Arizona silver belt., 1895-01-26
A BUFFALO RANCH.
An Experiment in Bison Breeding
 in the Texas Panhandle.
The Unique Enterprise of an old Plains. man Who Is Striving to Pcrpetuate the Valuable Qualities of an
 Almost Extinct Animal.


 Goodnight, little station on the Fort Worth and Denver City rail road, In Armstrong county, in the Texas Panhandle, Is the home of Charles Goodnight, who is quietly but earnestly and consistently conducting an experiment in the crossing of the American buffalo with native cattle, so far without completely successful re. suits, but certainly with very inter esting ones.
 Mir, Goodnight, says Forest and Stream, has a little home ranch of about seventy thousand acres This is his garden. His real ranch, Where he does business, is the Quitaquc, some distance away, where he has about four hundred thou sand acres under fence. It is at his lit tie garden, or truck patch, that he has his buffalo experimental station,
 Several years ago, when buffaloes were more plentiful In Texas than they are now, the cowboys working for Mir. Goodnight would often rope" a buffalo calf and bring it home. These were turned into an inclosure, and, though little attention was paid to them, they formed the nucleus of the herd now on the ranch. As the wild buffalo began to disappear these be- came of greater interest, and six or seven years ngo Mir. Goodnight began in earnest the attempt to produce a new and distinct breed by crossing buffalo and neat cattle, and trying to perpetuate this type of inbreeding
 There are now on his ranch about twenty-five or thirty full-blood buffa- loes and as many more half-breeds. Most of these full-bloods-probably all of them were calved on the ranch. h. deed, the herd are the product of the calves roped and brought in by the cowboys in the late '70s, which grew up and multiplied by the regular and natural process. They arc 6ne-loolzing animals. old buffalo hunters say they never saw tiner-looking ones when these animals covered the Texas prairies by millions which Is conclusive evidence that civilization is not fatal to the propagation of the buffalo. He needs only to be protected and given q fair show, and in time there is no reason why there should not be as many buffaloes on the prairies of Texas as there were twenty years ago.
 The crosses are, however, of the greatest interest. It was Mir Good nights desire to establish type of cattle with the valuable robe, the thrifty rustling qualities, the weight and general characteristics of the buffalo He has bred 'black mulleys" to the buffalo bulls-the cattle being chiefly polled Angus-and the result is an animal with the light hindquarters and heavy shoulders of the buffalo, the shaggy head and the long, woolly hair so desirable in buffalo robes being reproduced almost as perfectIy as ID the parent bull. The tail Is long and flat like . mules tail, Horns are absent when bred to mulleys In two or three cases, where the mothers were Texas cows. the horns were like buffalo horns, but some longer. One peculiar animal, which is out of place outside of 8 sideshow, is the offspring of buffalo bull and Texas COW, which has black and white stripes run ming around the body like zebra's
 The half-breeds are heavier in weight than the average cattle, are better rustlers, and keep fat through cold weather and hard rustling that thin the others and often result in heavy fatalities
 NIr. Goodnight also has on his home ranch about thirty or thirty-iive elk that were brought from Colorado, which he has in a pasture of four or five hundred acres, the fence around which is coyote-proof. These elk have not thriven well, and do not appear to be at home