In early November of 1493, a fleet of seventeen Spanish ships carrying over one thousand men, including Christopher Columbus, landed on an island that Columbus named, Dominica. Also on-board the ships were domesticated pigs, horses, and of course, cattle.Twenty-six years later, Hernán Cortés began his conquest of New Spain, (Mexico) with six hundred soldiers and fifteen horsemen. The horses were descendents of the original herd brought to Dominica in 1493. In 1521, Gregorio de Villalobos transported the first cattle, also descendents of the first herd, from Dominica to New Spain.
New world cattle soon became a form of currency for the Spanish. Owning a great herd provided men with disposable and liquid wealth. Cortés stocked his great estate in New Spain with significant numbers of the animal.
As the Spanish began their campaigns to conquer their new world, they took with them, horses and cattle. In 1540, one conquistador, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado set off in search of the famed Seven Cities of Cibola. He departed with thousands of sheep, goats, hogs, and, by most estimates, five-hundred head of cattle. Coronado’s ‘five-hundred’ were the first cattle to set ‘hoof’ in what is now the United States.
Over time, escaped, dispersed by Indian raids, abandoned, or left behind purposely, these strays or wild cattle propagated prolifically. Left to their own survival, Spanish cattle developed the traits necessary to survive and reproduce efficiently and providently in the new world environment. These traits included robustness, vitality, fertility, and most importantly browse-efficiency. By 1835, wild cattle, sometimes referred to as mustang cattle, and later, Texas cattle, could be found from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Some records of the same year put the total number of cattle and horses running wild inside this area as three million head.
These Texas cattle, what we today call longhorns, were, in the words of Captain Richard Ware, “…wilder than deer.”
Another chronicler, Colonel Richard Irving Dodge offered the following comment on wild Texas cattle. “…animals miscalled tame, fifty times more dangerous to footmen than the fiercest buffalo.”
After the Civil War, men returned home to Texas to find untended fields and millions of wild Texas cattle. A few far-thinking men looked at the vast cattle herds and saw a profitable future ahead. These far-thinking men began to round-up, brand, and then drive these wild Texas cattle toward railheads that serviced burgeoning northern markets, markets “hungry” for beef. We know these men by names such as cowboy, rannie, buckaroo, or cowpuncher, but they are all descendents, not by blood, but instead by the common love of their occupation from the Mexican vaquero.
The cattle drive era was short in duration but provided millions in gold to those few entrepreneurs who saw the potential of a rangy, long-legged animal that was shaped by Mother Nature for self-preservation. The Texas longhorn could live on a diet of browse that would kill other breeds. It was an animal that could go tremendous distances without a drink, swim the broadest rivers, and run, when needed, like a mustang pony. In short, the longhorn of that period was the right animal to accomplish what those far-thinking men had in mind. The longhorn, Cuerno Largo, was without peer.
Mike Kearby's Texas copyright 2009
