by Mari Sandoz
"It is the best way to get good bulls—the winners of the fights, before they can run fast again," another said a little sourly. But they did not look sour. They sat their horses admiring the black.
CHAPTER II
NOBLE ANCESTRY
THE men who captured the full-grown fighting black bull from the wild herds of Texas couldn't have known how much their catch resembled the ancient cattle of Europe and Asia, and how long the close tie between man and his kind had existed. Fossil remains of cattle from the middle Pliocene, perhaps three to four million years ago, were first found along northwestern India. This great beast, one of whose species was a direct ancestor of the ox, apparently lived in the forest but grazed in the open glades, something like the early Texas cattle along the Trinity, the San Antonio, and the Brazos—hidden in the timber and the brush by day, but feeding outside at night. Pliocene cattle, however, seemed to browse on twigs and shoots instead of grass. The female was hornless but the bull carried a horn spread between six and seven feet. In Europe the mid-Pliocene ox, slenderer of limb than the Asiatic, has been found in central Italy and southern France.
By the early Pleistocene several bovine types were living in south Asia. At that time, around a million years ago, Europe had three recognizable forms of the ox. The urus stood six feet at the shoulder and roamed the forests the same time that early man lived there. But the urus, not very hardy for all his size, retreated farther south before the great encroaching ice fields than the horse or the sheep of his time, or early Paleolithic man, the early toolmaker. When this first glaciation withdrew, nearly half a million years ago, the great African-Asiatic animals returned to Europe— among them the elephant, rhino, and hippopotamus as well as the urus and a primitive Asiatic bison. Of these the urus, the Bos primigenius, was perhaps one of the easier victims to man's crude weapons.
Around one hundred thousand years later, say almost four hundred thousand years ago, the second glaciation swept down over Europe, and with more severity, too, but this time the cattle were apparently heavily haired, something like the Scottish Highland stock of today. At least the cattle stayed, and when forage failed they were surely easy hunting. With the tendency toward domestication that the cow shared with the horse and the dog, occasional ones perhaps became approachable very early.
Twenty-five thousand years later the weather warmed, meadows appeared, and forests sprang up again. A fighting breed of cattle, one that could stand off the lion of southern Europe, spread rapidly. The next invasion of ice, which lasted another twenty-five thousand years, was less severe, but the cattle had the hairy mammoth and the woolly rhino to compete with for the shrinking forage. They did this so efficiently that when the icecap once more crept back northward, cattle and bison became the dominant great beasts of Europe, with man and his growing use of weapons their greatest enemy. The next hundred thousand years were the era of early man and his increasing ascendancy over the animals. This period ended the middle Paleolithic, reaching from the Heidelberg man through the Neanderthalers. At their caves in the cliffs, these Neanderthal men had watched the game in the valley below, with perhaps the first domestic animal, the tamed wolf or dog beside them. Perhaps the men planned traps for the wild cattle as they did for the wild horse, with surrounds and occasional stampedes over the cliffs, probably using fire—methods improved by their successors, the Cro-Magnons, and followed by man with limited weapons everywhere, including the Indians of Texas when the Spaniards came with iron and powder. Apparently early man cooked his beef in hot water fifty thousand years ago, and even earlier than that he had learned to crack the bones for the marrow. Like any other carnivorous creature in nature, the Cro-Magnon ate the visceral organs and fat of his newly killed cow first as the American Indian did of the buffalo or the wolf of a Texas calf.
The urus, the wild ox of the Cro-Magnon, was an imposing animal, long in the leg, swift and powerful, superior in stature, speed, and strength to his neighbor, the bison, and with much greater horn spread. One horn of a Bos primigenius, converted into a drinking goblet measuring six and a half feet in length, was reported in Alsace-Lorraine until around 1800, the historic drinking horn of the Strasbourg Ox. While this was from a much later specimen than any the Cro-Magnons saw, many skeletons of bulls of their time measuring six feet or more at the shoulder have been unearthed—truly fitting creatures to dominate the ritualistic life of Cro-Magnon man.
