The Texas panhandle was once home to millions of bison. Until the late 1800s, when white settlers moved in, the bison and Native Americans operated in a functional ecosystem. Native Americans hunted the bison, but with restraint and respect for the animal, always utilizing every part of the body.

In 1877, rancher Charles Goodnight brought his wife Mary Ann Dyer Goodnight with him to the Texas panhandle to settle what would later be the town of Goodnight, Texas. At the time of their arrival, the bison were still plentiful. Within a year, the population would be nearly decimated by white settlers.

“When Charlie Goodnight brought Mary Ann to the lip of the Palo Duro Canyon [about 30 miles south of Amarillo] in 1877, the bison herd was enormous. You could hear them rumbling ­­– they’d be miles away and you could hear them running down there all the way to the top,” Jane Botkin, American West historian and author of a forthcoming book on Mary Ann Goodnight, said.

By the end of 1878, white settlers had killed all the bison above the canyon. Soon, the hunters realized there were more bison in the canyon.

“The attitude of that time: for every bison you shoot, you get rid of an Indian,” Botkin said. “When the bison hunters went down into the canyon, they just left the bodies and took the hides.”

Living just above the canyon, Mary Ann heard bleating at night. She complained to her husband, wondering what the noise was. It was orphaned bison calves, crying for their mothers. Her immediate response? She wanted to rescue them.

According to Charles’ journals, he brought in two bison calves on May 15, 1879 at Mary Ann’s urging.

The baby bison fed from female cows on the ranch and grew into adults. A couple years later, a local rancher caught two full grown bison and gave those to Mary Ann as well.

“Whenever they found a straggler, she got it,” Botkin said.

In 1904, a woman named Ella Hubbard showed up with a newborn baby Cleo Hubbard. Charles and Mary Ann took them in, employed Ella as their housekeeper, and helped her raise Cleo. As the Goodnights could not have children of their own, they felt a parental affection towards both Ella and Cleo. Cleo went on to become the foreman of their ranch.

“Mary was an orphan mother,” Botkin shared. Though she couldn’t have her own children, her maternal instinct drove her to help anyone in need of a mother or even grandmother figure.

Today, Cleo’s granddaughter Elizabeth Magar lives on the ranch with her husband. They both work daily to honor the legacy of her grandfather as well as his mother and the Goodnights, Cleo’s foster grandparents.

I recently made the trip out to Goodnight to meet Magar, see the original ranch, and the bison. What was once Charles Goodnight’s “retreat” from the main ranch house is now an Airbnb run by Magar and her husband. I stayed there with my husband and two dogs over the course of a weekend in early November.

“Grandaddy was known for being able to deal with the bison but it’s because he had always been raised with them,” Magar shared with me.

As the bison grew older and the herd grew larger, the bison would occasionally escape from the ranch. They are wild animals. They do not operate like cows and were thus very difficult to restrain and keep under control.

“You can’t treat bison like cattle. For one thing, bison can jump…They also, because of the way they have all the protection, they’re able to push through a lot of stuff,” Magar said.

Magar’s mother Montie Goodin would tell Magar stories of when the bison would escape. Goodin’s father Cleo would journey for days at a time with nothing but his horse, a bullwhip, a six-shooter, and a bedroll. He’d find the bison then slowly herd them back to the ranch.

Mary Ann oversaw the growth and health of their bison herd for the entirety of her life. While Mary Ann cared for them, Charles sought ways to make the bison profitable as he knew this was crucial to their preservation.

“He and grandaddy [Cleo] sold bison heads to the east and to Europe so they had mounts on the walls. They tried to get this big tradition going of Christmas bison roasts so that you had bison at Christmas…He even took the hair off bison and turned it into yarn for socks,” Magar said.

Though Charles himself has become quite the panhandle legend – it is said that Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is a fictionalized account of Charles Goodnight’s cattle drive with his friend Oliver Loving – Mary Ann and her bison usually get lost in the stories of Goodnight.

Though Charles was a successful rancher in his own right, it is because of Mary Ann that bison even exist in the panhandle of Texas. Though she may have not realized it at the time, she singlehandedly stopped the extinction of bison in that area and is the reason there are hundreds of bison in Cap Rock Canyon State Park today.

The herd in Cap Rock Canyon State Park today are all direct descendants from those first few babies that Mary Ann saved.

As Mary Ann grew older, she developed memory issues. This impacted her decision-making skills.

“She was very attached to the bison. She called them her pets even though she knew that they weren’t her pets. One day, when they all sat down at the big table…they realized she was not there, and they went to look for her. She had wandered outside, climbed over the fence, and she was in the pen with the bison. And they knew that was not safe in there. One of the people there climbed over the fence, grabbed her, handed her over the fence, and climbed out as fast as he could. They had not hurt her, but she couldn’t have stayed in there,” Magar shared. “She had gone back to see her bison.”

After Mary Ann passed away, Cleo’s daughter Montie Goodin made the preservation of the bison her own personal mission. In the early 2000s, the herd had outgrown the ranch. There were talks of moving them to south Texas or even dividing the herd.

“Mother wrote a letter to [Texas Parks and Wildlife] saying, ‘they need to stay on their ancestral home, they need to stay where they’ve always been.’ She went to the meeting, got up to speak about it, and they said, ‘you’re the one who wrote the letter,’ Magar said. “And [because of that], the bison are here.”

Goodin is the reason that the bison roam free in Cap Rock Canyon today. She was present at the unloading of the bison into the canyon, a moment that surely signified the weight of not only her efforts but of Mary Ann’s before her.

“I was living in Chicago at the time, and during that time, when mother was restoring the house and taking care of the bison, trying to get the bison moved, I didn’t know anything else in her life other than those things,” Magar shared.

Today, Magar runs the ranch with her husband David. They raise red angus cattle just like the Goodnights before them. The Texas Historical Commission operates and upkeeps the Goodnight ranch house. It functions as a museum. And just an hour south of the home lies Cap Rock Canyon where you can hike, camp, and encounter (at a distance) the hundreds of bison who descended from Mary Ann’s rescued bison calves.