Bose Ikard’s splendid behavior

One reason the relatively brief cattle drive era, which lasted from the end of the Civil War to the early 1880s, had such an impact on history was because the cattle drives allowed men to rise above the circumstances of their upbringing and education to make a little money and earn a measure of respect. 

As good an example of that as anybody is Bose Ikard, who was born into slavery and became rancher Charley Goodnight’s most trusted and respected cowhand. For Ikard, more than most, the road to the history books was a long and winding one. 

Born into slavery in Mississippi in the 1840s, his father was most likely his slave master, Dr. Milton Ikard, and his mother was an enslaved woman named King. Along with Ikard’s recognized son, William Susan Ikard, Bose arrived in Texas with the Ikards in 1852. They set up shop in Parker County, near Weatherford and began living the life that was being lived on the frontier, which included breaking horses and battling Comanches. Bose served with the Confederacy during the Civil War and returned to Weatherford to continue the cowboy life as a free man. 

While it’s easy to say that Ikard’s life changed for the better when he met Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, namesakes of the Goodnight-Loving Trail, it’s just as easy to say that Loving and Goodnight were the larger benefactors of the meeting. Goodnight believed so. 

“Bose surpassed any man I had in endurance and stamina…I have trusted him farther than any man,” Goodnight said of Ikard. “He was my banker, my detective and everything else in Colorado, New Mexico and the other wild country. The nearest and only bank was in Denver, and when we carried money, I gave it to Bose, for a thief would never think of robbing him.” 

The Goodnight-Loving Trail was different from the Chisholm and other famous trails of the cattle drive era in that it headed west out of Texas instead of north. By going due west through Fort Phantom Hill, Goodnight and Loving reasoned they could avoid the perils that lurked in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. 

Between them, Goodnight and Loving had 2,000 head of Texas longhorns on the first drive. Stretches of the trail, especially in the deserts of southwest Texas, must have made some of the cowboys wonder if they would have been better off taking their chances in Indian Territory. 

Along with an unerring devotion to duty, Ikard had particular skills, such as his ability to trail stampeding cattle at night, that made him indispensable to the outfit/. 

Loving was killed by Comanches in September of 1867 in New Mexico. In February of the following year, Goodnight, Ikard, and others exhumed Loving’s body from its grave in Fort Sumter and hauled it 700 miles back to Texas. Ikard served as the model for the Joshua Deets character, played by Danny Glover, in the movie version of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. 

In real life, in between trips up the trail, Ikard bought a farm near Weatherford and lived there with his wife and six children. Neighbors remembered him as a handyman who did yard work and ran errands for extera money. When he died of the flu in 1929, the Weatherford paper ran a short obituary referring to him as “one of the old time Negroes of Parker County.” 

When Goodnight, then in his 90s and the embodiment of a living legend, heard of his old friend’s death he made arrangements for a monument at his gravesite. A more proper obituary, one that included his years as a cowboy with Goodnight and Loving, ran in Texas papers. 

Goodnight had these words inscribed on Ikard’s monument: “Served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches, splendid behavior.”