Long Ropes and Running Irons

On the open range, ownership of a calf was determined by the brand on the cow. But if the calf escaped the roundup and grew big enough to leave its mother without a brand, or if it were orphaned by causes natural or unnatural, there was no way of proving who owned it, and this simple natural fact led to more trouble and strife than any other one cause in the history of the West.

The orphan was called a maverick. There are numerous legends as to the origin of the name, but all agree that it was derived from that of the well-known Texas family, and that somewhere, at some time, there was a man named Maverick who neglected to brand his increase. Hence a rider happening upon a slick-sided cow or bull would say , "That's one of Maverick's," or simply "That's a Maverick." One version has it that this wily character deliberately refrained from branding and then said, "Anything without a brand is mine." The real story is told by J. Frank Dobie in The Longhorns and again by Robert H. Fletcher in Free Grass to Fences. A South Carolinian named Samuel A. Maverick had come to Texas and was practicing law in San Antonio some years before the Civil War. In 1845 he accepted 400 head of mixed cattle in lieu of cash on a note. Fletcher's account continues:

The cattle were on long, narrow Matagorda Island four miles off the Texas coast. They were in charge of an irresponsible Negro family who seemingly came with the cattle as part of the deal. . . . The Negroes were not very conscientious herders and few calves were branded.

During the Mexican War, Maverick was up to his ears in business and political affairs. He paid slight attention to his island bovines and due to defections by restless members of the herd (who had waded ashore at low tide) they still tallied four hundred after he had owned them for eight years.

In 1853 he had them moved from the island to the mainland where they mingled with the herds of full-time stockgrowers who kept their calves branded and who were forever on the lookout for slicks. When they found one, it was a twenty-to-one shot that it was a Maverick critter, which didn't deter them from slapping their own iron on the beast. And so unbranded cattle became known as Mavericks.

In 1856 Sam Maverick sold his herd. . . . They were the only cattle he ever owned.

Sam Maverick was a Yale graduate, and thus an eastern institution of learning became connected, albeit remotely, with one of the most controversial aspects of life in the Wild West.

Wyoming law defined mavericks as "all neat cattle, regardless of age, found running at large in this territory without a mother, and upon which there is no brand." Whose were they? Popular opinion had a ready answer: the unidentified animal belonged to the first man who dropped his loop on it. A "wide loop." A "long rope." The two terms meant the same thing. They meant trouble and loss for the owners of large herds.

Along with the long rope went the running iron. Respectable cow outfits imprinted their monogram on bovine hides with heavy stamp irons, but a slender rod with a curved tip would do just as well, in expert hands, to inscribe or burn over any brand. There were times and places where the mere carrying of a running iron on a man's saddle was considered prima facie evidence of guilt.

In most respects the honesty of the West was proverbial. Doors were never locked. Word-of-mouth agreements were accepted on transactions involving tens of thousands of dollars. But the West had an elastic conscience when it came to stock matters—it stretched like a piece of wet rawhide. Worse yet was the unsanctified sense of humor which made lawbreaking, which ought to have been a serious matter, a subject of infinite deadpan jesting on the part of everybody except the victim—unless the thief got caught, and then the joke was on him.

A whole family of yarns grew up around the assumption, which contained more truth than poetry, that no cow outfit on the roundup or on the trail ever willingly killed one of its own animals for meat. For instance there was the one about the Texas cowman who rode up to a neighbor's camp at dinner time, and was invited in with typical plains hospitality.

"Come in, come right into camp, John, and have some dinner," urged the host. "I'll give you something to eat you never ate before in your life."

"What's that?" the visitor asked, falling into the trap.

"A piece of your own beef."

The folklore rang countless changes on the theme, in vintage jests which grew warm with repetition. There was the one about the widow-woman who told her boys, when they brought in meat for the table, to be sure not to take an animal bearing their own brand, for she would as lief eat one of her little children as one of her own beeves. There were not-so-sly allusions to the cowman who was so extraordinarily honest, or who was so extraordinarily tough, that he could eat a steak from one of his own animals without feeling queasy; conversely, there was the cowman who unknowingly ate a bait of his own beef and it made him deathly sick.

Another classic was the yarn about the dishonest foreman, which proceeded from the tongue-in-cheek assumption that the foreman of any large outfit was inevitably dishonest and stole from his employer, who had of course stolen in his turn from somebody else; hence arose this chestnut about the foreman whose employer's brand was a simple letter I. In time the foreman became ambitious and decided to start a herd for himself; he chose for his brand an IC. As years went by he too became rich and respectable, and his foreman, becoming ambitious in turn, started a herd which he branded ICU. Finally, we come to the third foreman. Following in the footsteps of the others, who branded ICU2. Pretty feeble, no doubt, but it remained good for a laugh after countless repetitions over coffee and beans in the cook tent.

An easy way of stealing, before the era of tight brand-registration laws, was for a newcomer to move in on a range and start a brand which was like that of a wealthy neighbor except for the addition of a few lines. There are countless instances of brand conversion; a CY, for example, was readily changeable to an OX.

It was a sagebrush axiom that all it took to start a cow outfit was a running iron and nerve enough to use it. To this day the barroom cynic in any cow-country town, always ready to enlighten the newcomer, is sure to offer half-seriously, half in jest: "Why, don't you know how old So-and-So got his start?"—naming the ancestor of the largest cattle owner in the area. "He got it with a long rope and a running iron." The remark has been made about every cattleman of any prominence from the Rio Grande to the Canadian line, and is so hoary with ancient usage that it is taken without offense. Since it is a well-known psychological principle that humor is generally a denial of some inner discomfort, the discerning will see in this enormous folklore of jests about stealing, the symptoms of guilt.

