"Charles Goodnight is perhaps more extensively known than any other western ranchman, cattle owner, and pioneer."
Our imagination has been fired by such pioneer names as Boone, Kenton and the Wetzels in the pioneer days in Kentucky, and later farther west on the great plains and the Rocky Mountains we have other historical names, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill (Cody), Payne and others, but very little has ever been written about the great southwest, where the Indian tribes of the prairie made their last struggle for supremacy, and where they had conflict with the first settlers and pioneers, who with all they held dear on earth, hewed out homes for themselves and the coming generations amid the most indescribable dangers from their foes.
Pioneer Days is written by the rank and file who were the true heroes and heroines, who suffered and gave their lives and the lives of those near and dear to them, in order to lay the foundation for future happy homes, peace and prosperity. The writers of this book were the small remnant yet left who were the actual participators in these early struggles, and they give their experiences, unadorned, without any claim to literary merit; for the writers were by then old.
When you read their simple statements of facts of Indian conflicts, of terrible suffering and privations, so unassumingly told by them, it is only fitting that those who have had the advantage of schools and Christianity, and refinement, of which they were almost entirely deprived, to cover their rough and often ungrammatical sentences with the cloak of Christian charity, and interline them with garlands of flowers and chivalry which truly belongs to them.
With contributions from Charles Goodnight (1836-1929), Emanuel Dubbs (1843–1932), and John A. Hart (1790–1840), the 1909 book "Pioneer Days in the Southwest" gives unadorned truths and conditions that fortunately have passed out forever.
A great portion is devoted to the life of Charles Goodnight the first pioneer of the Texas Panhandle. No history of pioneer days would be complete without the name of Charles Goodnight. While Mr. Goodnight has a state and national reputation, the people of the Panhandle of Texas feel that they are especially honored in owning him as a citizen, and he and his estimable wife had, and now hold a place in the hearts of old timers as well as later settlers, that would cause the people to condemn any writer who failed to give to them that mete of praise which they so richly deserve, and place their name at the head of the highly honored galaxy of heroes who contended with and finally overcame every obstacle and danger of a country entirely given over to lawlessness at the time of their advent.
These histories generally took place in the present-day states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.
