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Men to Count On
Bose Ikard.
Bose Ikard was born a slave in Mississippi sometime in the early 1840s. He was brought to Texas by his owner, Dr. Milton Ikard, first to Lamar County on the Red River and then to Parker County well past the “settlement line” on the edge of the Cross Timbers before his tenth year. There he was raised on Grindstone Creek about four miles west of what became Weatherford, TX.
By the end of the Civil War, Bose was a trusted trail hand for Oliver Loving, probably the most experienced trail driver in Texas or anywhere else (as if Texas wasn’t enough said!) at the time. In 1866 Loving and Charles Goodnight agreed to combine herds to make a desperate drive to Colorado along what later become the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and Ikard would spend the next four years with Goodnight, who “trusted him farther than any living man.” Goodnight later said. “He was my detective, banker in Colorado, New Mexico, and the other wild country I was in.”
When cash deals were made all the way from Fort Sumner to Denver as the cattle herds were trailed along the Pecos and into the plains of Colorado, it was Ikard who carried that cash. Debts had to be settled or Goodnight could have been broke with the turn of a storm or Comanche attack. There were times that Bose carried what today would be well over a million dollars in cash and coin.
Ikard was also Goodnight’s “time keeper.” During months on the trail when one tiring day blended into the next and the next, Bose could always be counted on to have the exact date and day of the week figured in his head. The time of day anyone could tell from the position of the sun or the relative position of the “pointer stars” of the Big Dipper as it made its 24-hour circle around the North Star.
Bose was especially known for his ability to “turn a herd” in the middle of a stampede. It was not only dangerous work but skilled as well. It often took place in the dark of night and required someone who was both “horsebacker” enough to ride full speed over broken ground in the dark and fearless enough to actually do it. The trick to stopping the mad and mindless dash of the cattle was to begin turning the front of the herd at full speed and gradually bend the path back into the body of the herd and get them to “milling.” Few had either the nerve or the combined cow and horse savvy to excel at it.
Stampedes were serious business, but there was one that Goodnight remembered with a laugh. He and Bose were taking their turn together “night hawking” on the edge of Comanche country west of Buffalo Gap before they started their push toward the Pecos about a hundred miles away. The cattle had already proven to be bad to run and had started three times already on the trip, twice during the day. One of the runs had been started by Comanche and a scouting party of the plains nomads had been spotted that day.
Towards the time when the Big Dipper told them it was 4 in the morning, Goodnight started towards the wagon to wake the rest of the crew up to start the day. The cattle broke and ran about the time Goodnight got to the wagon and he managed to split them and save the wagon despite having his horse knocked down. He made it back on his horse and made his way to the front of the herd, where he found Ikard beside the leaders in a dead run.
After they had the herd turned and had them into “a mill,” he asked Bose why he had not tried to turn the herd before. “To tell the truth, till I saw ya, I didn’t know if we had ‘em or the Injuns had ‘em,” said Ikard sheepishly.
After four years on the trails with Goodnight, Bose decided to “settle.” He considered Colorado but elected to return to Parker County because of the lack of blacks in the mountain state. There he farmed to the west of Weatherford until he was well into his 90s. In the early 1870s, when Comanche and Kiowa raids were still common in the area, Bose would often scout for those chasing after the raiders.
Goodnight often made a point to swing to Weatherford for a visit with Ikard when traveling to Fort Worth or Austin. One such trip was well into the 20th century when Goodnight was met by reporters at the train station. He was, by that time, a famous figure and former Texas governor Sul Ross was in town to deliver a speech. Since Goodnight had been the scout during an Indian fight in the 1860s when Ross commanded a company of troops, the assumption was that he was there to meet the former governor. Goodnight, who had hardly grown more indirect in his old age, was asked when he was meeting with Ross. Goodnight snorted, “Why would I want to talk to that SOB? I came to see my friend, a man Ross couldn’t carry boots for.”
Ikard died a few months before Goodnight, January 4, 1929. Sixty-three years before, Goodnight had put Oliver Loving’s body in a wagon to fulfill the promise made to his partner that he would not allow him to remain buried “in a foreign land.” Loving had died after a fight with Comanche along the Pecos River in New Mexico. One of the two trusted hands who made that trip with Goodnight and Loving was Bose Ikard. In Weatherford, they delivered the body to the Masonic Lodge, where it would buried with fraternal honors.