There were rustlers and rustlers. Their methods varied and so did their community status. The distinctions among the various kinds of rustling were like the difference between professional prostitution and an occasional fling.

Branding a maverick, in the minds of the generality, was a crime without moral turpitude, if a crime at all—like violating the prohibition law or cheating on an expense account. No amount of legislation ever wholly changed this attitude, though a few jail sentences helped. Even under the law it was rated a misdemeanor, not a felony.

But it was one thing to slap your iron on a maverick when you happened on him in the course of a day's riding; this was a temptation few could resist, and men of the sternest anti-rustling persuasion have been heard to admit with the third highball: "Hell, I've done it myself." It was another thing to scour the country deep into another man's range looking for slicks on the pretext that you were merely out hunting strays, and to keep this up day after day. The more you made a business of mavericking the closer you came to the fine line that separated the mavericker from something worse. "'Mavericking,'" Frank Dobie has said, "graduated into a soft synonym for stealing."

When the natural supply of mavericks was not great enough to satisfy the ambitious mavericker, especially in view of the competition, the next step was to forestall nature by placing your brand on a big calf that was going to become a maverick in a few weeks. You took the chance that nobody would ride by and notice it in the meanwhile; indeed, you took a second chance, for the big calf, displaced by a younger sibling, would continue to hang around its mother for some time hoping to get another suck, and this was a dead giveaway. But what the hell. The country was big, riders were few, and if a stock detective hired by the Association did happen to come along, the likelihood was he would not know who owned your unregistered brand, called a maverick—and suppose he did; you could take care of yourself.

The third step was to make mavericks by separating calves from their mothers until they were weaned. Granville Stuart in My Forty Years on the Frontier, mentions the case of the fortunate ranchman whose cows always gave birth to twins and triplets, while his neighbors' cows hung enviously around his corral lamenting their own childless state. But as rustling went this was pretty crude stuff—settler stuff. Experts would pen the calves in some lonely corral in the foothills, then run the cows a long way off and hold them there until the calves were eating grass. This writer remarked to an old-timer that it must have taken a pretty good cowboy to run a cow off from her calf. "There were good cowboys," he said.

If the rustler stopped there he remained semi-respectable, at least in his own estimation, and he might even have a certain Robin Hood dash. He was well above the line which divided the good bad man from the skunk. But others descended to such methods as slitting the calf's tongue so it couldn't suck, or killing the cow in order to make an orphan of the calf. During Johnson County's time of trouble, calves bearing a rustler's fresh brand were found still hanging about the dead body of the mother cow. Nothing dashing about that.

Finally the rustler might come to burning over other men's brands with a running iron, or "blotching" them so badly they could not be read. He was now a full-fledged thief. Facilis descensus Averno.

Between the practices described in the last two paragraphs and the milder forms of stealing, the elastic conscience stiffened and became uneasy. A man who "made no bones" in later years about having branded any number of mavericks in his day would swear on a stack of Bibles that he had never altered a brand in his life. As for the other kinds of dirty business, we may quote the utterance of a likeable reprobate who was well known in Powder River country.

"I'm a thief and I've been a thief all my life," he declared with disarming frankness, "but there's one place I draw the line; I will not kill a cow to get the calf."

Butchering a steer on the range, burying the hide and taking the meat home to eat was a cheap form of stealing, fit only for thieving Indians and threadbare settlers. It was disapproved more on social than on moral grounds. Another two-bit operation was to separate a calf from the cow, take it home and let the woman and children raise it by hand. This was called "finding a motherless calf."

There was considerable sympathy for the man so poor he had to steal in order to feed his family, even when that man happened to be an Indian. Charlie Russell painted a picture called "Caught in the Act," in which two bundled-up cowboys in the dead of winter have come upon a pair of Indians skinning a beef in the snow. One of the Indians points to his open mouth in the sign for hunger, and the uncertain attitude of the cowboys tell more plainly than words how they are torn between loyalty to their outfit and pity for the half-starved red men.

But the business of butchering beef on the range soon developed into a commercial enterprise, with the local meat market for an outlet. In western Nebraska in the eighties a member of a grand jury considering the case of a settler charged with killing a beef wanted to know whether he had killed it to eat or to sell!

To sum up the code, the man least condemned for rustling was the man who stole in order to build up a herd of his own and get a start, after which he would turn respectable. Most condemned was the thief so low he would cut the rope tying some settler's old bony milch cow to the tailgate of his wagon and steal the cow.

Finally, let us not overlook the curious double meaning which attached to the word rustler. A rustler was a thief. But he was also a man of energy, a hustler who rose early and rode far in order to get ahead in the world. A money-raising committee would be referred to as "the rustling committee." Newspapers called themselves The Bonanza Rustler or The Big Horn County Rustler. When a young boy won a prize for bringing in the largest number of subscribers to a local paper, the item was captioned, "A GOOD RUSTLER." An animal which sustained itself on the range under adverse conditions was a good rustler too, and a man arriving home late with a guest would ask his wife to "go rustle us up something to eat."

Moral confusion, or merely semantic?

But a horse thief was something else entirely. When you said horse thief, you had better smile.

Helena Huntington Smith, Frontier Times, February, 1967

Eulogy by Dr. Cupples.

