In the mid 1860s, a growing Comanche presence made cattle drives heading directly north out of Texas increasingly dangerous, so Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving chose a different route toward markets at U.S. military forts along the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains. They planned to travel southwest across barren, dry lands to the Pecos River, then go 300 miles north along the Pecos to Fort Sumner in the New Mexico Territory and onward to markets farther north. In June 1866, they left the Brazos River in North Central Texas with 2000 head of Longhorns and, after forty days and the loss of 400 head to quicksand and lack of water, reached Fort Sumner, where they sold half of the remaining herd for $12,000. Their success gave the route its name, and many others followed, though many lost their lives or their herds and horses to thirst, alkali poisoning, quicksand, drowning, floods, stampedes, or Indian raids. The trail later faced competition from the railroads, which reached Artesia in 1894, and it ceased altogether with barbed wire fencing in the very early 1900s. The route also figures in comparisons to Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, whose cattle-drive life and main characters echo the experiences of Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight. In 1867, during the third Goodnight-Loving cattle drive, Loving and another cowboy rode ahead of the herd and were ambushed by a group of Comanche Indians about 40 miles south of here near the present-day town of Loving. Loving was wounded and sent his partner to get Goodnight, who was about seventy miles farther down the Pecos with the herd. Goodnight later found no sign of Loving at the ambush site, then rode to Fort Sumner, where Loving had arrived after escaping the attack. Despite efforts to save him, Loving died from complications related to surgery, and at his last request Goodnight took his body back to Texas for burial.