Mississippi Slave Turned Texas Cowboy Honored 70 Years After His Death

“Splendid behavior.”

The words stand out on a gravestone in Weatherford, Texas, where Bose Ikard is buried.

Born a slave, Ikard rode for years after his emancipation with cattle barons Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, whose exploits became the stuff of legend in Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”

Ikard was the real-life inspiration for McMurtry’s fictional Josh Deets. Capt. Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae were based on Goodnight and Loving.

When Ikard died, Goodnight wrote the epitaph quoted in “Lonesome Dove.”

It says: “Served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches. Splendid behavior.”

Ikard was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City on April 24. His great-great-grandson, Harry McQueen of Los Angeles, accepted the honor and thanked the assembled Westerners.

“To the National Cowboy Hall of Fame I say back to you: Splendid behavior.”

McQueen, a business executive and reserve sheriff’s commander for Los Angeles County, says his cowboy roots go deep. In fact, as a boy, it seemed odd to him that he always wanted to be a cowboy.

“I had the whole cowboy get-up,” he recalls. “I always had an affection or an interest in Westerns and Western life. Even today, I would really like, once I retire, to have a small piece of ranch property in Texas.”

He says it only became clear to him in junior high when his mother told him all about Bose Ikard.

“I knew there had to be some kind of connection for me to enjoy ‘cowboy’ so much,” McQueen says. “Basically, I’m awfully proud to have him as my great-great-grandfather.”

McQueen, 46, has lived the citified life in Los Angeles since 1978. But he has ridden in rodeos and on a commemorative trail drive in 1995 along the old Goodnight-Loving Trail, which extends up from Texas and eastern New Mexico across Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming to Miles City, Mont.

Loving, N.M., near Carlsbad, is named for Goodnight’s longtime partner. Loving was mortally wounded near there, along the Pecos River, in 1866 during an Indian attack. He died in Fort Sumner, N.M., and, like Ikard, is buried in Weatherford.

McQueen rode a few days with the trail crew through the flat range land of Wyoming in late July 1995, helping drive about 250 Texas longhorns.

“We would go somewhere between 18 and 22 miles per day. We would be up at 5. You’d have to break your tent down. Breakfast was at 5. Everything was broken down and ready to roll by 6 a.m.,” he says. “We would stay in the saddle until we got to the next encampment, and that would vary somewhere between 3 and 4 in the afternoon.”

By day, they even ate in the saddle. “We’d grab a sandwich from the chuck wagon while still on horseback, maybe a soda, and you kept riding,” he says.

After the cattle were settled in, McQueen had just enough time for a nap before dinner.

“I had to, yes, I did,” he says.

McQueen thus learned some of the realities of his great-great-grandfather’s life.

Reality did not include being killed by an Indian lance, the way Josh Deets died in “Lonesome Dove.” Ikard lived to be 85 and died peacefully in 1929, leaving six children and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

McMurtry says he never knew much about Ikard. But he knows the region--he’s lived there all his life--and the Goodnight epitaph.

“I’m sure he was a remarkable man for the loyalty he managed to inspire in Mr. Goodnight, who was not an easy man to please,” says McMurtry, from Archer City, Texas. “I just made up a black cowboy, basically, and I gave him Bose Ikard’s epitaph.”

Ikard’s great-granddaughter Cleo McQueen remembers Ikard standing about 6 feet tall, strong and usually silent.

“He was a very quiet man,” she says. “The thing we remember most clearly about him was the way he’d dress, and that was the cowboy style with the big cowboy hat.”

In 1990, Weatherford dedicated a historical marker in Ikard’s honor. It says: “Born a slave in Mississippi, Bose Ikard came to Texas as a child with the family of his owner, Dr. Milton L. Ikard. He remained as an employee of Dr. Ikard following his emancipation, but in 1866 joined a cattle drive to Colorado led by Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. Ikard became one of Goodnight’s best cowboys and a trusted friend. Following his work in the cattle drive, Ikard settled in Weatherford. He and his wife, Angeline, were the parents of six children.”