When Ikard was laid to rest in the same Weatherford cemetery, Charles Goodnight had a stone engraved for his grave. It can still be read today, only a few rows from the Loving grave.
With me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches, splendid behavior
C. Goodnight
Bose Ikard’s importance was not that years later he would be used as a model for a character (Josh Deets) in Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurty has used plenty of historically figures as models (Goodnight several times) and has always been more concerned with dialog than with accuracy.
Bose spent his life among men “with the bark on” and stood out among them. He had their respect simply because of what he was and how he lived. The cast of what could be called “Goodnight men” is long and distinguished. Their names might not be familiar to those from the east or west coast, but they are among many of the families whose past is tied to the ground that stretches from the Hill County along the Cross Timbers, up past the Red through the Big Pasture and westward through the Concho Basin, up to the Caprock and across the plains, canyons, and mesas where their past generations drove cattle and either settled or returned to grow more.
There was “One Armed” Billy Wilson, who was with Oliver Loving in that gully on the Pecos and then walked, wounded and almost naked, to find help. There was “Rowdy” John Rumans, who would “fight a circle saw” and “ride anything with hair on it.” Among them was “Long Joe” Loving (no relation to Oliver), who once had an iron arrowhead pulled from his neck by Goodnight using a pair of hoof pinchers while being held down by three men. There was Jud Campbell, who trail-bossed herds across the Panhandle and into Kansas for two decades. There was Bill Wiley, the best roper Goodnight ever saw (and I can attest that his great-grandson was pretty damn good too). There was stern John Mann, “the best range boss I ever had,” who was famous for working stock slow and quiet and never having motherless calves on his range. These men and a hundred more like them left progeny and a rich example.
The importance of Bose Ikard is that he held a place among them that was entirely of his own making. He was one of them completely because of what he was and what he did. They were all men to be counted on, and that required no explanation.
His importance was not that he was born a slave but that he was born to a land that did not just sow the seeds for the destruction of slavery with its founding,g but offered him a hard-earned equal footing. His importance was that he was worthy of that equal footing, just as everyone must prove themselves to be, regardless of color. There was no room for the unworthy in their world, be they white, brown, red, or black. They all were indeed judged by “the content of their character.”
For Bose and those like him, regardless of color, that “content” was a clear glimpse of the true American Character.
Published in General
Beautifully written.
I love posts like this . . .
Awe inspiring, those tough men of our past.
Back in college, I worked part-time at a newspaper serving the Arizona Capitol founded before Arizona was a state. The publisher was the grandson of the man who started it, and he was filled with stories from the territorial days. He showed me an old photo of cowboys in Tombstone he found in the archives; they were white, black, and Indian. So I asked the publisher if he ever heard what “race relations” were like on the frontier.
He said the men in the photo lived in the wilderness, regularly facing death around every butte or bend in the creek. They might die from an Apache raid, getting lost in the desert, starvation or thirst, sickness or infection. You had to rely on your fellow cowboys if you had any chance of making it. Worrying about skin color wasn’t a luxury they could afford.
Great post.
Another excellent post, thanks for this Ole Summers.
Charles Goodnight:
This is one reason that intermarriage between Anglo-Americans and Hispanic ranching families were not uncommon in the Tucson-Southern New Mexico area. Someone who could handle a gun and was willing to fight were a welcome addition to isolated ranching families.
Absolutely. It was a damn tough life. The publisher later showed me a picture of a frontier family with a few kids, one of them Apache. Apparently, the poor girl’s parents had died, so these ranchers adopted her. The handwritten info on the back of the photo didn’t draw any attention to that; it was just par for the course in the Old West.
You are such a wonderful storyteller, Ole. Thanks once again for a beautifully crafted tale.
Damn.
I read this and I think, they were men, and the age of men is past. And we aren’t going to a make it.
And then I think, it doesn’t matter. Because they were.
As I often do with someone like this, I checked FindAGrave to see what I could learn about his family. Judging by the information there, his owner seems to have been his father, and his brothers were big players in the cattle business.
The Ikards moved a little north toward Clay County on the Red but ran cattle a lot farer west as well. Like most in the business they drifted back and forth between plenty and plenty of debt especially during the 1880s. W.S. (Will) Ikard always claimed to be the first to bring Herford cattle to Texas in the 1870s – but there are other claims, all of which have their champions :)
LOL! At first, I misread this sentence because I thought, “Dang, Jon doesn’t look that old . . .