Fort Worth, established in 1849 on a bluff overlooking the West and Clear forks of the Trinity river, was the last halt on the Chisholm Trail before it entered Indian country. In 1876, the Texas and Pacific railroad arrived in the town and turned Fort Worth into a terminus for livestock, with their products shipped out all over the country. By 1900, the railway was bringing in vast numbers of animals for sale and slaughter in the stockyards, turning Fort Worth into a hub for an enormous selling, slaughtering and processing industry, from which it got the nickname Cowtown. In the last century or so, more than 160 million head of cattle, sheep and pigs have been sold through the Fort Worth Stockyards, which at its height held the biggest sales in the south-west of the US.
For a few years, the Chisholm Trail was one of the routes by which the cowboy drovers, after the Civil War, brought their Longhorns from Texas to the railhead in Kansas, from where they were sent eastward to feed the terrific demand for beef, tallow and hides from the mushrooming cities. The droving only lasted a couple of decades, but that hasn’t prevented it from passing into the myth of the western cowboy, more romance than fact. Hundreds of thousands of cattle that had been rounded up across the plains and tracts of sage brush of southern Texas between the Rio Grande and the Brazos river were driven north to converge at Red River Station, where they crossed the Red River on the border between Texas and Oklahoma. One major branch of the trail passed through Fort Worth.
The trail is named after Jesse Chisholm, born in Tennessee, son of a Scots father and Cherokee mother, who as a frontier trader with the Indian tribes established the route with easy gradients and river crossings to carry the heavy wagons that transported his goods. Chisholm was among the early pioneers who moved west into what is now the state of Arkansas. He acted as a go-between for the Indians and the American settlers, using his knowledge of both cultures and an alleged ability to speak 14 different Indian dialects as well as English.
In 1867, the year before Chisholm died, Joseph G. McCoy, a cattle buyer from Illinois, persuaded the Kansas Pacific Railway to lay track to Abilene in Kansas. He built holding pens and loading facilities at the railhead to attract the Texas cattlemen to his new facility. In that year alone, some 35,000 head of cattle came along the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, consigned to McCoy’s stockyard, which became the largest west of Kansas City. Within four years, 600,000 animals had passed through his yards. During its short zenith, an estimated five million head of Longhorn cattle travelled over the Chisholm Trail, their hooves churning up a track that was in some places 400 yards wide and over time, eroded by wind and water, indented the plains it crossed; in places the trail is still evident today.
Homesteaders settled and fenced the land through which the trail ran, and brought their own breeds of European cattle: Aberdeen Angus, Hereford and Shorthorn. The pioneers had little time for the indomitable Longhorn and were keen to fence against it, partly to demarcate their square-mile sections (640 acres) and partly to prevent their imported cattle from being ‘contaminated’ by the feral Longhorn. The drovers were forced further west, into eastern Nebraska, and by 1875, with the coming of the Union Pacific railroad, Ogallala in Nebraska became the main shipping point. The route to it was known as the Texas Trail, which superseded the Chisholm Trail as the main route north through Indian territory. Between 1867 and 1884, when the last drive took place, millions of cattle and mustangs went up the trail. By 1885, the vast stocks of Longhorns had been plundered, and then the new railroads replaced the cattle trails and the short heyday of the cowboy had passed into American myth.
The Longhorn breed was brought to public attention when the University of Texas adopted a Longhorn bull, Bevo, as their mascot in 1917. But it was not until 1927, when the last of the breed was almost gone, that a few private landowners and enthusiasts from the US Forest Service gathered together a small herd from the animals that were left, keeping them in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Lawton, Oklahoma.
Then, a few years later, J. Frank Dobie (who wrote The Longhorns), with others interested in the breed’s salvation, began to collect a few animals in small herds, mostly as curiosities. Their sterling qualities of longevity, disease resistance and astonishing thriftiness on moderate grazing then attracted commercial interest as beef stock. That, coupled with a sentimental attachment to their place in Texas history, has ensured the breed’s resurgence, although it has to be admitted, keeping Longhorns is largely a rich man’s hobby. They can now fetch enormous prices: $40,000 at auction is not unusual, and in March 2017 at a sale in Fort Worth, a record $380,000 was paid for the cow 3S Danica with her heifer calf at foot. There is a small yet growing demand from health-conscious consumers for the Longhorn’s lean beef.
