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TIP TO TIP—LEGENDARY TEXAS LONGHORNS by Henry Wolff, Jr.  I saw my first Texas longhorn steer when an animal show came to my hometown of Ballinger, Texas, sometime shortly after World War II. Even though the steer did not have a horn spread that would compare with some of the more legendary Texas longhorns of the past or present, it did have a nice curved set of horns wide enough to impress a boy who had never seen anything like it. Living out in the country in the Runnels County farming community of Dry Ridge, we only had Jersey milk cows, along with the crossbred feeder calves that my dad bought each year to run on Sudan grass and maize stubble. In the mid-1940s, longhorns were few and far between in Texas after having been virtually bred out of existence. The longhorned cattle that had evolved from the earlier Spanish mission herds would nearly become extinct in Texas except for a small number of herds of selected animals being kept by old-time ranchers interested in preserving the Texas cattle. The federal government joined in the effort to save the longhorn when it was decided in the mid-1920s to build a typical herd at the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma; another herd was built in 1936 at the Fort Niobrara Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska. In 1948, folklorist J. Frank Dobie and one of the ranchers who had maintained a herd of longhorns, Graves Peeler of McMullen County, assisted in establishing a small state maintained herd in Fort Griffin State Park at Albany, Texas. More than two decades before, at the 1926 annual meeting in Austin, the Texas Folklore Society adopted a resolution submitted by Dobie to save the longhorn . He had written an article for The Cattlemen on “The Texas Longhorn’s Dying Bellow.” 243 Thanks to men like Dobie and Peeler, Will Barnes of the Wichita refuge, and Texas ranchers Milby and Henry Butler, E. H. Marks, Jack Phillips, M. P. Wright, II and Cap Yates, there are Texas longhorns, legendary and otherwise, to this day. There are longhorn breeders scattered throughout Texas, and the historic breed can be seen on numerous ranches in other states as well. It was years after seeing that first longhorn, however, before I would be equally impressed, and that was only a couple of times at the Brackenridge Park Zoo in San Antonio, where longhorns were an attraction along with exotic animals from other lands. Longhorns would remain an oddity until the second half of the 20th Century when there was a renewed interest in the breed among Texas ranchers. When I wrote a newspaper article in 1966 on Walter B. Scott establishing a herd at Goliad from Graves Peeler stock, the Victoria Advocate headlined the story, “Legendary Longhorn Revived, History on the Hoof at Goliad.” Significantly, it was at Goliad where many of the earliest longhorns once grazed the vast acreage of Mission Espiritu Santo, which historians have labeled the first great cattle ranch in Texas. The herd, once numbering in the thousands, was started prior to 1749 at an earlier location of the mission near present Victoria. The renewed interest in these historic cattle resulted in the organization of the Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America in 1964. The previously mentioned old-time ranchers contributed to the salvation of the breed and to what is known today as the “seven families of longhorns,” referring to distinctive bloodlines within the breed. One of the ranchers, E. H. Marks, had a particular flair for showmanship, as did his son, Travis Marks. The younger Marks moved his longhorn operation to Goliad County in 1973, bringing with him a steer named Ranger that carried dignitaries for a number of years in the grand entry of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. On his father’s ranch at Barker, Travis had become interested in training longhorn steers to ride while still in his teenage years and helped to ready a steer appropriately named Barker that Tex McDaniel rode to New York in 1932. McDaniel completed 244 Everything But the Kitchen Sink 2,500 miles to New York City and then headed toward Washington , D.C., where he had hoped to arrive in time to see Texan John Nance Gardner sworn in as Vice-President of the United States, but he did not reach the capitol city until the end of April. The steer had worn out twenty sets of steel ox...

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