Lonesome Dove: Weatherford's Trail Drivers

Larry McMurtry never named the town, but the bones of Lonesome Dove are buried in Weatherford. Oliver Loving — the trail-driving cattleman widely seen as the model for Augustus McCrae — settled in Parker County, and his real death on a New Mexico drive, wounded by raiders and carried 600 miles home for burial, reads like a scene from the novel. His friend and partner on those drives, Charles Goodnight, is the other half of the legend; and riding with them was Bose Ikard, born into slavery and remembered as one of the finest cowboys Goodnight ever knew. This driving loop links the graves and homes of the men who actually rode the trails, plus the depots and lawmakers who tied frontier Weatherford to the wider world. It is a short drive through the country that turned cattle and grit into one of the great American stories.