The Story of Oliver Loving and the Goodnight-Loving Trail.
How it All Began
Just as gold made California, cattle made Texas
J.Frank Dobie
Along about 150 years ago, Texas was a brand "new" place... opening wide to settlers
who were looking for a piece of ground to call their own, a place to build a home, a
life with some fresh hope and promise. It was the new Frontier, at a time when the
Wild Wild West really was wild, where a man might be called to cash it in at any time
just around the next cut bank in the trail.
The new settlers huddled in close together to have the protection of their neighbors, their numbers and weapons being the only defense against the roving Indian bands. They worked at building a start on the open range land, from the dirt up. The Indian tribes were plentiful, they were being disposessed of their freedom, their lands, their food supply, and they weren't taking it lightly. The word "Cowboy" wasn't even a part of the language yet, but the seeds were sown - there were plenty of cattle in Texas.
Spanish cattle were first brought to New Spain (Mexico) in the early 1500s. Gradually, as the Spaniards pushed ever northward into what we now know as the Southwest, they came with cattle to establish missions in hope of taming the Indians of "Tejas". These missions were agencies of the Spanish crown as well as the Church. However, when Mexico won it's independence from Spain in 1821, the mission system collapsed. The Plains Indians had by then acquired the horse, and they remained wild, free and dangerous.
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