CHAPTER 16
The Texas Longhorn: an Ancient Breed in a New Land
The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle the civilized world has known. As an animal in the realm of natural history, he was the peer of buffalo or grizzly bear. As a social factor, his influence on men was extraordinary. An economic agent in determining the character and occupation of a territory continental in its vastness, he moved elementally with drouth, grass, blizzards out of the Arctic and the wind from the south. However supplanted or however disparaged by evolving standards and generations, he will remain the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded.
J. Frank Dobie, The Longhorns (1941)
THERE WERE NO cattle in the Americas before 1493. There were tens of millions of buffalo, but they are not of the same family.
On his second voyage to the Caribbean, Christopher Columbus brought some tough, thrifty beasts out of Andalusia to Santo Domingo, where the equable climate, vegetation and absence of competition favoured them. In a few years, these cattle, related to the race that now produces fighting bulls, established themselves on the islands. They grew taller, leaner and more powerful, with long legs that carried them tirelessly and very fast over rough ground and long distances, and long horns as a formidable defence against attack.
Modern genetic analysis has traced the Texas Longhorn’s ancestry back to ancient times. It is a cross of 85 per cent Bos taurus (the progenitor of European cattle) and 15 per cent Bos indicus (Indian and African cattle). Its closest modern relatives are two of the thirteen Portuguese cattle breeds, the red-coated Alentejana, and the Mertolenga, which is a roan and broken-coated type that looks a lot like our own Shorthorn. They are directly descended from Christopher Columbus’s cattle, which were from three different but related breeds: the Barrenda, Retinto and Grande Pieto.
As the Spanish conquistadors penetrated into Mexico and what became southern Texas in the early sixteenth century, they brought with them what they called their Caribbean Criollo cattle for fresh meat. Gregorio de Villalobos brought over from Santo Domingo ‘a number of calves, so that there might be cattle, he being the first to bring them to New Spain’. Notable amongst these early adventurers and importers was Hernán Cortés, whom Keats has staring in wonder at the Pacific, ‘silent upon a peak in Darien’. He is credited with introducing branding to the Americas to mark ownership and deter theft from the unfenced ranges. Cortés’s own brand was a distinctive three crosses, which he used on his hacienda in Cuba and later on the great estate he developed in Mexico named Cuernavaca – Cow Horn.
These cattle came into a land with few enemies they were not equipped to deal with, and the vast open prairies provided all the sustenance they needed. By 1540, only two decades after their first introduction, they had so proliferated that when Coronado set out on his expedition from Mexico to look for the Seven Cities of Gold, he easily gathered up 500 cattle to supply food. On the way north, he abandoned any that were too weak to continue. Twenty-five years later, Francisco de Ibarra, travelling the same route, found thousands of cattle running wild. By the end of the century, a single owner in the province of Jalisco on the Pacific coast of Mexico was branding 30,000 calves a year. And in Chihuahua province, which borders Texas, there were single herds comprising tens of thousands of animals. At the inauguration of the viceroy in Mexico City in 1555, 70 or 80 bulls were rounded up for the bullfight from lands beyond all settlements, ‘some of them twenty years old without ever having seen a man, cimarrones, outlaws, fierce and desperate for liberty’.
The Spanish custom in colonial times was to leave the males entire, and as a result, all animals were capable of breeding, which accelerated the growth of the herds. In any case, eating bull meat was supposed to be invigorating and promote longevity. Even as late as 1823, it was against the law in Mexico to kill calves for meat. Left to fend for themselves, augmented by further importations by Spanish colonists and missionaries, over time these animals formed huge semi-wild herds of wide-horned cattle that spread out over the more favourable parts of Mexico and west Texas.
