intriguing historical insight into the life of Goodnight-a man who had fought blue northers, drought and Comanches. In the late twenties when the Seymour letters were written, Goodnight was almost an anachronism; a frontiersman living in the twentieth century. He died the next year at the age of ninety-three.
Goodnight's letter to Garretson dates from almost a decade earlier. In the Garretson letter can be seen the firm hand of an elderly Goodnight-still very active in his eighties. Goodnight explained in the letter that there was a move to have his ranch taken over by the state as an "experimental station." One of the committee sent to examine the ranch was W. B. Bizzell, President of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas which Goodnight located in Bryan (since College Station had not yet been incorporated). The "annual book" which Goodnight had graciously given to Bizzell was the Report of the American Bison Society.
The effort to establish the Goodnight ranch as an appendage to the experiment station system fell through as Goodnight predicted. Although when Goodnight died in 1929, the Texas legislature did pass legislation to purchase the Goodnight buffalo herd. After a series of legislative false starts, the herd was eventually purchased by a syndicate of Dallas businessmen.
Goodnight's efforts at crossing sheep with hogs may bring a smile to some lips, but Goodnight, untutored in genetics, thought it was possible. After all, had not he crossed buffalo and cattle to produce the well-known cattalo? Whether the litters he produced were actually crosses or whether a boar had sneaked into the corral is less important than the insatiable curiosity of the man and his determination. Hopefully, from time to time, the Friends can publish more of the letters of Charles Goodnight. Texas would not have become Texas without men like Goodnight.
ŠTHE CUSHING MEMORIAL LIBRARY OF TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY