Out here, the wind still talks.
It moves across Palo Duro Canyon, the same red-walled fortress the Comanches once called home — their oasis, their refuge, their food chain. For three centuries they thrived here, hunting bison, rendering fat, living free.
Now that land hums with diesel and confinement. The feedlots and pipelines have swallowed the oasis whole.
The corporations call it progress.
I call it erasure.
The Comanches fought for sovereignty through the soil. The government learned how to break that — not by out-shooting them, but by out-starving them.
They took away the bison, and the people followed.
How They Won the War
Between 1874 and 1875, during what history calls the Red River War, the Army at Fort Sill launched the campaign that ended the Comanche nation.
They didn’t just fight warriors — they hunted food. Cavalry escorts rode with professional skinners who slaughtered herds to starve the plains.
General Philip Sheridan told Congress,
“Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated. It is the only way to bring lasting peace.” (Congressional Record / Hornaday Report)
By 1878, the herds had collapsed — from thirty million down to fewer than a thousand, documented in the 1887 U.S. National Museum Census.
Texas hunters were killing two thousand a day.
The Comanches surrendered not from defeat, but from hunger.
That was policy. That was precision. That was how you end a free people without firing another shot.
When they control your food, they control your fate.
Goodnight and Molly — Defiance on the Range
But one family refused to let extinction win.
Charles Goodnight, a Texas Ranger turned trailblazer, and his wife Mary Ann “Molly” Goodnight, a schoolteacher raised on abolitionist roots, built their JA Ranch in the Palo Duro in 1876.
After the war, they rode into the canyons and found what was left — maybe twenty, maybe thirty bison — gaunt, wounded, but alive.
Molly said, “We’ve taken enough from the land.”
They brought them home. They bred them carefully.
By 1887, the herd had grown to 250 head.
That herd became the seed of survival. Every wild bison walking today carries a little JA blood.
Goodnight didn’t save the animal for nostalgia — he did it for sovereignty.
He built the Goodnight-Loving Trail, moving ten thousand head a year from Texas into New Mexico.
He rebuilt trade through work, not war.
Preservation was rebellion.
Stewardship was defiance.
The New Comanches
A century and a half later, the faces changed — the tactics didn’t.
Today the new Comanches wear corporate badges: JBS, Tyson, Cargill, National Beef.
Four names control eighty-five percent of the nation’s beef processing.
They don’t ride horses; they ride algorithms.
They own the corridor — from your pasture to their packing house.
They process about ninety-five thousand head a day, while more than a hundred-fifty local plants have shuttered since 2020.
Each closure erases another town, another trade, another handshake economy.
They call it efficiency.
I call it captivity.
They’ve mastered the terrain of data, debt, and regulation — out-maneuvering us the same way the old warriors once out-maneuvered the Rangers.
So I learned to fight like them: fast, unseen, relentless.
Only now, I fight for the producers.
Rebuilding the Corridor
If Charles Goodnight could rebuild an economy from canyon dust, we can rebuild a corridor of our own.
Mine starts with ground beef — the people’s protein.
More than half of America’s beef is ground.
It’s the cut everyone knows, everyone trusts, everyone can afford.
Ground beef is our new pemmican — dense, stable, sovereign.
The Comanches rendered tallow and lived off its power.
We can too. Fat was freedom.
That’s why I built The Beef Initiative — a grassroots network connecting families straight to the ranchers who feed them.
Every handshake, every shipment, every story we tell rewires the supply chain back to the soil.
We’re not waiting on Washington or Wall Street to fix our food; we’re building a new corridor of trust, one freezer at a time.
Processing is still the new frontier.
They went big.
We’re bringing it back home.
The Modern Trail
In November, I’ll ride a different kind of trail — to El Salvador, for the Bitcoin Histórico Conference — what I call the Cattleman’s Feast.
They’ll talk about finance.
I’ll talk about fat.
Because sovereignty isn’t an idea — it’s a steak you raised yourself and paid for in sats.
Through Bitcoin and Nostr verification, ranchers can sell direct — no banker, no bureaucrat, no permission slip.
Every transaction becomes a digital handshake written in stone.
That’s the new Goodnight-Loving Trail: a corridor of trust, not paperwork.
Unconfiscatable speech.
Unconfiscatable food.
The Call
I’m not asking for permission anymore.
They took the bison to end a war.
Now they’re taking your beef to start a new one — quiet, bureaucratic, bloodless.
But we still hold the same tools that saved the herd: courage, memory, and land.
They took the bison. Now they’re taking your beef.
This time, we fight back with clean fat and local hands.
You can’t conquer a people who feed themselves.
The wind still remembers.
And so do I.
References:
• Sheridan Testimony/Hornaday Bison Report: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17748/17748-h/17748-h.htm (Smithsonian 1889 full text).
• Fort Sill Reports/Red River War: https://www.archives.gov/research/military/army/red-river-war (NARA RG 393 digitized; M1055 for post returns).
• Bison Population Decline: https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/29938/Hornaday_1887_366-549.pdf (U.S. National Museum 1887 census).
• Goodnight Papers/JA Ledgers: https://www.depts.ttu.edu/southwestcoll/research/aid/Goodnight.php (Texas Tech MS 101; access via archive).
• JA Ranch Bison/Foundation: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/bison-restoration.htm (NPS RG 79 imports, 1902).
• Goodnight-Loving Trail Journals: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/goodnight-loving-trail (TSHA primary excerpts; full in Haley MS 89).
• USDA Beef Processing Share/Slaughter: https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/lsddcbs.pdf (AMS 3208, Oct 2025 daily).
• Plant Closures (ERS Tracker): https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-poverty-well-being/rural-america-at-a-glance/ (2025 updates; COVID series).
• Ground Beef % (FMI/USDA): https://www.fmi.org/docs/default-source/research/power_of_meat_2025_top_10_final.pdf (FMI 2025); https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/livestock-dairy-and-poultry-outlook/ (LDP-M-373).
• BeefMaps.com: https://beefmaps.com/ (direct listings).
• Bitcoin Histórico: https://bitcoinhistorico.com/ (official site).
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