WHERE LONGHORNS ONCE kicked up red dust, oil pumpjacks known as “nodding donkeys” now pepper the land along the Pecos River, from the Texas border to up past Artesia. The opportunity to turn hard work into good money that inspired ranchers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving to drive cattle through this patch of land on horseback on the heels of the Civil War now finds a similar breed of men driving crude tankers along rough roads. 

The Goodnight-Loving Trail began in 1866 as a new way to bring cattle up from Texas to Fort Sumner along the Pecos River while skirting Comanche territory. Eighteen cowboys led some 2,000 head of cattle through unbearable heat and rugged terrain that year, before eventually selling what was left of the herd to the U.S. government to feed the Diné and Ndé peoples who were forcibly relocated to the Bosque Redondo Reservation. 

Stories of the brutal trail, which claimed Loving’s life the following year and eventually extended through Ratón into Colorado, live on in fictionalized accounts like Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove­—and the route still makes for a spirited road trip along US 285 today. The 200-mile drive through New Mexico now takes you through the cities of Loving, Carlsbad, Artesia, and Roswell, where people have since populated the Pecos. But by all accounts, the skies above the trail still look very much the same.

Less than 50 miles from the Texas border, the Carlsbad Museum makes a fitting starting point for the road trip. “We have air conditioning,” laughs Edward Van Scotter, director of the museum, about a comfort the early cowboys would have appreciated. A replica of Goodnight’s chuckwagon, invented specifically for the trail, sits adjacent to Chuckwagons & Cowboys: The Art of Theodore Van Soelen, 18 lithographs illustrating how the chuckwagon upgraded cowboy life. Goodnight’s creation streamlined the logistics of feeding the cowpokes by hauling an at-the-ready camp kitchen along instead of unpacking and packing mules at each stop. 

Map of the Goodnight–Loving Trail showing a route from Texas through New Mexico and Colorado, with marked stops including Pecos, Roswell, Las Vegas, Raton, Pueblo, and Denver."

On the north edge of Carlsbad, the Living Desert Zoo & Gardens State Park tucks into the Ocotillo Hills overlooking the Pecos. The 1,500-acre park showcases a collection of plants and animal species that make the Chihuahuan Desert their home and the trail ecosystem unique. 

In Artesia, the spirit of the trail now stands in the shadow of the state’s largest oil refinery. On the corner of First and Main, Vic Payne’s 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture Trail Boss pays tribute to the larger-than-life figures of the trail. Frozen in a moment fraught with peril and possibility, a cowboy spurs his steed with a rifle raised overhead as two massive longhorns charge ahead. 

A marker details some of the challenges of the 40-day trip along the trail: “Many lost their lives or their herds or horses to thirst, alkali poisoning, quicksand, drowning, floods, stampedes or Indian raids.” Eight other markers within walking distance are dedicated to the city’s frontier history. 

About two hours north by car sits Fort Sumner, the military headquarters for Bosque Redondo, where approximately 9,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache people were forcibly interned by the U.S. government. Due to poor planning, graft, and extreme cruelty, the Native Americans held there were starving. “If it had not been for the cattle industry, they would not have had food to eat,” says Aaron Roth, Bosque Redondo Memorial regional manager. 

The memorial details the shameful history of internment through stories and artifacts from the people who endured the famine and disease they found there, but also the role that the cattle trail played in keeping so many alive. Take a moment to walk the path down from the main building to the Pecos River, where the cattle driven there once watered. 

Next door to the Bosque Redondo Memorial, the Fort Sumner Heritage Center opens a new permanent exhibition in July. At the Crossroads of History details De Baca County’s past and delves further into the importance the trail, the cowboys, and the cattle industry itself played in creating the community that developed there. 

Considered a great success, Goodnight returned to Texas after that first trip with $12,000 in gold to buy more cattle and plan another drive to the fort. Subsequent journeys expanded through the Ratón Pass into Colorado and Wyoming until railroads and barbed wire changed ranching—and the West—forever. Or as Goodnight plainly said, “The cowboy of the old days is the most misunderstood man on earth.” Today, traveling the trail offers us an opportunity to relive, remember, and reconsider the complex history of the West, and maybe even our own place in it.   

Read more: Fill a backpack, saddle up, or load the car. The trail that moves you is out there, whether you’re seeking adventure, history, vistas, or a little solitude.