Hardwired

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My Current Reads

At the suggestion of Scott Slinker (https://twitter.com/scott_slinker) who highly recommended The Trail Drivers of Texas, I immediately purchased the book and read it in three days. In Scott’s own words, “Incredible first-hand accounts of the real west and the hardships and experiences they faced.” I was fascinated to learn about the early cowpunchers and their lives on the range. These were the men who fathered the cattle industry in Texas.

From the cattle drivers who faced danger on the plains, including warring Native American tribes, my curiosity led me to Quanah Parker and the town named after the Comanche chief. Quanah, Texas, is located in Hardeman County and is 8 miles south of the Red River which forms the Oklahoma-Texas state line. During one of his visits to Quanah, Chief Parker bestowed his blessing on the town. 

“May the Great Spirit smile on you little town, may the rain fall in season, and the warmth of the sunshine after the rain, may the earth yield bountifully. May peace and contentment be with your children forever.”

Searching for a more in-depth account of Quanah life, I bought Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne. Other books I’ve read about the Comanche chief have scratched the surface, but Gwynne’s book expounds on two astonishing stories. One traces the rise and fall of the most powerful Indian tribe in American history, and the second, the epic saga of  the most famous Indian captive—a pioneer woman named Cynthia Ann Parker.

Cynthia was born in Illinois in 1827, before the Parker family moved to Texas in 1833 and built Fort Parker east of Waco. In 1836, the fort was attacked by Comanche warriors and young Cynthia was taken captive. She spent twenty-four years with the tribe and during that time married Peta Nocona, a Comanche chief. They had two sons and a daughter. Their eldest son was named Quanah. Cynthia had several opportunities to leave the Comanches but refused. At one point, she was abducted by Texas Rangers and returned to her white family, but was unhappy and struggled to adapt to the white man’s world. A number of times she tried to escape back to her Comanche tribe, but failed. Her story is one of hardship but, like many pioneers of the time, also one of happiness. 

Gwynne’s exhilarating book covers the many wars fought by the Comanches over four decades, encompasses Spanish colonialism, the American Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads: the history that shaped Texas and the United States.

Trail blazers still on my mind, my literary interest circled back to Fort Worth and led to my recent purchase of Lost Fort Worth by Mike Nichols. Mr. Nichols is a fifth-generation Texan who was born near the Fort Worth Stockyards. He worked for the local newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for twenty-three years. At age 62, he began to chronicle the history of Fort Worth from his seat on a bicycle with his camera slung around his neck. In his own words, “I went to work for the Star-Telegram, traveled all seven continents, and I came back home thinking that Fort Worth is a really interesting place.”

Lost Fort Worth synopsis: “Fort Worth began as a frontier Army camp and grew into a city as cattle drives, railroads, the stockyards and packing plants, oil, and national defense drove its economy. During the tremendous growth, the landscape and cultural imprint of the city changed drastically, and much of Cowtown was lost to history.” 

But in Lost Fort Worth, we can “Join author Mike Nichols on a stroll down Memory Lane from the cattle pens on the North Side to the Battle of Buttermilk Junction on the South Side, from Randol’s mill on the East Side to the Army’s Camp Bowie on the West Side. Witness the birth of Western swing music and the death of a cloud dancer. See mansions of the well-heeled and saloons of the well-armed. Meet Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Clyde Barrow and Rube Burrow, Sisters of Charity and ladies of the evening. Along the way you’ll also pass four trolley parks, three World War I airfields, two gunfighters, one flamboyant preacher, one serial killer, and one very short subway that carries readers back in time to Lost Fort Worth.”

After reading Nichols’s book, I wanted to learn more about the author and Fort Worth’s history, so I logged onto his blog, Hometown by Handlebar: https://hometownbyhandlebar.com/

Sadly, Mike Nichols passed away on March 5, 2023, at the age 74 of complications from cancer.

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Book Reviews

I appreciate all the book reviews I’ve received over the years for my Darcy McClain and Bullet Thriller series. But for a moment, I’d like to concentrate on one in particular that caught me by surprise. 

