Neither of Loving's dying requests would be simple, but
there would be no let-down between these two partners.Goodnight had the body temporarily interred at Fort Sumner in a metal coffin. There is some disagreement as to who actually brought Oliver Loving's remains back to Texas, but most report that Goodnight returned to the Fort some months later and exhumed the casket, surrounded it with charcoal, encased the whole in a box made of pounded-out tin oil cans and loaded it onto a wagon. This was taken back over the Goodnight-Loving Trail, hundreds of miles, all the way to Loving's home in Weatherford, Texas, where it was delivered to his family "...the strangest and most touching funeral cavalcade in the history of cow country..." wrote J. Evetts Haley in his landmark 1936 book Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman.
Copyright 1997, Randy Leonard
Leave your mark here....
