Cattlemen
Page 5
The degree of this outside blood in the Texas stock varied, as did the Texas blood itself by locality, partly due to different origins and partly perhaps to a few isolated breeding areas.
The early Spanish explorers hadn't described their cattle very carefully. Onate, in 1595, agreed to take 1,000 head of "cattle," ganado mayor, and 100 head of "black cattle," ganado prieto, the stock of the fighting bulls, into New Mexico. Much of the seed brought to Texas, California, and the Southwest after Onate seems to have been blacks, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries breeding black cattle was much encouraged in Mexico. In early 1800 "black cattle" was almost a generic term, like "white faces." Some of these were solid in color but the more characteristic were perhaps those called linebacks, black with a shading or an actual stripe of white, dun, or brown from nape to tail, sometimes with the cross at the shoulders, the lobo stripe, like that of the zebra dun mustang. Sometimes these line-backs were lighter or spotted toward the belly. Occasionally there were reds, browns, and blues. Often the blacks and the variations among them had sunburned faces, brownish, and lighter around the eyes and muzzle—mealy-nosed, as the Texans called it—like the Moorish stock still seen in the bull rings, with horns set close together at the root and curved forward to kill, not too different from the horns of some of the cattle pictured in the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux. The Texas stock was quick, restless, keen of eye and nose. A wounded bull might hunt an enemy down by scent, trailing him. The early stock had long horns compared to the New England and Missouri cattle brought in, but probably never equaled the horns of those grown later in Texas.
These "black cattle" were usually what was meant by the Spanish; the undifferentiated "cattle" of Onate were called Mexican. The Mexicans were broader, heavier-horned, and many-colored.
"They used to come all shapes an' colors," an old trail driver of the sixties liked to say. "Yeh, all colors, 'ceptin' Hereford red, or green—" Then he would work his tobacco from one jaw to the other, his wind-leaned, skeptical old mouth twisting as he did it. With his cud settled, he always added, "—Come to think on it, I seen one right nigh to green once. One a them grulla blues, with the hair yellow along in the spring, an' slippin'—"
The crossing of these many-colored Mexicans and the black Spanish with the small infusion of immigrant stock that the Anglo-Americans brought produced the Longhorn, heavier and rangier, the horns lengthening in a sort of throwback to the urus, often snaking out eight, nine feet from tip to tip. Perhaps this horn growth and the longer legs resulted from the same circumstance that stretched out the bones of the men who grew up over much of Texas, and over most of the later cattle country, too—the sharply tilted Plains, which were leached of their iodine by the swift runoff water.
When the American colonists began to spread over Texas, they found wild cattle scattered from the Rio Grande to the Red River along Indian Territory, and from the Louisiana line to the uppermost breaks of the Brazos on the west. This wild stock gathered in small bunches, staying in the cover of the oak, mesquite, or other scrub timber during the day, and came out on the prairie only toward dusk, grazing against the wind to catch the first scent of danger. A rider could go fifty or sixty miles a day across the region and seldom see one head except perhaps some careless young stock badly hidden. The Longhorns were watchful as wild turkeys, keen-nosed as deer, and made wary of any rider from far off by the first little hunting.
Back in the mid 1830's the San Marcos River region was found stocked with wild cattle brought in by Partilleas, who had established his ranch there thirty years before and was driven out by the Comanches. In 1851, after Texas joined the Union, Captain Ware, pushing through westward with a herd, decided to winter on the San Marcos, near the old ranch. He lost many cattle, tolled off into the brush by the wild stock—smaller than common, all brown, and wilder than any deer.
By this time the Longhorn was established as a true pioneer, a fitting partner for the pioneering men who were edging out upon the Great Plains. The Longhorn cow, the leader of her bunch as the buffalo cow was in her herd or the mare among the mustangs, was tough as rawhide and as land-fixed and dug-in as any hoe man, and even harder to drive off her accustomed range. But she could move fast enough if the rains failed and the creeks and water holes dried up. Sticking her wet nose into the wind, she followed it to other holes or other creeks, and when they were gone, too, she pursued the smell of moisture under the dry stream beds up to the canyon springs or down to surfacing water. If necessary she could cross dry tablelands to other watersheds, even those she had never seen before, even if they required two, three days of hard, dry travel.