The following eulogy on the life and character of Hon. Samuel A. Maverick was delivered in October, 1870, before the Alamo Literary Society of San Antonio, Texas, by George Cupples, M. D.:

"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Society:

"In all ages and amongst all peoples, from the times of which history has no record, even unto our day, it has been held a sacred duty to celebrate the merits of the dead, the exploits of warriors, the services rendered by legislators and sages, the moral excellence of men noted for their virtues and their public services. In the dim pre-historic ages the burial places of their forefathers were held in sacred awe by all races of men that have left vestiges of their customs and of their existence on the surface of the globe; and, indeed, of many of these, their places of sepulture furnish the sole glimpse of their degree of culture and advancement. The deeds of fame of heroes, the services of sages, of benefactors of their race, are preserved in the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, and of races still older—to whom the former owed their knowledge—the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Hindoos, and the tribes of far Cathay.

"The lays and legends of barbarous and semi-civilized, preceded the invention of the alphabet and the art of expressive sounds by symbols, and had for subject and inspiration the deeds of those who had distinguished themselves beyond their fellows. All their customs and usages, as far as known to us, mark their reverence for the memory of their dead, and the traditions of their good and noble actions. Shall a duty recognized by our uncultivated predecessors be neglected by us who claim to excel in the fulfillment of all civic obligations?

"In this, the seventh decade of this marvelous century, when the march of progress and the change hurries us on with breathless speed, when revolutions in politics, in social and physical science succeed each other with such rapidity as to leave us scanty opportunity to look back on the past, absorbed as we are in the present, it is well, I saw, that events happening in our midst should arrest our attention and claim our homage for those who, descending to the tomb in the fullness of age, leave the record of a life which connects our stormy and troubled present with the calmer past, and who are worthy to serve as an example and pattern to their successors in the arena of life.

"More especially does it behoove you, on whom devolves the duty of preserving the remembrance of the worthies of the West, to mark your appreciation of the public services and of the public and private virtues of one who, having espoused in his youth the cause of struggling liberty in Texas, defended her in war, served her in peace, guided her in her commencing career by his counsels, proclaimed to the world her Declaration of Independence, suffered for her in person and in property, bore the pains of prison and of fetters for her sake; gloried in her triumph, and to the close of a blameless life, 'mid trials such as fall to the lot of few men, bore himself as a true Texan and a faithful patriot. Need I say that such a man was Samuel A. Maverick?

"The name of Maverick is of old standing in the New England States, the founder of the family having emigrated from England at an early period of the settlement of this country. A young man of this name fell in one of the affrays which occurred in the streets of Boston, immediately before the memorable tea party. Another branch of the family settled in New York. I have in my possession a diploma or certificate issued to a master mason—in English, Spanish and French—handsomely engraved on parchment, by Peter Maverick, and published by Bro. Samuel Maverick, of New York. An ancestor of the subject of this notice settled in South Carolina, where the grandfather of the deceased, after serving in the war of the Revolution, died soon after its close, reduced to poverty by losses sustained in its course. His son, the father of our Mr. Maverick, consequently began life penniless, but by industry, united to capacity and integrity, he rose from being a clerk in a large establishment in Charleston, to be sole proprietor of three business houses, and had the credit of being a pioneer in numerous successful enterprises. He shipped the first bale of cotton from America, and thus materially aided in establishing a commerce which has spread over the world and has penetrated into regions the most remote of the globe, carrying civilization and enlightenment to the fartherest corners of the earth. The enterprises of this remarkable man extended even to the Celestial Empire, at that day all but inaccessible to America. Having accumulated a large fortune he removed to Pendleton, South Carolina, where he built a residence and remained until his death, in 1852, largely interested in land speculations.

"Here, Samuel Augustus Maverick was born on the 28th of July, 1803, his mother being a daughter of General Robert Anderson of South Carolina, of Revolutionary renown. Of Mr. Maverick's boyhood and youth little is known. Having received his preliminary education in his own State, he entered Yale College, where he graduated. During his journeyings to and from Yale he made the acquaintance of one destined to be for long years his friend and neighbor, and to follow him to the tomb at an interval of but thirteen days. This was the late Wm. B. Jacques, who often spoke of the gravity and sedateness beyond his years of the young Maverick, whom he had first known in the morning of life.

"At this time Mr. Maverick's friends looked forward to the time when he should become a leading man, and he himself was ambitious to excel and to take a political stand. But his views were diametrically opposed to the nullification ideas of the Carolinians, and he could not compromise with his opinions. He was not a disciple of Calhoun, though personally an admirer of the transcendent talent of that great statesman. Finding himself in politics directly at variance with all his neighbors, he left the State. An incident growing out of this difference had, no doubt, an important part in determining him to such a step as emigration, then much less common than now. His father on one occasion, after having answered Mr. Calhoun in a speech of great power, was made the subject of some intemperate remarks, which his son resented by challenging the utterer of them. In the encounter he wounded his antagonist, and afterwards nursed him until his recovery. With our knowledge of the man, never shrinking from personal risk, we may well imagine that the painful necessity of chastising the aggressor on this occasion, had great influence in his decision to leave South Carolina. Previous to this he had studied law under Henry St. George Tucker at Winchester, Virginia, and had been admitted to practice at the bar of his own State.