With all this in mind, I arranged to visit a couple of herds in Texas. I was put in touch with Rebecca Wampler, who keeps Longhorns near Mineola and has donated animals to the Fort Worth Stockyards for the daily cattle drive (or plod might be more accurate). She was helpfulness itself, and arranged for me to go to the Longhorn Cattle Breeders’ Association ‘Mid-Year Blowout Sale’ (nobody could accuse Texans of hiding their light under a bushel) on 17 June 2017, at West, north of Waco in Texas.
The West Auction Barn stands prominently on an open site beside the southbound Interstate 25, convenient for transport but not a prepossessing place, with the constant roar of heavy traffic. Viewing was held the evening before the sale so buyers could inspect the cattle being brought in to be ticketed and settled in their pens for the night. There were 92 lots to be sold next day. Compared to cattle auctions in Britain, the West Auction Barn is a primitive affair, with gravel rather than concrete on the floor and rickety rusty metal fencing round the pens that lie behind the crescent half-ring through which the animals come to be sold. But it works.
The evening was very hot – about 100º F – and most people were sweating freely. Only the cattle showed no obvious discomfort in the heat. Huge pickups attached to goose-necked trailers that looked as if they were feeding from the back of them drove right into the holding pens behind the auction building and let down their tailgates to release their contents. Russell Fairchild, the sale organizer, bustled about, penning cattle, ticketing, checking paperwork and taking responsibility for feeding and watering the animals. He was very good at it. He even found time to introduce me to everyone who was anybody, and once they’d determined I wasn’t Australian – which most of them thought I was – everyone had something to say about the English and England.
I was leaning against a gate in an alleyway when a great shout went up and a cow with horns almost too wide to fit between the pens came bowling towards me with her head slightly inclined to one side, one horn pointing straight at me like a javelin. ‘Watch out for this one!’ shouted Russell. ‘She’s crazier ’n a bed bug!’ and everybody jumped out of the way, or climbed the metal bars of a pen, to let the roan cow with 80-inch TTT horns past. (TTT is a characteristic American acronym meaning ‘tip to tip’. Why they don’t just say tip to tip is one of those impenetrable mysteries of the American psyche.)
Kurt and Glenda Twining of Silver T Ranch have a commercial herd of Longhorns, but Kurt freely admits he couldn’t afford to keep them if he didn’t have another source of income. Lot 20 is one of his heifers. She has elegant black-tipped horns, already impressively long, and he’s certain they’ll grow much longer because her mother had 80-inch horns, as did her father. A seven-foot spread of horn is not unusual, he tells me. It is hard to see how they keep hold of such huge horns, which are bigger than the top of the head they grow from. There must be a lot of leverage at the root if the tip gets caught in something.
Longhorn beef is becoming saleable again, even valuable, after almost a century of not being wanted. It makes about $7 a pound (a far cry from the 10 cents it made at the Kansas railheads) and is bought by people who value the fact that it is grass-fed, lean, and free from chemical stimulation and corn or soya feeding. This is the nearest you get in the arid parts of the US to living off th
e terroir. There are newer cattle breeds on the prairies, such as the Angus, which are kept in a similarly natural way, but they are nowhere near as tough as the Longhorn.
However, most Longhorns are now being bred for horn length rather than anything to do with beefing qualities. Every beast that struggled with its impressive horns into the ring had the width of spread announced and the measurement recorded in the sale catalogue. A decent set of horns (attached to a head) now fetches around $350 – about a third of the carcase value. Those with particularly impressive antlers were the object of extravagantly expressed admiration by Russell Fairchild and the auctioneer.
