The speed of stampeding cattle was astonishing. They stretched out low to the ground and ran ‘as if the devil was in them’. If the leaders were stopped by a bolt of lightning or a thunder clap, the cattle following them would be unable to slow down or turn and would plunge over them, trampling the animals on the bottom to death. Some would try to wheel round, others darting this way and that, and from the terrible melee would come a horrifying roaring and moaning, adding to the terror of the storm. While they were running, the herd made no sound, but once the stampede was checked, they would set up a tremendous bawling and lowing, mothers calling for their calves, or lost companions.
Some storms were so appalling, the herd would be paralysed beyond stampeding. In July 1878, a terrible tempest blew up on the plain out from Ogallala, Nebraska. It started with flash lightning, then forked lightning, followed by chain lightning, followed by ‘the most peculiar blue lightning, all playing close at hand’. After this came ball lightning, rolling along the ground and around the men and their cattle. Then spark lightning and lightning that settled on the men and cattle ‘like a fog’. The air smelled of sulphur, and became so hot that the men thought they would be burned up. The cattle were milling about and moaning as if in distress, but made no move to stampede.
Once the cattle got wet, the lightning would play along the curves of their horns; it would dart round the bridles and bits of the horses and the rim of the cowboys’ hats. If a cowboy ‘popped his quirt’ – cracked the little whip with two leather thongs on the end that he carried to encourage the cattle – it would emit sparks, and even the swishing of a cow’s tail would bring forth electrical flashes. ‘Snakes of fire’ ran along the backs of cattle and up the horses’ manes. Lightning sometimes raced around the rims of the wheels on the chuck wagon. Men would discard their pistols and knives and spurs, believing it would protect them from a strike. Mexican vaqueros wore a ball of beeswax inside the high crown of their sombreros because the substance would not conduct electricity. All profanity ceased; like actors never uttering the word ‘Macbeth’, cowboys would never risk taking the Lord’s name in vain in a storm.
Charles Goodnight, one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated cattlemen, after whom the famous Goodnight cattle trail was named, described the heat generated by rampaging cattle as almost enough to blister the faces of the men on the leeward side of the herd. The visages of men who stayed with a stampede during an electrical storm were sometimes burned ‘a brimstone blue’. That is, if they survived the lightning. Many more deaths were caused by being struck by lightning than by stampeding cattle. Cattle tended to run round a man on the ground, even on black nights, and it was unusual for them to trample anyone unless they were so spooked that the press of animals behind them prevented the leaders from dividing around him. A stampede that ran for 25 miles could be scattered over 200 square miles, taking days to round up and re-form.
Texas cattlemen admired the Longhorn for its indomitable spirit and resilience under harsh conditions, particularly trail driving, but were ever alert to the wildness that lay just beneath the skin. A steer was described as ‘gentled’ if it would not flee from or attack a man on horseback, but it did not mean it was tame. The Longhorn’s sheer will to live, its vitality and hardiness were legendary. At a slaughterhouse and packing plant in Kansas in 1870, steers were being killed by pushing them down a chute, where a man with a long sharp lance would strike them behind the horns. They would then drop to their knees and fall through a trapdoor to be dragged to the skinning beds. One big steer was lanced and fell through the trapdoor, but when the knife was at his throat, he leapt to his feet, ran towards the daylight coming through a door, and jumped a storey and a half to the ground. He then swam a quarter of a mile across the Missouri river to a sand bar, where he ‘shook himself and turned his head to the shore – at bay’. On another occasion, a big brindle steer made a dash for his life and liberty from a pen in a hide and tallow factory at Fulton on the Texas coast, from where he swam 12 miles across the bay to Lamar.
The Longhorn was seldom troubled by maladies. They had no herd diseases, tuberculosis was unheard of and miscarriage, or spontaneous abortion, unknown. They even knew how to avoid the clouds of mosquitoes that could obscure the sunlight down on the Gulf Coast and torment them to madness. The cattle would drift to the open shore in vast numbers and swim far out into the sea, where they would spend the night and part of the day, riding the waves, with only their heads and shoulders clear of the water.
