Daryl Meador
The famed Texan frontiersman and cattle rancher Charles Goodnight was an unlikely filmmaker, especially in 1916 at the age of eighty. Goodnight is historicized as the archetypal pioneer, both figuratively and literally. He helped to ignite a vast transformation of the Texas panhandle, first as a militia man expelling indigenous populations from West Texas, and later as the first settler to establish a commercial cattle ranch in the region. He is historicized with such fierce and romantic frontier nostalgia that he exemplifies, in the words of Alex Hunt, “the notion that truth and fiction, story and history, can become so entangled as to become almost inextricable” (Hunt, 2). Goodnight’s cattle drives, undertaken as a young man, inspired one of the central characters in Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel Lonesome Dove. In the 1995 TV miniseries based on the book, Tommy Lee Jones’ stoic, sometimes dispassionate character Woodrow F. Call is an approximation of Charles Goodnight.
Goodnight, who exterminated some 15,000 buffalo from his canyon, preserved a small herd of the animals at the behest of his wife, beginning in the 1880s. The herd eventually reached two hundred, a tenth of the continent’s entire population. In 1916, Goodnight invited Kiowa men—by then forcibly displaced onto reservations in Oklahoma—to stage a traditional buffalo hunt on his property, their ancestral homelands. The local crowds that gathered to watch the event unexpectedly reached 11,000. The killed buffalo was later barbecued and served as a dinner to 150 of Goodnight’s special guests. The event was so popular that it was re-staged for a film crew later on that year, the Wiswall Brothers of Denver, resulting in Old Texas (1916), preserved and digitized by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. Goodnight financed the film, acted in it, and directed much of its action.
The film’s opening title card states the setting as the Llano Estacado, where “truth is stranger than fiction,” a prescient statement for reasons not addressed in the film. Previous to Goodnight’s settlement of the region, the Llano Estacado contained spaces of refuge for indigenous communities who resisted their forced expulsion. The 1874 Battle of Palo Duro Canyon—in which the US army ransacked a village of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne, killing 1,400 of their horses—largely ended the final holdout of these tribes. Only two years later, Goodnight arrived with 1,600 longhorn Texan cattle and claimed space for his JA Ranch, which would eventually grow from 12,000 to 1.3 million acres. What is “strange,” in Goodnight’s conjecture, is the Kiowa themselves, as a buffalo head and man’s head in a traditional headdress sit in the bottom corners of the frame.
The film begins with Goodnight’s “discovery” of the canyon, opening with a prolonged pan of its vast and empty interior. “The views were wonderful,” a later title card reads, before showing a man walking onto a cliff in admiration, pulling his unhappy horse behind him. The man soon sees “Indians” near his settlement, who he knowingly approaches and invites back to his home. The remainder of the film largely offers a pseudo-ethnographic focus on Kiowa customs from the region, including a traditional buffalo hunt.
One of Goodnight’s biographers describes that Goodnight himself supplied the hunters with bows and arrows, “the fabrication of which had become one of his hobbies.” In the absence of traditional clothing, the hunters were told to wear “drawers such as men were wearing as underwear at the time.” Goodnight himself apparently directed the action of the hunt “to replicate those he had seen in the old days” of his career as an Indian hunter (Haley, 109). If these reports are true, the result is less an ethnographic document than the manifestation of a perverse perspective: an indigenous custom re-staged by a white man who aided in their eradication. A man who once hunted these tribes re-stages their traditional buffalo hunt to the best of his own memory.
Old Texas serves as a ripe visualization of the frontier myth. The prairie is civilized through Goodnight’s settlement; the indigenous traditions that the film features are framed as receding into the yet uncivilized landscape. In an act of what María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo calls colonial space-making, Goodnight can only conquer the seemingly inhospitable environment “through the Indians, whom the colonists must mime in order to succeed on the Plains.” Here, as in frontier literature, “American masculine character, implacable and intrepid, is wrought from the encounter with implacable and intrepid Plains Indians” (Saldaña-Portillo, 11).
An intertitle presents a Kiowa legend that when the “buffalo shall perish from the face of the earth, you may know that the end of the Kiowa is near and his sun is set.” The film proclaims this prophecy fulfilled but offers an indeterminate ending: a shot of two Kiowa men riding into an empty horizon is followed by a shot of Goodnight’s enduring buffalo herd as they graze in a pasture. Alex Hunt notes that in this way, the film suggests that despite Goodnight’s complicitness in the slaughter of the buffalo, he is in fact “the Kiowas’ greatest protector and benefactor” (Hunt, 7). As the preserver of the buffalo, he frames himself also as the preserver of the Kiowa.
Jennifer Peterson, in her 2020 Orphans presentation on state-sponsored films from the 1920s promoting road-building, argued that we can look to cinematic images of natures past in order to better understand what has led us to the current ecological crisis. The nature that Goodnight offers us is enfolded into an elegy for the frontier. Goodnight looks back to a virginal, unconquered landscape with nostalgia, perhaps because the film was created twenty years after the ranching crisis of 1886. Caused by overgrazing and drought, the crisis initiated the decline of the open-range cattle industry. Twenty years after Old Texas, the region experienced the onset of the Dust Bowl, a monumental disaster caused by decades of reckless plowing and grazing in pursuit of profits rather than sustenance.
Couching Old Texas within this history of ecological history crises offers insight into the inevitable failures of the settler futures imagined within the film. Scholars argue that these crises are, in part, predicated on the racialized division of land that we see dramatized in Goodnight’s film (Holeman). Today, the 36 buffalo descended from the five that Goodnight caught in the 1880s face dangerously low levels of genetic diversity and impending extinction. The fenced in spaces of the panhandle plains have grown smaller and smaller. Cattle in West Texas are housed in crowded feedlots, stomping up a fecal dust from the ground beneath them that engulfs local towns in a brown smog so thick that drivers must turn their headlights on before sunset. If our current visions of West Texas are hindered by fog made of cattle feces, under-studied early films such as Old Texas may help us understand what got us here.
Bibliography
Hagan, William T., 1918-2011. Charles Goodnight: Father of the Texas Panhandle. University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
Holeman, Hannah, “No Empires, No Dust Bowls: Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History,” Monthly Review, Vol. 70, No. 3, 2018.
Hunt, Alex. “Hunting Charles Goodnight’s Buffalo: Texas Fiction, Panhandle Folklore, and Kiowa History,” Panhandle Plains Historical Review LXXVII, 2004
Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. Indian Given : Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States, Duke University Press, 2016.