"He first moved to Alabama, and thence, in 1834, to Texas, arriving at San Antonio in 1835. In the fall of that year Messrs. Maverick, Jno. W. Smith and P. B. Cocke were arrested by Col. Ugartachea, commanding the Mexican troops occupying the city. During their incarceration they contrived to keep up intelligence with Gen. Burleson, who commanded the Texas army then investing the town. On one occasion these three gentlemen were sentenced on suspicion to be shot, and were actually marched to the place of execution, then Mrs. Smith, now the wife of Mr. James B. Lee, living on the Medina, appeared on the ground, fell upon the earth, embracing the feet of the Mexican commander, begging piteously for a further investigation of their case. The investigation was finally granted, and resulted in the clearing of the prisoners, who were, however, kept under close guard. They made their escape, nevertheless, and joined the Texan army. Early on the morning of the 5th of December, 1835, Col. Ben Milam attacked the city; S. A. Maverick as guide, with Milam at the head of the right division, moving down Soledad street to the de la Garza House—Johnson, commanding the left, marching down Acequia street to the same point, with Jno. W. Smith for guide. The cannon posted at the corner of the Main Plaza swept these streets. To procure water our troops took the Veramendi House by digging a trench of five feet in depth across the street during the night of the 5th, and so going back and forth with heads bent to avoid the grape shot. Of the seven hundred volunteers under Burleson at the Old Mill above town, only two hundred and fifty were under Milam—others joined two days later, but the greater number had gone home or to Goliad, where a force was then gathering to move against Matamoros. On the 8th, Milam was killed in the yard of the Veramendi House, being shot through the head; and by his side stood Mr. Maverick. On the 10th the Mexicans ran up the white flag of surrender. The Texan troops had fought incessantly night and day, and had taken all the square block of buildings fronting the north side of the Main Plaza, by digging through the walls of the houses from one to the other. Where the Plaza House now stands there lived the priest, Padre Garza; from this house the Texans made a charge and took and spiked the guns, the fire of which had been concentrated on that building and was fast crumbling it down. In this charge Col. Ward lost a leg, and the young Carolinian, Bonham, an eye. The Mexican gunners fled or were cut to pieces. This was on the morning of the 10th, and was followed by the capitulation of Gen. Cos, who was permitted to retire with his troops across the Rio Grande.

"Mr. Maverick's absence on March 6th, 1836, the day of the massacre of the Alamo, was due to his being sent a delegate to the Convention of the people of Texas. In which capacity he, on the 2nd day of March, signed the Declaration of Independence; the Hon. Jose Antonio Navarro being the other delegate from the municipality of Bexar, also present and signing.

"After the battle of San Jacinto, the result of which secured the safety of Texas, for a time at least, Mr. Maverick returned to Alabama, where he married in August of the same year, and in 1838, returned to San Antonio with his family.

"In March, 1842, Gen. Vasquez invaded western Texas, entering San Antonio with nine hundred men. On this occasion, Mr. Twohig blew up his store to prevent the ammunition it contained from falling into the hands of the enemy. The few American families then living in San Antonio had made good their escape in time, retiring to the Brazos river. The family of Mr. Maverick did not return to San Antonio until 1847.

"On the 12th day of September of the same year, the District Court being in session, a Mexican citizen, now dead, was visited by some of countrymen, known to be in the Mexican service; from them he ascertained that Gen. Woll was close at hand with a force of fourteen hundred men. This intelligence he communicated to Don Antonio Manchaca, who lost no time in making it known to Judge Hutchison. The few troops stationed in San Antonio immediately withdrew, but the American citizens, with the members of the bar, the presiding judge at their head, decided on defending the place; Mr. Maverick, who was urgent in favor of this course, declaring that they ought to set an example of resistance, and that whatever might be their fate, they would at least check the advance of the enemy, and give time for succor to arrive from the few and scattered settlements which existed at that day in western Texas. They accordingly, in the night of Saturday, the 12th, took up their position on the flat roof of the building known as Maverick's, forming the corner of Commerce and Soledad streets, and commanding all the entrances to the Main Plaza. This little band numbered fifty three Americans and one Mexican, Mr. Manchaca, who had served through the War of Independence, from Bexar to San Jacinto, and was especially marked for vengeance by Santa Anna. Soon after daylight, in a thick fog, the Mexican troops entered the Main Plaza, music in front, little expecting the reception which awaited them. A pealing volley from the Texan rifles checked their march, and before Woll could withdraw them, fourteen were slain outright and twenty-seven wounded. Having placed his men under cover, Gen. Woll brought up two six-pounder guns, and being well advised of the numerical weakness of the Texans, made his disposition for surrounding them and cutting off their escape. On the roof of the Dwyer House, on the southeast corner of the Plaza, he posted thirty-five Cushatta Indians, who formed part of his force. Another detachment crossed the river and took post near the large pecan tree, in front of the barracks. The east bank was guarded by cavalry, also, and preparations of the Mexican commander being now complete, he sent an officer, with a flag to summon the little band to surrender as honorable prisoners of war, adding, that if the conditions offered were not accepted within ten minutes he would advance on them with the bayonet. During the fire of musketry and artillery to which they were exposed while Woll was posting his troops, it is singular that not one of the little band of Texans was hit; they were partially covered by the low parapet of the flat-roofed house. The only one of them who received any injury was Mr. Manchaca, who was struck in the knee by a fragment of stone detached by a round shot, from the effects of which he walks lame to this day. Resistance being evidently vain, the small band surrendered, and were, on the retreat of Woll, marched to the Castle of Perote and there imprisoned, under circumstances of the greatest harshness.

"Gen. Woll has been generally and loudly denounced for breach of faith toward his prisoners; but it is not generally known that in sparing their lives he disobeyed the express orders of President Santa Anna to put to death every man taken with arms in his hands as a rebel and a traitor. These orders were shown by Woll, in 1863, to an intimate friend of Mr. Maverick (now present)—on which occasion he made many friendly inquiries for Maverick, Colquhoun, Twohig, and others by name. When asked why he had not defended his course by the publication of these orders, Woll replied that he himself owed, not only his life, under similar circumstances, to the intervention of Santa Anna, but also his position in the Mexican army, and that he could not, honorably, vindicate himself by the exposure of one to whom he owed so much.