The Longhorn cow was, next to the buffalo out on the open plains, the first to know when snows and blizzards, the blue northers, were due. Smelling a storm, she fed hard and then headed for the breaks and thickets and browsed on dead leaves on the winter brush until the sun cleared off the wind-blown ridges. For defense she depended on her horns and hoofs, and the sharpness of her feral senses and instincts, once more as acute as when she was truly wild blood. She fattened when there was grass, gaunted down when the pasture was gone. She fought off the screwworm fly and healed her bruises, rubbed her shedding hair off on rock and bank, on stubby oak and mesquite, until her coat gleamed like silk. She shed her ticks, escaped the heel flies the best she could, and rubbed their ripening warbles from her back when she failed. She adjusted her increase to what the range would carry, bore her calf in sheltered seclusion, and taught him to lie as still as the shadows which his mottled hide often imitated—so still that the sharp-eyed predator detected no movement, not even the blink of an eyelid. She fought for her calf with coyote, wolf, cougar, and man. She organized relays of calf watchers so they were protected during the far march of the cows to water. Long before the cattlemen discovered it she knew that the steer was often better at calf watching, and more inclined to it, than any cow. She bore calves for many, many years, weaned each in time to make room for the next. When the day for dying finally came she took herself off into some remote spot and died in decent privacy.
She was a character, in a region of characters, deserving the idolatry that man had bestowed upon her so long. She was the creature to whom many men had dedicated their lives and to whom there would be many, many more dedications.
* * *
* The first was toolmaking.
CHAPTER III
THE COW WALKS AGAIN
THE ancestors of the Longhorn had walked westward out of Asia, across Europe, and up the American continent to Texas. Now, as wild cattle they were once more bawling their protest before the push and angry shout of man, but this time was different. This time they were not going to seek out a new home with man, or to feed the hungry on a long march. This time the herds were to be traded for gold, for money in the saddlebags or, if the trail wasn't through too heavy timber and swamp miles, perhaps hidden in the false bottom of an oxcart piled high with trail gear to deceive the alert thieves in the land that had no law beyond that of powder and ball and the cold knife between the ribs.
In the past it had usually been breeding stock, largely she stuff, with some selected bulls, that man had taken with him. Even the meat herds were mostly sturdy cows, the bulls less tractable and trail-worthy, the steer, with the Spaniard's aversion to the cutting knife too rare to count.
But the herds that the American trail drivers gathered were usually steers and yearling or two-year-old bulls because they sold better, the steers often five, six years old, with a long, steady trail stride. Some were from the swamp-lands, where almost every mouthful of the rank grass was pulled from watery roots; others, wilder, came from the brushy bottoms and had to be cut from their protection at dawn while out grazing. Sometimes they could be driven off with some tamer decoys but often they had to be roped and thrown, perhaps chased into the thorny thickets, tearing both man and horse. When the steer went down, the brush popper had to be off and, jerking the short hogtie rope, the piggin' string, from around his waist, ti
e the steer down until he was too stiff to run and could be gathered into the little herd that was the morning's catch.
Some of the captives were driven to the Gulf ports and forced into boats for the Louisiana cities. Even some good steamships between Galveston and New Orleans and Mobile carried cattle when there was no better cargo, crowding as many as possible between decks, the entire ship scrubbed afterward. The company generally bought the stock and sold them at the Louisiana ports because the usual freight rates were too high for profit and the rate level must not be disturbed. Cuba could use beef, too, and now and then some reached there, but it had to be cheap, very little above the shipping charges.
