Ep. 72: Death of a Trailblazer, Oliver Loving
Wise About Texas
Ken Wise
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2019
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Oliver Loving was a trailblazer…literally. He drove cattle to Illinois, Louisiana, and Colorado. With Charles Goodnight he blazed a new western trail intended to avoid the Indian threat. Impatient as he was brave, he rode ahead to Santa Fe and was immediately attacked. However, he held off hundreds of Comanches while one of his men went for help. Through luck, or fate, or toughness, or all of it, he survived the attack. But his wounds were too severe. Before he died, his best friend promised to take his body back to Texas. Get a taste of the cattle drives, the danger, the bravery, and promises kept in this latest episode of Wise About Texas.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Howdy and welcome to Wies about Texas your award-winning Texas history podcast. I'm your host Ken Wise. I want to thank |
| 0:15.1 | you for tuning in today for some Texas history. This episode is being released in the summer |
| 0:20.6 | of 2019, the time period of vacations and I'm trying to release some quick |
| 0:26.3 | episodes so you have something to listen to while you're driving around hopefully Texas |
| 0:29.9 | maybe some other states I for one just returned so we've had a little bit of a break in the |
| 0:35.8 | episodes. I took the family to New Mexico for a week up in the mountains. We had a great time, but the way it relates to this |
| 0:44.7 | episode is I took the occasion, we drove up there and I took the occasion to read |
| 0:49.8 | one of the best Texas history books you'll find out there. |
| 0:53.4 | It's a book on Charles Goodnight. |
| 0:54.9 | The title is Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman. |
| 0:58.2 | And it's by J. Evitz Haley. |
| 1:00.8 | It was originally published in 1936, it is it remains the biography of Charles Goodnight and it talks a lot about him trailing cattle where he did it, his adventures in the Texas Panhandle, |
| 1:16.9 | and his life up there. |
| 1:18.3 | And when you're driving west to either New Mexico or Colorado, you're driving right through where all that happened. |
| 1:25.7 | So I read that book while we were going and while we were there. |
| 1:29.6 | It was very interesting to do so. |
| 1:32.2 | And it gave me the idea for this episode and this episode is |
| 1:35.6 | going to deal with a very small piece of Charles Goodnight's incredible life and |
| 1:40.8 | that is the death of his partner Oliver loving. He and loving were |
| 1:45.0 | partners in the cattle business and were quite literally trailblazers. |
| 1:49.8 | So we're going to go back to the middle 1800s and get wise about Texas. Oliver Loving was born in 1812, December of 1812. He was born in Hopkins County, Kentucky. |
| 2:10.0 | He married in 1833 and he was a farmer for a decade in Central Kentucky. |
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