Its flamboyant character unchanged since it helped forge our country a century ago, this legendary animal with its lean meat is again revitalizing America's cattle business

John Wayne was wrong. The West was not won by men alone; it was settled as well by the Texas Longhorn. This remarkable animal with sweeping horns established our cattle industry and gave rise to the American cowboy. Extremes in terrain and weather shaped the hardy character of both the longhorn and his drover; economic necessity brought them together--and together they made brief but vivid history.

Having helped shape a nation, the lean longhorn fell into disrepute in the late 19th century. With the introduction of the faster growth British breeds Herefords, Shorthorns and Durhams, ranchers and consumers entered a 75-year love affair with fat-marbled beef. But to avoid excess cholesterol, many Americans today are eating less of that beef. Cattlemen are looking again at the longhorn and rediscovering a "genetic gold mine" for the beef industry.

The stirring New World saga of the longhorn began when Columbus brought a few Spanish Andalusian horned cattle to Santo Domingo. In 1521 a dozen offspring of these cattle accompanied Spanish explorer Gregorio de Villalobos into what is now Mexico. Eventually vaqueros traveling with Spanish mission priests drove descendants of the breed north into what became Texas.
As mission settlements fell to disease or Indian attack, the cattle roamed freely through the territory. Alert and hardy, the animals adapted to the vagaries of the harsh land and evolved into the Texas Longhorn. By 1860, some four million of them, unbranded and unclaimed, loped across the state.

Survival of the Fittest. According to the Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America (TLBAA), pure bred animals are "big, raw-boned and rangy, with slabbed sides and a squarish look. They have long legs, with the huge forequarters making the front legs seem shorter. The head is large and long, giving the eyes a wide-spaced appearance, while the neck is short and stocky."

The most spectacularly colored of all cattle, with shadings and combinations so varied that no two are alike, they reach maximum weight in eight or ten years and range from 800 to 1500 pounds. Although slow to mature, their reproductive period is twice as long as that of other breeds. Most longhorn cows and bulls have horns of four feet or less. However, mature steers have an average span of six feet or more and a 15-year-old's horn span reach up to nine feet.

Longhorn expert J. Frank Dobie believed that the horns grew out of necessity. "Under primitive conditions," he wrote in The Longhorns, "only the fittest longhorns could survive. They grew horns to fight off wolves, to sweep away thorned branches protecting sparse tufts of grass on the parched ground."

When fighting off wolf packs, a herd would gather around their calves and lower their heads, making a tight circle of sharp horns. If a calf was cornered by a wolf away from the herd, it would bawl and longhorns would come charging.

Longhorns feared nothing.
Nat Straw, a grizzly-bear hunter in New Mexico, claimed that when longhorns arrived in that state's Black Range the grizzly met the one creature that would not give way before it. In fact, a wild bull was observed charging an upright grizzly, bowling him over, then barreling on, barely breaking stride.

Longhorns have a natural resistance to the most common cattle diseases and parasites, including the worst enemy of range cattle, the screw worm. Soon after a calf is born, blow flies deposit eggs in its' navel, and under the cow's tail. The cows instantly lick the worms off the calf and themselves. If the worms infest some part of a longhorn's body that it can't reach, it will stand for hours in deep water, drowning them.

Herd Highways. The sheer physical stamina of these extraordinary animals made them attractive to early drovers. By 1860, Texans were rounding up free-ranging longhorns and starting small ranches. But their enterprises were put on hold during the Civil War. At war's end, returning veterans found the longhorns running wild again in herds that had tripled in size. A few resourceful Texans, realizing that the North would be hungry for beef after five hard years of war, rounded up the longhorns. They drove them thousands of miles north across Indian country to railheads at Abilene and Dodge City in Kansas.

To drive the cattle, the entrepreneurs hired scrub-hardened youths, some as young as 14 and about one-third of them black or Mexican-the cowboys of the American West. The legendary age of cowboy and longhorn lasted only about 20 years, but before it was over, ten million cattle had followed such celebrated "herd highways" as the Chisholm and other famous trails to railheads primarily in Kansas and Missouri.

Lush prairie grasses could, in three years, convert a $4 yearling into a $20 or $30 steer or heifer, so cattlemen could parlay 30,000 longhorns into a half-million dollars. These men invested in land at about 75 cents an acre, quickly became the West's cattle barons, and made Texas financially stable.

But it was the longhorns themselves, moving along the trails to market, that settled the marginal range lands thought worthless. The movement of cattle to holding pens created rough settlements of small family spreads that became the backbone of the industry, attracting merchants, bankers and railroads.

Getting those longhorns to the stockyards was grueling work. Cowboys often were in the saddle for four months at a dollar a day. Herds usually ranged from 1500 to 2000 head, handled by about a dozen cowboys. Stampedes were a constant threat that could be sparked by anything, a clap of thunder, flash lightning, a coyote's howl. At night, to quiet the longhorns, cowboys sang camp-meeting hymns, or ballads made up on the trail.

Mississippi Miracle. One of the most famous longhorns was Old Blue, a steer that for eight seasons led 10,000 longhorns over the trails. The steer understood the drovers' signals, and the other cattle learned to follow the bell he wore around his neck. For his services, Old Blue got to hang around the chuck wagon until the cook gave him bread or apples, and at night he bedded down with the horses.

One remarkable drive was made by teen-agers, led by I7-year-old
W.D.H. Saunders. These cowboys took 800 longhorns from Goliad, Texas, to Woodville, Miss. Seasoned trail drivers had deemed it impossible to cross the lower Mississippi, but the boys didn't know that. Though the point where they were going to ford was one mile wide and 40 feet deep, they blithely drove the herd into the river, yelling and whirling lariats. "The longhorns wallowed in the waves like hippopotami," Paul Wellman reported, "breasted the muddy tide, struck out boldly, each following the wake of the beast in front of it, and miraculously clambered safely up the opposite bank."

By the mid-1880s, cattlemen were crossbreeding heftier breeds with the angular longhorn, producing heavier, quicker maturing, feedlot steers that brought more money at the stockyards. The longhorn went into rapid decline.

"Longhorn Lean". In 1927, when Congress, prodded by conservationists, appropriated money to establish a federal herd of purebred longhorns, it proved a difficult task. Two U.S. Forest Service Rangers traveled 5000 miles and inspected 30,000 cattle, searching for purebred Texas Longhorns. They found just 20 cows, three bulls and four calves. These were taken to the

That effort paid dividends, for today the longhorn is on the comeback trail. Says Stewart H. Fowler, head of the department of agriculture at Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga.," The Texas Longhorn's reputation is spreading as a valuable 'new' genetic seed stock. Ranchers are realizing that this is the one breed proven through centuries to excel without high-priced grains, and with genes strongly fixed by nature for high fertility, disease and parasitic resistance, easy calving, hardiness and longevity."

The longhorn now appears headed along another important new trail. Lean, natural meat, offering more nutrition per calorie, is in demand, and the longhorn fills the bill. Those who have tasted longhorn beef pronounce it tender and full of flavor.

But changes in the U.S. food chain don't happen overnight. It requires 107,000 cattle every day to supply our taste for beef, and longhorns number only about 100,000. Though it will be a while before we can ask for "longhorn lean" at supermarkets, the outlook is optimistic that its singular attributes will help strengthen other breeds and thus revitalize the industry.

Reprinted from the January 1987 issue of READERS DIGEST.
© 1986 THE READERS DIGEST ASSOCIATION INC.

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