The cheapest transportation was overland, on the rangy steer's own tough shanks. Often these early drives had no fixed destination, the drivers realizing they might have to change their direction a dozen times through pathless forests and marshes and over great swollen rivers. They traveled light, every man carrying his own grub outfit, with such tin utensils as he thought he needed to cook his meat over a fire perhaps built of half-dried cow chips. Some carried little except coffee beans to be pounded in a little skin pouch with a rock. That and their tobacco, either eating or dipping—gumming tobacco as some called their snuff. Always they carried guns, very necessary against any Longhorn that showed fight as well as against thieves, predators, and rattlesnakes, which were plentiful and very big in the watery regions.
The first non-Spanish drovers to New Orleans were three, four French ranchers over east in the Trinity River country, beyond contact with the original colonists. Some of the early herds from the Anglos in Texas did reach New Orleans before the Mexican revolution, and the number increased steadily after that as the early beef bonanza drew more and more immigrants to Texas, until that city was the Texian's best market. Many herds were driven to Shreveport or Vidalia and other river ports, and flatboated down from there. Unhappily, steers that sold for $10 in north Texas near the Red River loading points brought $45 in New Orleans. Many drove straight through, particularly from the southern ranges, the main route hitting the Trinity River at Liberty then east across the Sabine and on to the Mississippi, with few bridges and many streams to be forded, ferried, or swum. "Stands" a day's drive apart were established on the main-traveled routes, offering meals and pens for the night. Even so the powerful Texas stock sometimes broke out in a wild stampede on both the southern and the northern routes. One herd surged over the pen fence at a plantation near Shreveport, tromped the carriage house and all the fine vehicles into the ground, and ran over the slave quarters, killing a whole Negro family. The steers rounded up alive after the run didn't come near paying for the damages.
These herds for the southern markets, often only a few hundred head, were usually caught from the brush—mostly wild, stubborn bulls instead of the more desirable steers, both for meat and for trailing. A quicker way to get stock that was more tractable although not necessarily with a higher percentage of steers, was to raid the herds of the Mexican ranchers. The raiders were mostly wild, bold-spirited recruits from the States, many of them GTT's, Gone to Texas, suggesting a certain urgency in the departure. Others were from the American settlers who had fought in the Texas army for freedom. Nearly all were young and became known as "cowboys"—a term that was soon a fighting word if spoken without a smile. These raiders thought no more of killing a Mexican than of shooting an Indian down or of cutting a rattlesnake to pieces with a doubled rawhide rope. They gathered up herds along the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers, often from Mexicans who had fought beside them on the Texas side, but all Mexicans were the same to them now.
The great hunting ground of these cowboys lay between the Nueces and the Rio Grande and often across into Mexico, their raids generally planned for moonlit nights. Twelve, fifteen cowboys swept off herds varying from 200 to 600 head, keeping them on a steady run that they could hold for twenty, twenty-four hours, dropping any stock that didn't keep up. After that they slowed to a trot or even a walk, giving the cattle and the horses and riders a little respite while they waited for the men who had stayed behind to discourage or to ambush pursuit. This was before the brush, particularly the mesquite, had moved in over the region, spread by the undigested seeds in the cattle droppings. In the open country, with travel easier and grass plentiful, the worn herd could be managed like the domestic cattle many of them were, driven along slowly enough for grazing and watering—actually letting them put on meat. Some of these herds reached the New Orleans market but the majority went to stock the coastal ranches. Goliad, of early mission stock tradition, became a kind of trading center. Here eventually Mexicans counterraided, and for many years there was no peace or security on this Bloody Border.
The only precaution in these raiding times that the Anglo rancher could take was to keep his cattle wild—so chased, whooped, and dogged that they scattered at the sight of any rider, Mexican or Indian. In addition the Texians, in the wild, open region without law, felt they must work up a reputation for relentless pursuit. In 1839 Andrew So-well and other rangers under Paint Caldwell chased raiding Mexicans out on Prickly Pear Prairie, north of the Nueces River. Here the nopal, the prickly-pear cactus, had grown up higher than a rider's head in great spiny gray-green tangles and piles, standing, sprawling over the dead growths, many of the great cactus hands with red and purple knots of fruit that looked like the swollen finger joints left after frost amputation. The ground, when visible at all, was hot as a gray stovelid just before it turns red, mottled gray so the coils of the great rattlesnakes were almost invisible.