It takes nourishment to grow horn. Steers – bulls castrated as calves – grow the longest horns. Entire bulls and cows do not develop the same length. It was believed among Mexican cattle keepers that a cow needed horns to thrive because it needed un lugar para sangrar – a place to bleed. Texans picked up an echo of this when they thought that if an animal was not doing well it was suffering from ‘hollow horn’. To remedy this they would either bore a small hole in each horn, or saw them off short, with much loss of blood. From this arose the saying, when referring to a person who seemed particularly listless or dopey, that he needed ‘boring for the holler horn’.
Horns grow until an animal is 10 to 15 years old. Straight at first, and then with twists or wrinkles as it reaches maturity. ‘Mossy-horn’ came to describe older, rougher cattle with lots of wrinkles on their horns, as well as any veteran cowman with age and experience, in contrast with a greenhorn, a beginner. It was also used to refer to horns that were twisted about with low-hanging Spanish moss from bushes and trees.
Practically all the cattle for sale at West had wide horns that grew out and up, some with black points, others with uniform colour the full length. But hardly any of them had horns that were set for hooking or goring. They had what Dobie calls an ‘exhibition spread’ – more for show than utility. Nothing can now compare with the massed horns that 3,000 Longhorns presented. As the herd grazed in tall buffalo grass, their horns could appear disembodied, weaving and bobbing in the air, disconnected from anything.
On the long trails, cattle that had been reared on and adapted to dry prairies and wide plains had to swim across every body of water that crossed their way. There are few rivers in Europe that compare with the mighty watercourses in America. The old trail bosses describe crossing rivers in flood: apart from the glistening sea of horns, the cattle would disappear beneath the swirling brown water, the herd undulating and surging in a long wavering S as they fought the current, swimming for their lives to the opposite bank. This was ‘something that not the Colorado, the San Gabriel, the Brazos, the Trinity, the Canadian, the Arkansas, the Platte or the Yellowstone ever surpassed in wonder’.
Horns were not just for decoration or defence. They were supremely useful to pioneering people for myriad uses: hand-cut buttons, cups and spoons, pegs and racks, pieces of furniture such as hat-stands and tables. The cattle kings of the 1880s and 90s had a passion for chairs made of horns. Horned skulls were used as signposts. In some desert places water was carried in horns. A long blowing horn hung at a crossing on the riverbank to summon the ferryman. On plantations it called field hands to dinner.
In Far Away and Long Ago, W. H. Hudson describes fences seven, eight and nine feet high built of hundreds and thousands of horned skulls enclosing fine houses in Buenos Aires. Some of the older walls were festooned with creeper, wild flowers and green grass growing from the cavities in the bones; they ‘had a strangely picturesque but somewhat uncanny appearance’. During the mission days in California, just as householders used to cap their walls with shards of broken glass to deter intruders before they were made liable for the welfare of burglars, so people used horned cattle skulls to top the adobe walls of their corrals to make a palisade against horse thieves.
From the conquistadores to the gold hunters of California, prospectors used a great spoon made from the horn of a cow split lengthways, softened by heating and fashioned into a kind of scoop, rather like the shape of a wide Indian canoe. As the deposit of crushed stone or gravel was swirled round in water, the lighter material came to the edge and could be washed away, leaving the flakes of gold in the hollow.
Sets of horns adorned bars, saloons, hotels, public buildings and houses all over Texas. Most banks had at least one bovine head on the wall of their lobby, in recognition of their main source of revenue. Businesses with even a tenuous connection with cattle or ranching used the emblem of a head of horns on their writing paper and advertising. It was the favourite design on the handle of pistols, engraved in bone or horn. Leddy’s bespoke boot makers in Fort Worth, and nearly every other shop and bar for miles around, has a pair of cow horns adorning the wall. The head and horns symbolizes strength, power, the freedom of the land in the Big Country, and is also a memorial to the formidable animal that thrived in a hostile land and within a few short decades was sacrificed for the fortunes of the State of Texas.