Their adaptability to climate, terrain and vegetation was continental. They ranged from the tropics of Mexico, far below the southern limit of buffalo migration, to the blizzard-swept prairies of the Dakotas, into Montana and on to the plains of Alberta. They crossed deserts to get to the sweet valley grazings in California; they survived in the bayous of the Mississippi delta and the marshes of Louisiana and the infertile pinewoods of east Texas, where the cattle ticks ‘sucked the very life blood from the time the calves were born’ and were sometimes so thick on them that they ‘covered up the cattle just like shingles on a roof’. When there was nothing to eat, cows could sometimes be seen standing on their hind legs browsing like deer, hooking down twigs and leaves from nine or ten feet up in the trees.
In a drought, when water became more expensive than hay, Longhorns could live for months on prickly pear – a kind of cactus – without drinking. Pear was both a curse and a salvation for the Texas rancher. When there was plenty to eat and drink it was a dreadful nuisance, colonizing huge areas with impenetrable thickets of spiny growth that resisted all efforts to eradicate it. But in a drought it became the salvation of many a herd of cows. Its succulent stems or pads (nopales in Spanish) held reserves of water and nutrients and its beautiful flowers presaged a sweet deep-red fruit called a tuna. Every part of the plant was edible, so long as the lethal spines that covered it to protect it from browsing animals could be overcome. Some animals eat pear if there’s nothing else available, but they suffer for it, because the spines embed themselves in the soft tissues of their lips and tongues, where they fester into painful pockets of pus and prevent the animal from eating. Once the spines are embedded, there’s a good chance the animal will die. Uniquely, Longhorns could chew the whole pad, flesh and spines, and it was unusual for them to be affected.
Ranchers whose cattle were not as tough as the Longhorn developed a way of burning off the spines from the pear pads without damaging the nopales, which would not easily burn because they were full of water. At first they used a torch made from rags impregnated with ‘coal oil’ – kerosene – on the end of a long green pole, which they rubbed against the pads. It was laborious work to provide enough sustenance for a herd of cattle. Later, they used pressurized petrol blow-torches on long handles, called pear-burners, and which shot out a two-foot-long flame at 2,500 ºF. It was hot, dangerous work. The operator had to wear heavy clothing for protection against the spines and the wasps that colonized the pear thickets, and boots to protect him from the rattlesnakes, copperheads, centipedes and scorpions that would inevitably be enraged by his work. An effective operator with a flamethrower could remove the spines from an acre of pear in a day. This would be enough to feed a reasonable-sized herd of cattle. If he repeated the process every day for a few weeks, by the time he had burned the last acre, the first would have regenerated with new succulent nopales and he could start the whole process again. This saved many a herd of cattle from starvation.
At first, when the Longhorns took over the plains after the buffalo were slaughtered, they roamed across vast acreages of unfenced land. In a hard time there was nothing to stop them drifting up to 300 miles south, in migrations comparable to those of the buffalo that had preceded them. In a bad blizzard on the plains of the west, vast herds of cattle would be driven south before the snow, moving on until they came to shelter or the blizzard abated.
Fortunes were made and lost during the two or three decades of cattle driving. A steer selling at the railhead in the
north for $50 left a profit of around $44, after deducting the purchase price and trail expenses of about $1 a head. The average herd making the journey from Texas was around 2,000 strong, but there were much larger ones, up to 15,000. A man could get rich from just one cattle drive. One of these was Captain Charles Schreiner, whose family had arrived in Texas from Alsace in 1852. After the Civil War, in which he served as a private in the Confederate army, he returned to San Antonio and began trading and cattle driving. He made enough money to buy 27,000 acres and start the Y.O. Ranch,1 which in true Texan fashion grew to over 600,000 acres by 1900. Exploiting these huge herds set Texas back on its feet after the Civil War and served as an hors d’oeuvre to the later boom that came with the discovery of oil.