"After the surrender of Maverick, Colquehoun, Twohig, Hutchinson, and their companions, Woll was utterly defeated, with great loss, five miles from San Antonio, on the Salado, by the Texans under Hays and Burleson, and without loss on their own side, if we except the La Grange company under Captain Dawson, which was surrounded by the Mexican troops in the prairie, while on the march to the rendezvous, and cut to pieces, seven only of their number escaping.

"On the 23rd Woll marched on his return to Mexico, carrying his citizen-prisoners with him. On the way, one of the number, Mr. Cunningham, died and was buried on the Leona. On their arrival at Perote they were subjected to the most humiliating and cruel treatment, being confined to cells and frequently chained two together, Major Colquhoun being, if I mistake not, Mr. Maverick's companion in these bonds of adversity. Of these they were relieved from time to time to work on a stone quarry, or on the road which Santa Anna was constructing to his palace of Tacubaya. I have seen the quondam prisoners smile grimly when allusion was made to the little work the Mexicans got out of the Texan captives. While they were here many attempts were made to bribe them with promises of office and favor, and Mr. Maverick particularly approached, on account of his influence in Bexar; but he, like his companions in captivity, had naught but scorn for their offers, which utterly failed to seduce them from their faith and allegiance to Texas.

"By the intercession of Waddy Thompson, then American minister to Mexico, and a relative of Mr. Maverick, the latter with Judge Wm. E. Jones and old Judge Hutchinson, were released in April, 1843; others were released at the instance of the British minister, while others, of whom the leader was Jno. Twohig, disdained to ask protection from either power, and manfully dug their way out of the fortress, making good their escape to Texas in the spring of 1844.

"The following extract from a report of a speech made by Gen. Waddy Thompson, at Greenville, South Carolina, in May, 1844, sets the conduct and character of Mr. Maverick during his captivity, in the most honorable light: 'Amongst the many interesting incidents which General Thompson mentioned there was one particularly so, as it related particularly to a gentleman born and educated in this neighborhood—Mr. Samuel A. Maverick—which, in the language of Gen. Thompson, was not only honorable to the man himself, but to human nature. Mr. Maverick was a young man of large fortune, with a young wife and three or four interesting children. When he arrived at his prison at Perote he wrote to Gen. Thompson, informing him that he was there, and in chains, but said that he neither asked nor expected any interposition from Gen. Thompson, as he considered that such interposition might not be proper, and only asking the General to convey some letters to his family. Gen. Thompson, nevertheless, set about obtaining his release, and as there was then a negotiation on foot for re-annexation of Texas to Mexico, Gen. Thompson wrote to Mr. Maverick, saying that if he was really in favor of such re-annexation, and would say so, he thought his release would certainly be granted, as he, Gen. Thompson would say to Santa Anna that any promise which Maverick made would certainly be complied with. Mr. Maverick replied: 'I regret that I cannot bring myself to think that it would be to the interest of Texas to re-unite with Mexico. This being my settled opinion, I cannot sacrifice the interest of my country even to obtain my liberty, still less can I say so when such is not my opinion, for I regard a lie as a crime, and one which I cannot commit. I must, therefore, make up my mind to wear my chains, galling as they are.' General Thompson said that the virtue and constancy of Regulus, which had immortalized his name, did not excel this; and he felt a special pride in this heroic virtue because Mr. Maverick was a South Carolinian, his neighbor, and the kinsman of his kinsmen.'

"I have dwelt at length on the history of the taking of San Antonio, and the adventures of the prisoners taken there, as they constitute the last episode of the Texas-Mexican war, of which San Antonio was the theatre, and they may give some idea of the dangers and hardships to which the old Texans were exposed.

"During his captivity Mr. Maverick was elected by his fellow citizens of Bexar to the Senate. On his return he found his family at La Grange, all sick; after moving them to the coast, near Decrows Point, he returned to South Carolina to procure means to meet obligations which he had assumed in many instances for the relief of his more necessitous companions in captivity. He gradually sold his property elsewhere and invested in Texas lands. In 1847 he returned to San Antonio, where he continued to reside up to the time of his death, September 2nd of this year.

"In 1838 he took out his law license in San Antonio. From 1838 until 1842 he was one of Hays' minute men, and often followed the trail of the marauding Indians under that celebrated chieftain. He accompanied his old leader, in 1848, on his expedition to open route from San Antonio to El Paso del Norte. On this memorable trip they lost their way, and were at the point of starvation, one man actually perishing of hunger; when they were guided by Indians to San Elizario, on the Rio Grande, where they found food and rest. Their route back from El Paso established the present road by Devil's river, Fort Stockton and Fort Davis.

"And now I approach an era in Mr. Maverick's life without a notice of which I should signally fail of doing justice to his character. We have seen that in 1834 he was driven by his opposition to nullification in South Carolina, to seek a home elsewhere. In 1860 he appeared on the stage of public events an ardent, zealous, and fearless advocate of secession—and in this there was no inconsistency; a Union man as long as the Union guaranteed and protected the dignity and sovereignty of the States which composed it, and the rights of their citizens; he advocated and strove for secession when he saw that these rights could not be maintained in the Union, and that the Constitution had failed to be the Aegis its framers had fondly hoped it to be. A scholar, his mind was too well versed in historic lore, and his intellect too right in the wisdom which deduces lessons for our guidance in the present from the annals of the past, not to know that revolutions once arrived at a certain point, continue to progress at increasing speed. A true Republican, he foresaw innovations which would substitute the will of the majority for the rights of the minority, and which would change the whole fabric of the government and institutions for which his fathers and himself had periled their lives.

