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
[Read on. . . . ] Amateur Settler Cinema in Early Texas: Old Texas (Charles Goodnight, 1916)