Last time I told about the steer I didn’t buy. You know, the twelve year old Longhorn steer that I expected to pick up for a few hundred dollars only to see the auctioneer pound his gravel at twelve thousand. I finished that article (I can’t help it, I spent too many years writing for a magazine, I just can’t get myself to use the B word) by saying that either those Longhorn folks knew something I didn’t, or they were crazy as hell.
Well, they did know something I didn’t. They knew the Texas Longhorn, the animal that built the Western United States. You think that’s an exaggeration? Not so. After the Civil War millions of Texas Longhorns roamed the prairies and forests of Texas, most the offspring of cattle that had been abandoned by ranchers and farmers who went off to war. These were the survivors and that’s a key word. They are the bovine example of survival of the fittest. They learned to survive drought, insects, poor feed and predators like the panther and the wolf. If a Longhorn critter couldn’t survive those conditions they died - and so did their genes.
When the war was over and the men returned (survivors in their own right) they had to make a living. The vast number of Longhorns provided a solution. For the next ten plus years these cattle were gathered (no small feat since they had been running wild for years) and trailed to railheads in Missouri and Kansas.
Remember the Longhorns in John Wayne’s Red River? They were scrawny, temperamental and hard to handle. Oh, and by the way, most of those weren’t Longhorns at all.