"In February, 1861, as one of the three Commissioners of the Committee of Public Safety, he was charged with the delicate duty of procuring the removal of the United States troops from the State of Texas—and that all this was effected without bloodshed, and with so little of inconvenience or humiliation to the officers and men who had so long been friends among us, constitutes one of his highest titles to the respect and gratitude of his fellow citizens. And a very little acquaintance with the situation of affairs at the time will satisfy anyone, whatever views he may entertain on the question of accession, that but for this action of the Commissioners, civil war would have been inaugurated in the State; the Federal troops, numerous, well equipped and well commanded, forming a nucleus for an army composed of the forces which the Governor had already commanded to organize for the maintenance of Federal authority. No one who knows the feelings which prevailed throughout Texas can doubt that the Union army would soon have succumbed, but I repeat, that to the prudent yet energetic action of the Commissioners, and of their coadjutors, Texas owes it that no blood was then shed within her borders, and that she escaped the horrors of war which devastated her sister States.

"With this closed the public functions of Mr. Maverick, which he had exercised in various capacities from the memorable day when he affixed his signature to the Declaration of Independence, and always with credit to himself and advantage to his constituents; his public services in either House. In convention, or in any capacity whatever, being rendered with a disinterestedness and freedom from all personal and party considerations; which I trust will yet again be imitated in the legislative halls of our State.

"From this imperfect sketch of the life of our lamented associate it may be understood what manner of man he was. In all the qualities which constitute the true gentleman he was confessedly pre-eminent. Truthful to a punctilio, no man can say that he ever used equivocal language, and his sincerity was testified to by the confidence he commanded from all who knew him. And of those who enjoyed that privilege, who is there who does not remember to admire that courtesy of the old school which is fast passing away.

"Prudent and considerate, he never said of the absent one word, which uttered in their presence, could have wounded or pained them. Modest and retiring to a fault, he ever manifested that forgetfulness of his own comfort and convenience which is the true test of good breeding.

"His personal bravery was as patent as the sun at noonday. In moral courage he knew no superior. From that hour of jeopardy, when he signed the Declaration of Independence, to the last public act of his life, there was no hesitation, no wavering, no consideration of risk to person or property.

"It has been said, and not without truth—alas for the perversity of human nature!—that no man of worth can live without making enemies; this may be so, but if it be, Mr. Maverick's case furnishes the exception, which, according to the old scholastic dictum, proves the rule; for manifold as were the occasions which his vast landed possessions and his public functions at various times furnished for collision with the interests and passions of others, I verily believe he passed from earth without leaving on its surface a single personal enemy. Not that he courted popularity, for no man ever lived more independent of the prejudices and fashions of the world, and many personal peculiarities stamped him with an individuality all his own. And if, on rare occasions, amid the turmoil of civil commotion and revolutionary license, some pigmy of a hostile press sought to cast a stain on the record of this good man, 'twas but the homage he paid to virtues which he could never aspire to emulate.

"It may be thought by some that he was close and penurious, that he loved money more than the world deems right; but in this opinion the world, as is often the case, was very much mistaken. Those who knew him best, his oldest and most intimate friends, knew him to be most liberal and most generous when a worthy object of expenditure offered. True, he was careful and prudent in the management of his affairs; he was frugal and unostentatious in his habits, and he carried into practice his philosophic scorn of the gewgaws of fashion and of display. Years ago, when sickness and distress pressed hard on the poorer classes in San Antonio, secretly, and as a thief in the night, Mr. Maverick came unto the then mayor of the city, bearing something under his cloak—that cloak which, among the older inhabitants may be remembered as an historical relic—drawing forth the hidden object, Mr. Maverick in his peculiar hurried manner begged his honor to undertake the distribution among the necessituous of a thousand dollars, his contribution in this time of suffering, and above all, to say nothing of it.

"Such was the penuriousness of this good man, 'who did by stealth, and would have blushed to find it fame.' Would to God there were more misers of this stamp among us!

"I would sum up his character in the words of one who witnessed his first appearance at the bar of this District Court, and who formed one of the long procession which bore him to the tomb: "Mr. Maverick's distinguishing characteristics were still the same through life; quiet, sedate, courteous, gentle and dignified; none knew him but to respect and admire him. More eminently just and dispassionate than brilliant and captivating, mature age found him a venerated exemplar of all the highest virtues.'

"Thus I have feebly, but truthfully, sought to sketch for you the life and character of our late associate. His honored head has been laid in the grave; the place which knew him shall know him no more forever; but his services to Texas and his sufferings in her behalf are a part of her history. His virtues shine forth as a light to the feet of those who seek to tread the path of life with honor to themselves and with benefit to their fellows.

"To this Society he leaves the signal honor of having inscribed his name on the roll of its founders, and the task of rearing on the site, which you owe to his munificence, an edifice which may do honor to the donor and credit to your young Association, the Alamo Literary Society; a task in which I trust you will be aided by the wealthier members of the community.

"To the inheritors of his name he has bequeathed a heritage richer than broad lands more precious than fine gold—the name of a just, an upright and a conscientious man, of one who never compromised with his convictions, who never bowed the knee to expediency; and let them ever remember that the name they bear has long been a synonym for honor, integrity and truth."