The Longhorn’s legendary resistance to the effects of ticks ought to have given it an advantage over the new breeds, but it turned out to be yet another reason why it was driven to the brink of extinction. Over centuries of harsh natural selection Longhorns had developed immunity to tick fever, a disease that was fatal to about 80 per cent of the European cattle that caught it. Some of the cattlemen noticed that if the cows drank sulphur water the ticks would drop off them. Before the open ranges were fenced, when cattle could travel almost as far as they wanted, the herds would go 20 or 30 miles to drink their fill from particular sulphur springs, passing by fresh water to get to the minerals. It was observed in the eighteenth century that buffaloes would make an annual migration of over 200 miles from their usual range, across the Alleghenies, to drink from and wallow in salt springs in Pennsylvania. There are many accounts of Longhorns making similar pilgrimages to satisfy an annual craving for minerals, particularly salt.
As the Longhorn herds were driven north to the railheads, they carried with them ticks that dropped off and shed their eggs, which hatched into infected larvae and attached themselves to the settlers’ cattle. Farmers noticed that their cattle got tick fever after the Longhorns had passed through and assumed that the Longhorns were spreading some disease. As the settlers consolidated their hold on their sections of the prairie and, crucially, barbed wire became available, they fenced off the trails and refused permission to the cowboys to cross their land, both as a response to their fear of disease and also to deny the cowboys a market for the Longhorns, which were competing with their own cattle.
In a typically American response to the threat to the softer European cattle, various experts from the newly formed USDA advocated eradicating the Longhorns altogether. Not only were they spreading disease, but even worse in the eyes of the authorities, the Longhorns themselves remained remarkably healthy. It was another example, along with eradicating the buffalo to starve out the Plains Indians and spraying defoliant in Vietnam, of the kind of scorched-earth policy that the US authorities have favoured from time to time. Such was the hostility to the Longhorn that by the turn of the twentieth century it was in real danger of going the way of the buffalo.
By 1906, when the Longhorns had largely disappeared from their former ranges, tick fever was still endemic throughout 14 southern states and was believed to be limiting the introduction of European breeds of cattle. It was considered necessary to eliminate the ticks by state and federal eradication programmes. For 35 years, efforts were made to try to remove them from the eastern seaboard to the Texas–Mexico border. By the 1940s, a tick-free permanent quarantine zone had been created along the international boundary from Del Rio to the mouth of the Rio Grande, in an effort to prevent ticks crossing into the US from Mexico, where infected ticks remained.
But it proved impossible to eradicate ticks. By the 1970s, they had returned to Texas, where they have proliferated and become a serious problem again. The official USDA response is to quarantine cattle to try to prevent ticks from spreading. But decades of changed land use, encroachment of brush and increasing wildlife have brought them back. By 1 February 2017, more than 500,000 acres in Texas, apart from the permanent quarantine zone, were under various quarantine measures managed by the Texas Animal Health Commission and USDA in collaboration with farmers and wildlife agencies. Quarantine is designed to prevent the movement of animals harbouring ticks and allow the authorities to treat animals that act as hosts. But it is impossible to prevent the movement of wildlife or to treat or remove every host species.
There are two closely related tick species that transmit tick fever: the cattle tick and the southern cattle tick. The veterinary name for Texas cattle tick fever is bovine babesiosis; it is caused by a parasite that breaks down the red blood cells, resulting in anaemia, fever and eventually death. The cattle tick is from the Mediterranean, and the southern cattle tick originated in India. They were both imported into the Americas with cattle from the Old World, and both adapted to the climate of the US, Mexico and Central and South America, where they found an abundance of hosts.
USDA appears to have learned nothing from the failed attempt to eradicate the ticks in the first half of the last century, or the slaughter of the Longhorns at the end of the nineteenth. Animals (and humans) develop immunity to tick-borne diseases. The Longhorn was a good example. Yet instead of working with the cattle to breed a population unaffected by ticks, they tried to eliminate the very type of cattle that would have solved the problem and embarked on a futile campaign of eradication using chemicals, quarantine and slaughter. Recently they have tried genetic modification to create ticks that will be infertile and unable to reproduce themselves. This is unlikely to be any more successful than the other methods. There is something in the psyche of Western scientists, particularly in America, that will not accept that it is better to work with nature rather than try to conquer it. The same attitude embraces pasteurization and genetically modified crops.