Paleolithic man not only lived off these cattle but by the latter period, perhaps twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago, he was paying them his finest tribute in magnificent paintings. There are around thirty-five known caves in Spain, over forty in France with walls painted by Old Stone Age man, giving cattle a prominent place in his magico-religious cults. Perhaps the finest of such paintings and, judging by their excellence, certainly not the first, are those in Lascaux Cave in southern France. Here, in limestone hollowed out by water, is the flowering of the second of the two capital events* of man's history—his discovery and proficiency in art in a great and apparently sudden outburst, explosion. It is interesting that much of this flowering is concerned with cattle. The main chamber of the Lascaux Cave is called Hall of Bulls because of their domination of the high-ceilinged space that would hold 100 people easily. At the entrance a unicorn initiates the monumental animal dance of bulls, horses, and deer around the walls, the largest portrayals those of the cattle, the horses smaller, the deer comparatively very small. The bulls vary in size from around ten feet tall above the knee to over eighteen feet in length. Many of the cattle, both bulls and cows, have the forward-turned horns as some of the early Texas stock apparently had, the color varying— black, small-spotted or brockled, brown or almost Hereford red, some with darker lower legs, some with the whole face or the lower part dark. One brockle-faced bull has a lowish hump, like many of the blacks of Texas had.
In the smaller chambers and galleries that lie beyond the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux there are more pictures of horses than of cattle, but often the latter dominate by size or position. There is a huge cow leaping over other animals; one, red with a black head, is nine and a quarter feet long. Other large cows are blackish, brown, or red. Of the red cows, great and small, some have delicate heads and fancifully curved horns, much like those found in some early photographs of Texas cattle around twenty thousand years later, cattle that descended from the Spanish stock that the friars brought.
Lascaux Cave must have served Old Stone Age man much as Chartres Cathedral, for instance, served man of the Middle Ages. Here where he pictured the mysteries as he tried to understand and engage them, through creatures upon whose magical favor he existed, the main chamber is not one dominated by the horse or even the great rhino, but by cattle—the Hall of the Bulls.
Cattle—bulls, cows, or calves—run through much of ancient mythology and religion but it was in Egypt that the cult of cattle apparently reached its highest development. Towering above all the other Egyptian gods was Osiris, sometimes said to have been born of a cow. The sacred bull Apis was regarded as the image of the soul of Osiris, with a second bull-god figure, Mnevis, supposed to contain the actual soul of the highest god, with many lesser cattle figures running through Egyptian mythology. Such deification of the bovine was the natural, almost the inevitable result in any society that placed cattle at the top of its wealth symbols, locally or nationally, for any considerable time.
From prehistoric days Egypt concentrated on the breeding of two animals, the greyhound and a polled, a hornless cattle. In the rock tombs of Deir, dating before 2500 b.c., are many pictures showing the handling of cattle. The tomb of Huy, who was in charge of Tutankhamen's royal herds, portrays his men branding King Tut's cattle, while the tomb of Auta, of the Fifth Dynasty, before 2625 b.c., shows a bull branded 113 on the left rump.
Around 1000 b.c. the priesthood that ruled Egypt and the temples owned all the towns, vineyards, orchards, the shipping facilities, and half a million cattle, reminding one of the beginnings made by the missions of
Texas and Father Kino's cattle empire in the southwest and California. The Egyptian god Amon alone owned more than 400,000 cattle. The Old Testament, by its repeated use of cattle in the symbolism, illustrates the importance of the cow in Jewish history and the deep identification with her kind, by such stories as the casting of the golden idol when Moses was late coming home from Sinai. The idol might have been the king of beasts, or the ruler of the skies, but instead, out of a deep mystical memory of the people, it was a calf, the golden calf. "And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings—"
And so it was almost into the twentieth century, even in America, even the burnt offerings.
In India, where the cow made her first known appearance, she is still in a measure a sacred creature on the streets and the roadways. In Sanskrit the word for soldier meant "one who fights about cows." Curiously, most of the fighting, and the bloodshed, in Texas and farther north on the prairies of the Great Plains was over the cow.