By 1770, the mission of Espiritu Santo near Goliad claimed 40,000 head of branded and unbranded cattle between the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers. The unbranded animals were known as mesteñas (‘mustangs’). After 1770, ranching up and down the San Antonio river declined rapidly under onslaughts from the native Indians – Comanches, Apaches and Lipanes – who slaughtered and stole cattle in ‘unbelievable’ quantities. Many cattle (and horses) were scattered across the countryside, where they turned feral and were sometimes hunted down by the Spanish for sport. The slowest were killed, while the fleetest and wildest escaped to breed. One Spanish rancher on the San Marcos river was so oppressed by Comanche raids that he was forced to abandon his ranch and those cattle he could not gather up. The ones left behind multiplied so rapidly that by 1833, Anglo-American settlers arriving from the north found the country ‘stocked with wild cattle entirely free of all marks of ownership’. It was wrongly assumed that they were aboriginal feral cattle, rather than domestic cattle gone wild.
In the early to mid nineteenth century, when English-speaking colonists began to penetrate Texas, huge numbers of cattle were roaming in groups (not vast single herds) from the border with Louisiana in the east and the headwaters of the Brazos river in the west, as far north as the Red River and south to the Rio Grande. They were reported to be fearful of human beings, hiding in thickets during the day and grazing by night.
Then settlers from Europe brought their English Longhorns and Herefords, and others brought milk cows and oxen, some of which interbred with the Mexican and Spanish herds. In eastern Texas, the Cherokee Indians kept their own unique type of cattle, which they had to abandon when they were forced off their land. Even the Shorthorn was brought into the mix when Queen Victoria sent two cows and a bull from her own herd to Colonel Thomas Jefferson Shannon, governor of Texas, in 1848. They were landed at New Orleans and hauled in crates on ox wagons to north Texas so that they would clear the tick zone – where infective cattle ticks were endemic, and would have killed them if they had sucked their blood – before being allowed to touch the soil. But they did not meet with universal approval, being seen as too short in the leg. Some of the colonel’s bulls were even shot dead on the open range by neighbours who wanted none of that ‘squatty build’ breeding with their herds.
But the characteristics of the basic cattle stock that became the Longhorn were so persistent that without fences to control their breeding, later imported types were simply absorbed into the breed without altering its basic character. These mixings resulted in the Texas Longhorn, a semi-feral, lean, flat-sided, multicoloured, self-reliant beast that lived off the land with no need for husbandry. They were not mature until about ten years old, at which age they carried an impressive spread of horn between three and four feet across. They were exceedingly long-lived, and resistant to severe hardship, parasites and disease. Although their lean meat was an improvement on the beef from the early Spanish Criollo cattle, it was still considered stringy, lean and too tough to be palatable, not unlike venison.
Gradually a Texas type of Longhorn diverged from the Mexican type and became widely accepted as superior to those that remained below the Rio Grande. This was partly as a result of the Mexican approach to selection for breeding, which was that if a calf was not doing too well and looked as if it would not make much of a steer for beef, it would be left for a bull. Whereas in Texas, the best bull calves were selected for breeding, and other males were castrated to make steers. There was also something in the terrain or climate north of the Rio Grande that grew rangier, bigger-horned and more powerful cattle than their Mexican relatives to the south.
By the time of the Mexican–American War in 1846, the Texas Longhorn had become a recognizable breed, distinct from its Andalusian ancestors, with a uniquely wide range of multicoloured coats, from black to blue-grey, yellow, brown, red and white, both solid colour
s and spotted, freckled, finched, brindled and even striped. It had also developed immunity to most of the endemic parasites and diseases that would kill many of the northern European breeds the ranchers were trying to introduce. The animals were lean, medium-sized (between 800 and 1,500 lb) and with a horn spread of up to five feet. But with the annexation of Texas into the US, the land became more comprehensively settled and fenced and the Longhorn lost its main value, which was the capacity to thrive on open ranges on indifferent vegetation. If they were pampered a bit more, the newer English breeds, such as the Hereford and Shorthorn, gained weight more quickly on improved pasture than the slow-to-mature Longhorn.