To some extent, terroir affects the length of horn, but it seems that inheritance has the decisive influence. When J. Frank Dobie and Charles Goodnight were engaged in collecting the remnant of the Longhorns for preservation in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in 1927, Goodnight believed that under such conditions their horns would never grow to the impressive spread of the original range cattle. He thought they would become shorter and thicker and their bodies more compact, because ‘no power on earth will defeat nature’. By 1940, Goodnight’s prophecy seemed correct, because there were few spreads wider than four feet. He associated ‘mighty horns, like the hoarse howl of the lobo, the wide wheeling of the eagle, and the great silence on the grass, to be a natural part of the freedom, the wildness and the self-sufficiency of life belonging to the unfenced world … the crown of the open range’.
But judging by the horns on the cattle offered for sale in the ring at West Auction Barn, time and breeding have proved him wrong.
The Texas Longhorn Blowout Sale was ‘hosted’ by two breeders who provided most of the cattle for sale: Mike MacLeod of Split Rock Cedar Ranch and Dr Zech Dameron of Clear Creek Pecan Plantation.
About a hundred buyers assembled on the raked seats above the auction ring, which was a semicircle, with the rostrum on the flat side. Russell Fairchild’s fruity Texan drawl introduced the key people: Keith Presley, auctioneer; the ringmen; and the ‘pretty good-looking old girl here behind me’ who owned the mart. Russell’s father was in the crowd, and he had him stand up and introduce himself. Then he got Mike MacLeod onto the rostrum to lead the prayers.
Mike was remarkably good at extemporizing on the theme that we should thank God for creating the cattle we were about to see passing through the ring. The prayers covered everything we had to be grateful for and thanked God for his generosity. Then he broadened out his theme. ‘Last year, as you all know, I lost my dear wife.’ He paused, and a general murmuring of regret for his loss came from the crowd. ‘But the Lord moves in mysterious ways! Praise the Lord! So here’s mah new wife, Teresa. She’s been a blessin’ from the Lord!’ A few ‘Amens’ and a general murmuring of appreciation for the Lord’s goodness came from the crowd. Mike had Teresa stand up and beam round the auditorium at the buyers, acknowledging the clapping and generally basking in the limelight.
Then Mr Presley started selling. He rapped his gavel on the rostrum to get attention and began each lot with ‘Right, here’s the deal!’ singing his auctioneer’s patter, rolling his Rs, keeping going until he had to breathe. The first lot was a ‘bred’ (in-calf) heifer from the same Mike MacLeod. (She had been ‘exposed’ to his bull, Valentino – maybe a clue to old Mike’s romantic nature that had attracted Teresa.) Presley was very good at keeping up the excitement, with the help of his characteristic Texan enthusiasm – and the ringmen. We don’t have ringmen in Britain, or at least not specifically employed as such. Now and again auctioneers will take turns to sell, with the one not selling watching for bids and pointing out anyone the
auctioneer might have missed. But the American system employs qualified auctioneers who stand on either side of the ring, scanning the crowd for bidders. When somebody bids or appears to bid, they point at them and shout, ‘Hup!’ or ‘Yep!’ with great gusto, whipping up excitement. The shout of the ringmen is the Texas yell. It was born 150 years ago, when cowboys were overcome by the thrill of roping cattle at night or riding down a maverick. It’s a combination of the Comanche war whoop and the wild shout of the Johnny Rebs as they charged the Billy Yankee lines during the Civil War – which is not forgotten down here.
All the important men wear white cowboy hats, white shirts, jeans and fancy tooled boots. Their women wear shorts or short skirts with cowgirl boots and are the thinnest, most attractive I’ve yet seen in this land of obesity. Their menfolk must have a lot of money, because the richer you are in America, the thinner you can afford to be.
‘What kind of mama is she?’ shouts one potential bidder as the next cow twists its neck to negotiate its vast horns through the gate into the ring. The cow seems to know instinctively where the tips of her horns are and avoids getting them jammed in the metalwork of the pens. These horns are not meant to be worn by cattle that live inside or in feedlots.
‘She ain’t mean! She’s a lady,’ declares the auctioneer, giving away nothing with his ambiguous answer.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 27