The Goodnight-Loving Trail has inspired songwriters and novelists. Cattleman Charles Goodnight became one of the iconic figures of Texas and the West—and helped save the American bison from extinction. Oliver Loving, whose death in 1867 led to one of Robert Duvall’s most endearing acting roles, has a Texas county and an Eddy County, New Mexico, village named after him.
Goodnight and Loving are credited with blazing the trail to deliver cattle to the Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort Sumner in New Mexico Ter-ritory in 1866, and the trail eventually stretched to Denver and Cheyenne.
“The trace that led from Texas to Fort Sumner is generally known as the Goodnight Trail, while that which Goodnight later blazed direct to Cheyenne is called the Goodnight and Loving Trail, though sometimes the terms are used interchangeably,” J. Evetts Haley wrote
in Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (Houghton Mifflin, 1936).At least, that’s the legend. Two historians, however, have recently suggested that maybe the trail should be known as the Chisum Trail.
Chisum vs. Goodnight & Loving
“Erroneous popular mythology holds that Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving made the first drives across West Texas and up the Pecos River to New Mexico markets in 1866 and 1867,” James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely argued in Confederates and Comanches: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021). “In fact, this route was established prior to Goodnight and Loving and was known as the Chisum Trail decades before Goodnight’s biographer branded it the Goodnight-Loving Trail.”
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