Wherever the Spanish had introduced cattle, numbers of them escaped to run wild in remote places. These cimarrones, outlaws, were there to be captured and tamed, or killed by settlers. Fresh escapees added to the breeding mix of the wild herds and replenished the stock of outlaws, which came to be known as mavericks – pronounced ‘mav-rick’ in Texas – after Samuel Maverick, a man whose name has passed into myth.
Numerous colourful stories arose to explain how these cattle got their name. One that blended fiction and fact has it that Maverick ‘being a chicken-hearted old rooster wouldn’t brand or earmark any of his cattle’. His neighbours all branded theirs – and as many of his as they could. Nevertheless, the old rooster claimed ‘everything that wore slick ears’ – had no ear-marks – or was unbranded. And when people spotted an unbranded animal, with ‘clean ears’ they would say, ‘There goes one of Mr Maverick’s beasts.’ Then it got to be ‘There goes a maverick.’ By 1861, Samuel Maverick owned more cattle than any other man in Texas. After the Civil War, he claimed the hundreds of thousands of mavericks that roamed the Texas prairies – though of course he couldn’t gather them up.
The least colourful story is the true one. Samuel Maverick was a lawyer in Texas who in 1845 reluctantly accepted a herd of 400 cattle in satisfaction of a creditor’s debt of $1,200. The cattle were running free on Matagorda Island, supposedly in the care of a Negro family. By 1853, Maverick realized that the animals’ caretakers were not looking after them, so he had as many as he could gathered up and moved to a range on the mainland. As most of his cattle were not branded, and most of his neighbours’ were, they took the opportunity to ‘maverick’ them. This was not strictly stealing, because the ‘custom of the range’ allowed anyone to catch and mark any ‘strays’ with his own brand.
In 1856, Maverick sold his herd, still about 400 strong, to the romantically named Toutant Beauregard for $6 apiece, ‘range delivery’, which meant that the buyer took the stock uncounted, ‘as they ran’. If there were more than he had paid for, he would be the gainer; if fewer, he would take the loss. These were the only cattle Maverick ever owned, but as is the way of things, his name has become more indelibly associated with ranching than nearly all the cattlemen who gave their lives to it.
By the time of the Civil War, the Texas Longhorn proliferated across southern Texas into California. Its physical attributes and temperament inherited from its Spanish ancestor, had been modified by adaptation to the extremes of the American climate and terrain. Depending on the make-up of the herbage, a Longhorn cow could support herself and rear a calf each year on between 10 and 30 acres. And as there were millions of acres of open grazing on the Texas plains, and few predators that she could not deal with, a cow would normally survive to have between 12 and 20 calves in her lifetime. The native Indians tended to leave the cattle alone because they preferred to hunt buffalo, as they had always done, or other game; and the wolves stuck to their same atavistic prey, the less dangerous buffalo, rather than risk tackling fierce and well-armed Longhorns.
As the buffalo herds were being slaughtered to extinction on the prairies, the burgeoning herds of Longhorns spread out to take possession of the huge acreages of abandoned and ungrazed open ranges. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, there were estimated to be about 10 million Longhorns grazing across Texas, about a third of which were unclaimed. Nearly all able-bodied men had been involved in the war, either in the Confederate army, or against Indians, and there had been nobody to ride the far ranges and work the cattle that had never seen a rider or felt the rope. After four years of warfare, Confederate soldiers returned home destitute. Almost the only occupation available to them and the youths who had grown to manhood during the war was catching and branding maverick cattle, which belonged to whoever could get to them first and had enough fighting men to keep hold of them.
Young men would be hired as ‘brush poppers’; for $10 a month plus board, they combed the sage brush, popping out cattle and rounding them up for the drive north. One rather facile saying arose that all it took to make a cowman was ‘a rope, nerve to use it and a branding iron’. But there was more to it than that. It was one thing to brand mavericks, but an entirely different thing to keep the cattle you’d claimed and get them to markets a long way distant. And when the beasts were plentiful and relatively easy to rope, the price was low.
