JA Ranch - Expanding The JA Ranch

Expanding The JA Ranch

Goodnight then purchased 12,000 acres (49 km2) from Jot Gunter and William B. Munson, Sr. for seventy-five cents per acre. In the next two years, he continued buying premium pieces of property in a peculiar arrangement around a 75-mile (121 km) stretch of the Palo Duro, careful to select the best grazing and watered land. In 1878, Goodnight drove the first JA trail herd, led by his ox, Old Blue, north to Dodge City in western Kansas, the nearest railhead. In 1879, he moved the ranch headquarter to the foot of the Caprock, some twenty-five miles east of the Home Ranch. He built a four-room house of cedar logs and supervised construction of a bunkhouse, a bookkeeper's residence, a wagon boss's house, a blacksmith shop, a wagonyard, and a milk and meat cooling shed. Later, the two-story, nineteen-room main house was added. The old Home Ranch house was then used as a line camp until it burned on Christmas Eve 1904, explains the historian and archivist H. Allen Anderson of the Museum of Texas Tech University at Lubbock in The Handbook of Texas.