Mrs. Mary Adams Maverick, widow of Samuel A. Maverick, was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, March 16, 1818, and died at San Antonio, Texas, February 24, 1898, having attained the age of fourscore years, lacking a few days.

J. Marvin Hunter, Frontier Times, April, 1928

Mavericks and Maverickers

Old Diamond Joe was a rich old jay,
With lots of cowboys in his pay;
He rode the range with his cowboy band,
And many a mav’rick got his brand.

—“Diamond Joe,” in LOMAX’S Cowboy Songs.

Wherever the Spanish introduced cattle some of the offspring soon ran wild and unbranded. While these cimarrones—the original cattle of Texas—were being caught and killed by the colonists or absorbed into their small herds, the ranching industry advanced. Meanwhile cattle were constantly escaping the cows works, taking refuge in remote coverts, and breeding a progeny to mature with ears unmarked and sides unburned. At no time in the history of ranching, until barbed wire brought the range under control, was there a dearth of mavericks in Texas. Their great era was right after the Civil War, about which time the word “maverick” passed from local into wide popular use.

The word and its derivatives took on varying meanings. The simple facts of its origin were expanded by dictionaries, range talk, and books concerned with cowboy life into a cycle of legends. Despite Mr. Webster and other New England authorities on Southern speech, there are only two syllables in the word (mav-rick) as pronounced by any genuine Texan.

Charlie Siringo, who mavericked on the Texas coast and in 1885 published the first cowboy autobiography known, elaborates on how Samuel Maverick, “being a chickenhearted old rooster, wouldn’t brand or earmark any of his cattle.” All his neighbors branded theirs—and his too. Nevertheless, the “old rooster went on claiming everything that wore slick ears. . . . At first people said, ‘Yonder goes one of Mr. Maverick’s animals.’ Then, upon seeing any unbranded animal anywhere, they got to saying, ‘Yonder goes a maverick.’”

According to another source, at a great meeting of stockraisers in southern Texas each man declared publicly what brand and earmark he would use. Finally, after everybody but an “old Longhorn named Maverick” had recorded his brand, he allowed he wouldn’t use any brand at all; and then when range people saw anything unbranded they would know it belonged to him—and would please not claim it. As he was known to possess only “a triflin’ bunch of Mexican steers” and not a single cow, the other cattlemen agreed.

Samuel Maverick, the legend goes on, was in 1861 the largest landholder in the United States and owned more cattle than any other man in Texas. His ambition was to travel on his own land all the six hundred miles from San Antonio to El Paso and to stock it. After the Civil War he had a logical claim to tens of thousands of the unbranded cattle—“Maverick stuff”—though little good it did him.

But, no, another form of the legend persists: In the beginning Maverick had nothing except “an old stag, a branding iron, a tireless perseverance, and a mortality that was blind in one eye.” The stag was more prolific than Tommy Simpson’s Scotch cows, which always brought quintuplets, and the branding iron worked faster than a billy goat. A man had to get up early and ride late to do even a small share of the mavericking business when Maverick was on the range. He became “one of the cattle kings” and was the bull of the woods in “bovine aristocracy.”

The word “maverick,” says one writer, comes from the name of a great cattle driver whose herd, consisting of many thousands, stampeded in a snowstorm at a mountain pass ten thousand feet above the sea and were so scattered that he could not regather them. Their offspring came to be known as “Maverick’s cattle,” though he had no more power over them than Mother Carey had over Mother Carey’s chickens.

Another “authority” tells how Maverick had his cattle on an island off the coast of Texas. As they were entirely cut off from all other cattle, he did not have to brand them to maintain ownership. But one night a tropical storm blew all the water out of the pass between the island and the mainland; the cattle rushed across, mixed with other cattle, and were dispersed beyond recovery. A variant of this story is that some fishermen sent Maverick word that his cattle had overpopulated the island. He had forgotten all about them. Now he ordered a big cow hunt to brand the cattle and move a portion of them to the mainland. Then, a herd of thousands having been assembled, they stampeded, swam the bay, scattered like quail, and became the quarry of whoever could rope and brand them.

Eight hundred bulls, however, the legend concludes, were salvaged by Maverick’s men and driven to the Salado above San Antonio. Just bulls and nothing else, and they were fiercer than fierce. Stockmen from all over the country got a “rawhiding” Maverick unmercifully. They would ask him about the price of bull meat, whether he threw in the hide and horns, how many ranches he intended to start, and “otherwise nearly ran the old gentleman to the verge of distraction.” Finally, in answer to any allusion to the subject, he would say, “For God’s sake help yourself to whatever bulls you want.”

There was, in truth, an island. The facts have long been available. Samuel A. Maverick, a lawyer, one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence against Mexico, and an extensive speculator in lands, was the English-speaking citizen of San Antonio in 1842 when an invading Mexican army captured him and took him prisoner to Mexico City, where he was in time released.

In 1845 he was living temporarily at Decrow’s Point on Matagorda Bay. A neighbor named Tilton owed him $1200, could not raise the money, and persuaded Maverick to take four hundred head of cattle running on Matagorda Island in cancellation of the debt. Maverick did not want the cattle; he knew almost nothing about cattle and had no ambition to learn. Soon after receiving them, he left the four hundred head thus forced upon him, along with a few ponies, under the care of a Negro family nominally slave but essentially free—especially, free to be shiftless.