Cattle have a much shorter history of domestication by man than as figures in his religious rites and activities. There seems no evidence of any bovine domestication in Europe at the time of the great Lascaux paintings. The earliest remains of a domestic cow have been found between the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the arid plains of Persia and Arabia. Here the ox became the real foundation of agriculture, where the fertile, watered earth of the ancient world drew vigorous pastoral tribes to push in from mountain and desert to build the historic cultures of such peoples as the Sumerians; the Babylonians, apparently originators of the zodiac with its sign of Taurus, the bull; the Assyrians; Chaldeans; Medes and Persians. Apparently it was the mountain and desert men who domesticated cattle along with the other far-walkers: donkeys, sheep, goats, camels, and horses; the farmers who tamed the less wandering creatures: pigs, chickens, geese, and so on.
About eight thousand to ten thousand years ago migrations of New Stone Age man pressing into Europe from western Asia brought domestic cattle among their other animals. Some time after 6000 b.c. the lake dwellers of Switzerland had two kinds of domestic ox, the urus and a Celtic shorthorn. In northern Iran, where these immigrants probably originated, the cattle remains found seem to be of Celtic shorthorns, but there is some belief that the cattle brought west by the people who became lake dwellers may have had zebu blood from India and were therefore distant relatives of the modern Santa Gertrudis, the Brangus, and similar cattle developed in the twentieth century in America by crosses with Brahma blood.
Many students of prehistory consider planned food production man's first great economic revolution. While Old Stone Age man ate the flesh of the urus, his successor, New Stone Age man, counted his wealth in cows. Further, he discovered that the tractable creature, the ox, could be harnessed to help roll stones too large to drag and possibly from that transferred the rolling principle to relays of load-bearing logs and finally some genius, perhaps too lazy to keep transferring the logs on up ahead, cut off pieces and with heated rocks burned holes through the middle for an axle and he had the wheel. No civilization that lacked the patient bovine creature, not even the highly developed Mayan cities or the Andean cultures, developed the wheel to move burdens. Wheeled toys have been reported from pre-Columbian strata in Mexico and some Mayan archaeologists think some of the pottery was made on the wheel, but understanding its principle came to very little with no strong tractable creature to pull the wheel.
As man tamed the cow and the horse he learned to control breeding, a science well developed for the horse at least four thousand years ago in the Euphrates Valley if not elsewhere. Breeding for improved stock sprang up everywhere from eastern Asia to England and Spain. By 630 b.c. Andalusian cattle were a hardy lot, some used as work oxen but mostly bred for beef. They were descended quite directly from Bos primigenius, substantially horned, great in stature and strength, and well adapted to the hot, dry summers. It was this blood that fitted so well into Spanish America. The last known urus, a cow, died in 1627, long after the Spanish cattle had carried a good measure of the blood across the soil of Texas.
The first cattle brought to the western world were not from Spain. In 982, over five hundred years before Columbus landed his Andalusian bull and some heifers at Hispaniola, Erik the Red put a nondescript assortment of northern domestic animals, including cattle, ashore on Greenland. In 1004 the real colonizer of the mainland, Karlsefni, brought the first cattle to Nova Scotia. When the Norsemen moved farther south they took the cattle along and remained, some stories say, until after Columbus landed in the West Indies. When a sickness struck the people all died, and their cattle, although winter-hardened Viking stock, disappeared, as did the English cattle left by the starved-out colonists of Virginia later. Cattle were found alive in 1598 on barren Sable Island off the southern tip of Nova Scotia but Spanish cattle, with the gaunt old wrecks of Spanish ships on the shore. These southern cattle, certainly unaccustomed to the rigorous winters of the region, were still there in 1633, increased to 800 head. They were the same stock, apparently, as the cows of Coronado and the mission herds that produced the wild cattle of Texas from which the Longhorn was developing—the only bovine brought to America that could live without man, either at Sable Island or on the brushy, timbered bottoms of the Trinity.
Not until the Anglos, the English speakers from the United States began to penetrate the Texas region did the cow have much value beyond the local use of meat, leather, and tallow, and for sport. It is true that from 1763 to 1800, while Louisiana was once more Spanish, herds as high as 2,000 head were driven from the old mission ranges on the San Antonio River to stock Louisiana territory. The government claimed all unbranded herds and issued permits to kill or drive away cattle at four bits, four Spanish reals, a head. This was considered a license for early-day cattle rustling by some and brought much wrangling between the government and the citizens of San Antonio, who claimed many of the orejanos, the unmarked ones.