Just as the 60 million American buffalo had been ruthlessly eliminated in less than a century with concern for nothing but the money to be made, so the 10 million indigenous Longhorns were seen as a free resource to be pillaged and almost eradicated in the rush for profit. But the Longhorn proved tougher, even than the buffalo, and was not easily dispatched. During the twentieth century it was kept going by a few Texas ranchers, and in the last few decades has made a notable comeback. Its devotees value its extraordinary resistance to drought and disease, its ease of calving small, vital calves, even when mated with bulls from bigger breeds, and its self-reliance and fiercely protective mothering, particularly in the face of danger. Above all, the breed has retained its considerable capacity to convert indifferent herbage into lean meat without artificial feeding or other inputs.
1 The Y.O. brand was first used in the 1840s by Youngs O. Coleman of the Fulton Family Ranching Empire near Rockport.
CHAPTER 17
‘Rascals with horns goin’ straight out’
PRECISELY AT 11.30 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day (weather permitting), a solemn procession of eight cowboys, booted, hatted, bewhiskered and got up as if they were still on the trail, drive a herd of fifteen pampered Longhorns (one for each decade of Fort Worth’s history) along the street from their accommodation in one part of the Fort Worth Stockyards, past the Cowtown Coliseum (where the rodeo takes place) and into a large corral, where they pose with their minders for photographs. Then they convey them back to their pens to await the next drive. The docile animals plod along in the fierce summer heat, their massive horns nodding from side to side in time with their steps. The parade resembles a Catholic feast-day procession through the streets of some Spanish town, accompanied by a silence similar to the awe that would greet the parading of the relics of the local saint.
Until you see these cattle in the flesh, it is hard to appreciate how unusual they are, from the spread of their horns – up to eight or nine feet from tip to tip – to the way they quickly learn to negotiate narrow gates and alleyways by turning their heads sideways and looking forward out of one eye, even deftly reversing into narrow spaces so that their bodies are inside while their head and horns remain outside, to their unique multicoloured coats, with no two animals having the same combination of
colours.
In the early 1960s, the Texas Longhorn Society began to register the breed. Longhorn cows then had horn spreads of between two and three feet. As stock was selected for size and muscle and also horn length, the average spread from tip to tip increased by about a foot during the seventies, and continued growing into recent times. With careful selection for horn spread, the average has increased by about an inch a year for the last 40 years. Coupled with enhanced carcase quality, the breed has been improved considerably without any out-crossing or loss of hardiness or ease of calving. It also appears to have lost a good deal of its fierceness. Whether this is the result of breeding or handling I cannot say.
There is also the delightful paradox that in a new country, this is a very old breed, whose ancestry can be traced back over 500 years to a precise year at the end of the fifteenth century: 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Then, in less than a century, they went from being numbered in their millions to being almost wiped from the face of the earth. In recent decades they have acquired a group of passionate devotees, and a cult has arisen around them. They have become the emblem of the state of Texas, and of a city, Fort Worth, whose tourism is partly sustained by the myth of the Texas cowboy; and they are celebrated, even revered, in the twice-daily ritual that has the scent of the religious about it.
This is living history with the difference that all the players have worked as proper ranch hands in the past and know their business. ‘It’s an awful lot easier than doing it for real,’ said one of the grizzled horsemen, every one of whom has some form of facial hair, impressive moustaches and goatee beards being very popular. The drive passes the Fort Worth Livestock Exchange, once known as the Wall Street of the West because of the enormous numbers of cattle (and other livestock) that came here to be turned into money during the boom years. The drive and the cattle are managed for the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau by a dynamic Polish girl called Kristin Jaworski. She has absorbed fully the Texas enthusiasm and clearly loves what she does with ‘the world’s only twice-daily cattle drive’. Each beast has its own calling card, with a portrait photo on one side and details of its date and place of birth on the other, together with some snippets of information about its life. These cards are put together into a pack sold to tourists.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 26