An acquaintance saw a print ad I had recently run in a local bulletin and was delighted to learn I’m an author. He quickly followed with, “I used to be an avid reader, but since my stroke, my attention span has never been the same. I find it hard to stay focused.” But he assured me he would buy Brainwash and do his best to read the book. 

A week later we bumped into each other again. He appeared excited to see me and I wondered why. Sure, we know one another, but he certainly had something on his mind and was eager to share it. With a broad smile on his face, almost bordering on a smug grin, he said, “This is a great book, and I’m back to reading like before my stroke. I couldn’t put the book down.” He was halfway through Brainwash and had purchased Gadgets so as not to break his momentum. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Not about the book sales, but that the series had helped someone in a most unexpected way. 

Three weeks passed and I hadn’t seen him. I grew a bit concerned and asked about him from mutual friends. He was on vacation visiting family in his hometown in North Dakota. When we met up again, he had read Genocide and was almost done reading CLON-X. That impressed me, but what touched me the most? He had a thank-you gift for me. And what better than a book from a local author in his home state – Lori L. Orser’s Spooky Creepy North Dakota. What a fitting title right in time for Halloween! 

I read it in two days. I loved the haunted stories, but, as I’ve never visited either of the Dakotas, I also found the historical facts about locations and people informative. I had both states on my bucket list and all reservations made for visits. Then Covid hit, derailing those vacation plans. Both states are now back on the list. 

A parting comment. In Lori’s book she states: “Like most places, North Dakota has plenty of what would be called urban legends in a more populated state. Here, we call them rural legends. These are stories with only one source, and no one to confirm or disprove them, but whose authenticity as history can only be considered as dubious!”

Her statement regarding authenticity as history certainly hit home, harkening back to my blog post titled “Fact, Fiction, or Contradiction?”

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Texas: The History of the Longhorn, Part 3

In the previous episode, we learned how Longhorn cattle came to be in Texas in the first place. Let’s pick up with the rest of Michael Casey’s article.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the commercial importance of longhorns (since they were at that time the predominant breed of cattle) was to supply the hide and tallow industries of Europe and, after the Revolutionary War, of New England as well. Before the advent of electricity in the early 20th century, candles were the world’s chief source of night light. Tallow, the main ingredient in candles, soaps and lubricants, was obtained by rendering animal fat. Hides were important to the shoe, boot and leather industries. Therefore, “Hide and Tallow” companies (as beef processing plants were then called) became the major users of cattle carcasses, first in California and later in Texas and other southern states as well. In the absence of refrigeration, meat was largely a byproduct and of little commercial value.

An effort to supply the hide and tallow markets began in Texas shortly after the end of the Civil War. During the war, many longhorns from Texas had been driven into the Southeast (swimming the Mississippi River enroute [sic]) where they supplied the field kitchens of the confederate forces. Those first drives had taught the Texans that Longhorns could be driven long distances successfully and without much, if any, loss of weight. Having learned that lesson well, enterprising southerners began driving their longhorns north to the railheads at Abilene and Dodge City, where they were loaded onto trains and taken to Chicago and points east to supply leather and tallow (and to a far lesser extent, beef) markets of the wealthier northern states. That was the beginning of the glory years of cowboys and long distance cattle drives. By 1895 it has been estimated that over 10,000,000 head had been driven the length of the Chisholm, Goodnight and other trails from Texas and other southern states to the northern markets. These drives, which lasted in total less than thirty years and were often led by very young cowboys and “vaqueros”, became a part of the romantic western lore as the “legendary cattle drives of the old west.” Many of the more docile animals were also used, before being slaughtered, to pull wagon trains westward.

During the memorable cattle drives, those millions of Longhorn bulls, cows, steers, and calves walked north along well worn trails and actually gained weight as they walked, all the while protecting themselves and their calves from predators, swimming rivers, and surviving desert heat and winter snows. The fact that they could not only survive but actually thrive under those conditions is a remarkable testament to the evolutionary advantages these animals had gained.