These problems, like many others of Texas history, were solved by events far away. Spain turned Louisiana back to France under Napoleon. Jefferson, the man to see an opportunity and to grasp it, consummated the Louisiana Purchase December, 1803, and put the aggressive Anglo-Americans hard up against the Texas border. They didn't remain on their side of the line long, had, in fact, been slipping into Texas for some time, seeking adventure, escape from the sheriff, or were lured by the hope of fast wealth, particu- larly in cattle. As early as 1800 Philip Nolan had led a party into Texas, ostensibly for mustangs. Although Spanish soldiers overtook and killed him, nobody was deterred. Early in 1807 Zebulon M. Pike was arrested while seeking the headwaters of the Red River and dragged off to prison in New Mexico. The publicity of this reminded more Anglos, and many who didn't need reminding, of the region below the Red, and the accounts of the rich bottom lands with vast herds of wild cattle to stock them, free for the taking. There were frequent civilian invasions from the eastern border. In 1812-13 one expedition got far enough to capture the town of San Antonio and was later slaughtered. Two more, in 1819-20, proclaimed the independence of Texas, but failed, too. Then in 1821 Mexico won independence from Spain and Texas became a part of the new republic.
Now a fever for Texas swept the United States, with rushes of homeseekers setting out from Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and particularly from the Gulf states. Some of the newcomers brought their own seed cattle, others bought a start in Texas or below the Rio Grande. If there were energetic young men in the family, as was usual, they could catch a good start for a ranch from the wild herds out beyond the settlements. It was work, but the cattle were free and acclimated, important because often the outside stock seemed to sicken and die in the easy climate. The cattle that lived matured and multiplied very rapidly, almost doubling their number in two years. Heifers often calved in eighteen months, and stock could be driven overland to New Orleans cheaply, or shipped there from the coast, or to the West Indies and Cuba.
Most alert, perhaps, of all the adventurers com
ing in were the Connecticut Yankee stock, such as the Austins. Moses Austin, a St. Louis banker who lost his fortune in the panic of 1819, had secured permission from the Spanish Government in 1820 to settle 300 families in Texas. He died, but his son Stephen established the colony called Austin in 1821, with 5,600 settlers. By 1828 the population was 20,000, with stock raising, based on the Spanish cattle, the principal activity, in spite of the raiding Indians and the thieving Mexican soldiery, as hated by the Mexican revolutionaries running ranches in Texas as by the Americans. The troops requisitioned cattle and mules without payment and then failed to protect the herds against the Indians. There was trouble, too, about brands and strays and other minor matters with the gringos, the greenhorns, as the Mexicans called the Anglos. Mexico, hoping to colonize the state rapidly, had offered land grants to farmers and ten times as much acreage to the cattle grower. In 1826 a man who had his colonizing contract declared void organized a little rebellion. It failed, but it made the Mexicans head-shy about the gringos and in 1830 immigration from the United States was outlawed. This couldn't be enforced, not with so much of the border still wilderness, but it helped to keep the settlements boiling and led to the massacre of the Americans at the Alamo, which was the old Mission San Antonio de Valero, established in 1718. Then came the victory at San Jacinto, a battle won by a group of early Anglo settlers who were to leave their mark on Texas, some of their names to be known over the cattle country as far as the Yellowstone and beyond. Like the list of Mayflower immigrants, the roster of those at San Jacinto grew and grew.
By the time the Texans became Texians, as the citizens of the new Republic of Texas liked to be called, the longhorned cattle of the region were rapidly being recognized as Longhorns, a fixed breed. The Longhorn, in addition to his predominantly Spanish blood, carried a mixture of strains brought in by the Anglo settlers: some Missouri stock, noted as work oxen; a little of the nondescript Arkansawers, and some blood from the swamp runners of Louisiana —a bit of French stock crossed on the local Spanish, smaller and spike-horned, perhaps from the region of the transplanted Acadians. One Texan who had some knowledge of the swamp cattle on the Louisiana side, knowledge earned by popping the brush to catch the wild ones, was James Bowie, who achieved fame for his knife, his search for the lost Bowie mine, and his death at the Alamo.