I’ve done a number of short story videos for City 4, our local TV station.  The stories are about people or events from the history of our American West.

Mel, the manager of the TV station has put several of them on YouTube.  You can take a look at them by entering “Chronicle of the Old West” in the search line.

Incidentally, the picture isn’t of a wild man, but Al Sieber.  Then again, after you hear his story you may think he was a wild man. 

Indian Chief “Two Eagles” was asked by a white U.S. government official, “You have observed the white man for 90 years. You’ve seen his wars and his technological advances. You’ve seen his progress, and the damage he’s done.”

The chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, “Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?

The chief stared at the government official then replied, “When white man find land, Indians running it, no taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work, Medicine Man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex.”

Then the chief leaned back and smiled, “Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that.”

What follows is a December 20, 1883 article from the San Antonio Light newspaper.  It’s the actual words of a soldier who had been scalped:

Quote…“Imagine someone who hates you grabbing a handful of your hair and giving it a sudden jerk upward, and a not particularly sharp blade of a knife being run quickly in a circle around your scalp in a saw like motion.  Also imagine what effect that a strong, quick jerk on your hair to release the scalp would have on your nervous and physical systems, and you will have some idea how it feels to be scalped.

“When that Indian sawed his knife around the top of my head, first a sense of cold numbness pervaded my whole body.  A flash of pain that started at my feet and ran like an electric shock to my brain quickly followed this.  When the Indian tore my scalp from my head it seemed as if it must have been connected with cords to every part of my body.”…Unquote

Following the attack, a friend of the scalped man killed the Indian who had done the scalping, but, according to the soldier, his scalp wasn’t returned.

After recovery he chose to muster out of the service…but his commanding officer called him into his office, and suggested that the soldier was making a mistake by leaving the army.  “Thank,” said his commanding officer, “how surprised and disgusted some red devil of an Indian might be if you should stay with us and happen to fall into his hands.  When he went to raise your hair he would find that someone had been there before him.”

Incidentally, his commanding officer was General George Armstrong Custer whose command was wiped out shortly afterward at Little Big Horn.

Charles Goodnight was an early Texas cattleman who controlled up to 100,000 cattle on a million acres of land.  But, one thing most people don’t know about Charles Goodnight is that he, more than anyone else, was responsible for cowboys “eaten’ good” while on the trail.

At the age of 20, he agreed to take care of a neighbor’s cattle…if he was allowed to keep every fourth calf.  In four years, he had 180 head of cattle, and later he bought the neighbor’s whole herd.

It has been said of Goodnight that he “stole when he wanted to and lynched when he had to.”  By the end of the Civil War, he had a herd of 8,000 cattle.

To keep his burgeoning empire…he did the lynching.  One time his wife, expressing her shock over a vigilante hanging said, “I understand they hanged them from a telegraph pole!”  Charles Goodnight responded, “Well, I don’t think it hurt the telegraph pole.”

Goodnight was an innovator who, throughout the years, raised Durham, Hereford and Anus stock.  He even did some early experiments with what was then called “cattalo”…a crossbreed of buffalo and beef cow.  Unfortunately, the calves were sterile and the mother often died in birth.  However, Goodnight’s southern plains buffalo were later bred with northern ones to create the hardy strain of buffalo that now occupy Yellowstone and other areas.

In 1890, at the age of 54, he sold his ranching interests, spending the rest of his life as a “snowbird” with summers in Texas, and winters in Tucson, Arizona. Charles Goodnight passed away on December 13, 1929.

Oh yes, I mentioned that Charles Goodnight was responsible for cowboys “eaten’ good” on the trail.  It was Charles Goodnight, who in 1866 took a surplus Army wagon, and revamped it into the first chuckwagon.