The horses of the pursuing rangers gave out and they had to turn back, leading their worn animals, picking their booted way very carefully. From the time they entered the burning cactus prairie until they got back out, they were never beyond the sound of the whirring rattlesnakes. Some of the Mexicans captured later said that several of their band were bitten while fleeing across the prairie, the victims buried the best they could manage.
Another time out on this great cactus tangle Sowell noticed a herd of mustangs run from a little clump of brush and trees. Looking for water, he rode over that way. As he approached, his horse, although accustomed to the region and its inhabitants, plunged and reared back from a terrible stench and the blood-freezing whirr of great rattles. A snake about nine feet long and as thick as the thigh of a man had been run over by the mustangs. Back broken and infuriated at his immobility, the rattler was striking out with the great wedge of head, armor-scaled like some dragon, the crooked white fangs long as the worst thorns of the monte. And all around him was the sickening stink that every creature of the brush country knew so well.
The Mexican war of 1846 had disturbed the growing movement of beef on the hoof; its end, with Texas in the Union, accelerated it. Substantial northern outlets for Texas cattle were known as early as 1842, when a herd of 1,500 head seems to have reached Missouri. Four years later Edward Piper of Ohio drove 1,000 head up from Texas to be fattened there, the first of what was to become a steadily increasing stream of range cattle to the cornlands, enough to double and redouble the corn acreages in many regions. Cattle from two 1853 drives were fed in Illinois, one from Indian Territory, the other trailed home from Texas by Tom Ponting. Part of both herds seem to have reached New York City alive. These Longhorns, really moderately horned, judging by the pictures in the magazines, running loose on the street caused great excitement, and, with another depression settling over the East, a new crop of emigrants to Texas, with many GTT's among them.
Illinois soon became an active feeding center for Texas and Indian Territory cattle, with Independence, Westport, and Kansas City the largest markets. During 1853-55, 100,000 southwestern beef cattle reached Kansas City, an estimated two thirds of these from Texas. Apparently Texans did not let their southern sympathies interfere with business. When a drove of 2,000 cattle went through Dallas for the north, to feed "our abolition neighbors," the Dallas Herald said, "we hope that this southern diet will agree with them," overlookin
g the northern origins of many of the ranchers.
St. Louis became the great market, and many Midwestern cattle were fattened and killed there, the meat shipped down the river to New Orleans. Cattle from the Cherokee Nation also reached the city. An attempt to feed some Longhorns with corn at the market was a failure; they ran away from it. In 1854 the St. Louis Intelligencer said, "Texas cattle are about the nearest to 'wild animals' of any now driven to market. We have seen some buffaloes that were more civilized."
But for some years there was an urgent demand for beef in expanding California, particularly after the gold strike. Ironically, in 1833 California had 424,000 head of cattle. The next year the missions were secularized and the padres started a massive slaughter of their herds for the hides and tallow. Contractors worked on a fifty-fifty basis and often only the hides were saved.
In addition to the missions there were several hundred rancheros in California at the time, their cattle of no more value than those of the missions. It was an era of aristocratic existence: the dons with their elegant flat hats, slashed, gilt-laced trousers, embroidered jackets, red sashes, and serapes; the women in their silken gowns and delicate shoes of satin or kid, the married wearing the high combs, and out-of-doors, the mantilla. Mission-trained Indians did the work, prepared all the tallow and hides for the Boston ships waiting in the harbors, ships that had brought luxuries and fineries all the way around South America. One of the youths carrying the dried hides into the surf to the conveying boats was Richard Dana, working out the time he described in his Two Years Before the Mast.