While the cattle drives of the 1870s and 1880s have become romanticized and legendary, the greater influence of these drives was in the exportation of the “Texas Longhorn system.” This system embodied not only the longhorn animal but also the management technique used in Southern Texas that was characterized by “allowing cattle to care for themselves year-round in stationary pastures on the free range, without supplementary feeding or protection.” While it worked well in the tropical climates of Mexico and south Texas, it was inadequate in the more hostile climates further north. The failure of this system in northern climates, plus the influence of “Cattle Tick Fever” (see below), resulted in the near demise of Spanish long- horned cattle in this country. Northern ranchers, who were enjoying relative success during those hard times by utilizing the British system of close penning and winter supplement feeding, lost faith in the longhorn. While it was probably unfair to blame the longhorns for the bad management practices of their owners, the fact remains that the “Texas Longhorns” were rapidly seen as scrub cattle that should be eliminated rather than propagated. The downhill slide of the breed was exacerbated by one of the strengths of the longhorns – their immune system – which now worked against them. Their immune system enabled longhorns to survive while carrying a tick on their hides which, in turn, carried the disease, Cattle Tick Fever. Cattle Tick Fever was devastating to British and other cattle that were not immune to it. When populations of other breeds began to decline because of this disease, that was the last straw and the result was large scale destruction of the nation’s longhorn population.

In a fascinating article appearing in the February, 1999 edition of the Western Horseman, Dwight G. Bennett, DVM, recounts the role of “Cattle Tick Fever” in the history of the demise of longhorn cattle. He attributes that phenomenon largely to pressures from other cattle ranchers intent on protecting their herds from the “Texas cattle” which were “poisoning their [pasturelands]” and killing their cattle. It turns out that the disease-laden ticks, engorged themselves with the blood of their host longhorn, then dropped from the cow, laid eggs on the ground, and died. The disease is carried on when the ticks complete their life cycle by attaching themselves to passing cattle. That explains why ranchers complained that the longhorns had poisoned their pasturelands.

As noted by Dr. Bennett, Cattle Tick Fever was not just identified locally where longhorns were passing through. Indeed, it was recognized as early as 1868 among cattle breeders as far east as New York State who noticed their purebred British stock dying when Texas Longhorns were shipped into the state by railroad from the stockyards in Abilene and other railheads. As a result of public outcry throughout the country the market for longhorn cattle toppled, and, various states passed laws attempting to prevent the passage of longhorn cattle across their borders. Although the tick was later found to be controllable and Cattle Tick Fever has since been eradicated in the United States, those scientific advances came too late to restore the reputation of what had, by the mid 1870s, become, essentially, outlaw cattle.

My name’s Oreo!

By the 1880s, after consumers had slaughtered millions of longhorns, the demand for higher fat content in both tallow and beef also played some role in the drop in the marketability of longhorns. All things being considered the population of Texas Longhorn cattle went into a steep decline and by 1910 the breed, which only thirty years before had numbered well into the millions, was considered nearly extinct.

In 1927 Congress (at the behest of conservationists and historians) appropriated money to establish a federal herd of purebred Texas Longhorn cattle. Over the next several years, two U.S. Forest Service rangers inspected over 30,000 head of cattle and found only 20 cows, 3 bulls, and 4 calves that were in their opinion purebred Texas Longhorns. These cattle were taken to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Cache, Oklahoma, as seed stock for what has become the “Wildlife Refuge (WR)” herd. Of interest, the WR herd was compiled only from “remote” herds and did not include any influence from six other purebred herds then known to exist (Marks, Phillips, Yates, Butler, Peeler, and Wright). Equally as interesting, no cattle were collected from California, Arizona, or New Mexico where there may well have been purebred herds still in existence.

Most present day Texas Longhorn cattle are descended from those seven families, each of which had its own distinctive attributes. To a Longhorn producer today, it is vitally important to have an understanding of an animal’s pedigree and the degree to which it has been genetically influenced by one or more of those families.

In 1964 the first registry was established to perpetuate breeding records and confirm the purity of blood lines for breeders of Texas Longhorn cattle. Since that time, the numbers of registered Texas Longhorn cattle has soared and by the late 1990s it had exceeded 250,000. Breeders now exist in all 50 states as well as Canada, Mexico, and many other countries.

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