But if a man could brand and hold the cattle, there was money to be made. The Civil War had depleted stocks of European cattle in the east, and a steer that was only worth $4 in Texas would fetch up to $50 in Chicago, Cincinnati, Dodge City or one of the meat-packing towns in the north – that is, if the beast could be got there. That was why for rather more than two decades after the war, vast herds of Longhorns were gathered up and driven north by tough and desperate men along cattle trails. Cowboys, as they came to be called, were paid about $30 a month, plus keep, for the four to six months it took to drive a herd the 1,500 miles or so to the railheads in the north. A fair day’s progress for a herd was about ten miles. They were allowed to graze along the way, and if they had plenty to eat, and fresh water, the tough Longhorns would gain weight on the drive and fetch a better price at the end.
It was not work for the faint-hearted. Cowboys were almost permanently in the saddle. They slept outdoors, were constantly on the lookout for danger, and endured extremes of weather and hardship. There was the ever-present peril of attack from Indians, who often resented them crossing their territory. Some Indians demanded tribute, which they mostly took in horses – they weren’t that interested in the cattle.
The mere mention of the word ‘stompede’ (as it’s pronounced in Texas) was enough to strike terror into the drovers’ hearts. Like much else to do with ranching, ‘stampede’ is from the Spanish – estampida. The Greeks called it ‘panic terror’, and in one old cattleman’s phrase, ‘It’s one jump to their feet and another jump to hell.’ A stampede was ‘the personification of instantaneousness’. The herd did not ease themselves to their feet like domestic cattle. The jump from lying down to being on their feet was ‘quicker than a cat can wink its eye’. The impulse to stampede passed through the animals as though every single animal in a herd of say 3,500 had been wired together and a switch clicked on. No other breed of cattle in the world was as disposed to stampede as the Longhorn. In an instant, a resting herd would become a solid wave of blind unstoppable panic.
The least thing could spook a herd and set them running. A stray dog sneaking up to a sleeping cow; a cough, a human sneeze; the snapping of a twig, the click of a latch, the smell of a wolf; even the end of a rainbow almost touching the leading cows in a herd. Sometimes, if cattle were bedded down for the night too close together, one flicking its tail in the face of another would cause it to jump up with a bawl and set the whole herd off. There was always a cause, but sometimes it was hard for the trail men to know what it was. Often, with their acute sense of smell, the beasts would scent something on the breeze that the men could not: the smell of cooking wafting on the wind from another trail outfit; the sharp smell of a coyote cub approaching the camp, or of an Indian, because Indians often tried to stampede a herd in order to try and pick off scattered animals. One of their favourite tricks was to burn a sack of buffalo hair on the windward side of a herd to spook it.
It was said that if a herd could be driven for two wee
ks without a stampede, the danger had passed. Being gathered up from their wide-open ranges, crammed together with a horde of other cattle and driven through strange and frightening surroundings by the most fearsome threat to their freedom that the primitive cattle knew, it was hardly surprising that they were prone to panic. On their ancestral range they would have known every rock and bush and tree for miles around, but snatched from the security of the familiar, they could easily be scared.
The commonest and most terrifying cause of stampedes was a thunder storm, especially at night, when the worst ones occurred. People in the west don’t live out in the weather any more, as the Texas trail men did – or, nearer to home, the Scottish and Welsh drovers. A cattle trail could take nine months or more, following the North Star from the Gulf of Mexico, where the salt winds blew fresh, to the drifting snows of the High Plains. Wherever they were, cowboys usually slept outside, without tents or other cover, and moonless nights on the open range were darker and lonelier than anybody living in the modern world of electricity, flashlights and well-lit, comfortable houses can imagine. When a man could not see his hand in front of his face, or his sleeping companions next to him; alone in the vast blackness of a prairie night, with not even a tree for shelter and a couple of thousand semi-feral cattle lying somewhere out in the inky gloom, he relied on whatever resources of fortitude he could summon. But nothing could prepare a cowboy for his first stampede.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 25