Matagorda Island, with its southern appendage Saint Joseph’s Island, is a great sand bar more than seventy miles long, in places less than a mile wide and in other places spreading out four or five miles. It is beached rather evenly on the outer side by the Gulf of Mexico and indented on the other by scores of inlets from Espiritu Santo, Mesquite, Aransas, and other bays. At shallow places like Dagger Point, the Karankawa Indians used to wade across from the mainland at low tide, and until recent times cattle were driven from the island to the mainland in the same way, though barges now take them across.

High sand dunes, some of them grassed over and some of them so loose that they shift constantly with the constant winds, parallel the Gulf shore. Running down the center of the island is an irregular prairie carpeted with coastal grasses. There are fresh water lakes, though wells and windmills nowadays supply most of the stock water. Three or four times a century hurricanes sweep Gulf water over the land. Far in from the bearded salt rye of the dunes one can see occasionally a great drift log, under which deer and even cattle shade. Ranching is the only occupation, and four or five ranches occupy the whole land. Prickly pear, Spanish dagger, mesquite, huisache, catclaw and other low growth are to be found in places. Coons, which live on water life, coyotes, sand crabs, deer, jack rabbits that look almost as big as the deer, rattlesnakes, an infinite variety of shore birds and, in winter, migratory fowls by the hundreds of thousands, give a profusion of life to a land seemingly empty.

Here Maverick’s cattle could roam as free as any other creatures of nature. They could scatter not only up and down the long island, but could, if the notion struck them, wade across to the mainland when the tide was low and the wind was blowing the water out of the bay. Perhaps some of them, like the deer, now and then passed to the mainland. Modern Herefords on the island will not make such a venture. When droughts dried up the little fresh water lakes, some perhaps died of thirst, the more thrifty standing in salt water for hours a day absorbing moisture.

The Mexican War was being fought; Texas was ceasing to be a Republic and becoming a state. Maverick was in the stir of the times. Now and then he heard something about the cattle and heard that the calves were not being branded. In 1853 he had his entire stock, in so far as it could be gathered, crossed to the mainland and driven to a range up the San Antonio River. His visible stock still numbered about four hundred head.

The Negro family came with the herd and continued to be the official caretakers. They became energetic enough to brand about a third of the calves. Owners of other cattle in the country were keeping their own calves branded up, and were hunting down older unclaimed animals. Surmising that at least some of the unbranded animals they saw were Maverick’s they got to calling all of them “mavericks”—and they “mavericked” them.

This was not thought of as stealing—it was not stealing; it was the custom of the range at the time. There was comparatively little stealing of cattle before the Civil War. All calves caught in the “cow hunts” were branded in the brands of their mothers, whether the branders knew who the owner of the cow was or not. The old-time cowman was a patriarch, but the range has always been matriarchal. Unbranded cattle of a year old and up went to whoever caught them.

But to get back to Samuel Maverick. In 1856 he sold out his stock of cattle, estimated at the original number, four hundred head, at six dollars around, range delivery. That is, the purchaser, one Toutant Beauregard, took the stock “as they ran.” If there were more than four hundred head, he was the gainer; if less, the loser. He hoped to find a considerable number of mavericks on Maverick’s range.

These were the last and only cattle that Samuel A. Maverick ever owned. His unintentional contribution to the American language was more important, perhaps, than his honorable and useful part in Texas affairs; at least it has done far more to keep his name green, and it has made him a notable factor in the history of a business he really never entered. One of his descendants, Maury Maverick, recently published a book with the punning title, A Maverick American. The word in time came to mean, as applied to persons, one who has separated himself from the heard, or a mere stray.

A “maverick brand” was an unrecorded brand. Theoretically it would “hold” an animal on the range against being driven off, but in case theft was suspected the brand could not be fixed—by any records—on the thief. “Mavericking” graduated into a soft synonym for stealing. The illegitimate “maverickers” would sometimes slit the tongue of a suckling calf so that it could no longer suck and would soon stop following its mother. If a calf with a slit tongue were put in a pen with other calves, it could not bawl and betray its strangeness to the place. Maverickers at times killed the mother cows and hid the carcasses, thus destroying evidence of theft, for a healthy cow with a swollen bag and no calf says that some thief has stolen her baby. Again the maverickers would cut the calves off, drive them to some canyon and rasp their feet so that they could not walk back hunting their mothers. Or the feet of the cows might be rasped so that they could not follow the calves.

Just as some men fudged on the age of the calves, anticipating the time when they might become true mavericks, others would brand nothing they did not absolutely know to be their own, though they would fight to finish in holding that. Jack Potter tells how one day on a New Mexico range he roped a bull maverick that looked to be past a year old and was about to brand it when a notoriously honest cowpuncher loped up yelling for him to wait. The puncher jumped down off his horse, grabbed the young bull’s head, and went to smelling its breath. “That yearlin’ has a ma,” he said, untying the rope. “He had his liquid diet this morning.” And sure enough, the very next day, the bull yearling, who had ranged away from his ma only temporarily, was found butting her bag for more milk.

Of the millions of cattle in Texas at the close of the Civil War, none were yet out on the Great Plains; all of them were far east of the Pecos River. Perhaps a third or a fourth of these millions were unbranded. Nearly all able-bodied men, many of whom were killed, had been occupied in warfare, either in the Confederate Army or against Indians. The slave population, very sparse in all but the eastern part of the cow country, had raised cotton and grain—and rested. The women and children and old men could brand calves that stayed around the homesteads. There was nobody to ride the far ranges and work the wilder-growing cattle. During the more than four years of war, calves by the multiplied thousands had grown into twisty-horned cows and fighting bulls without having felt the rope, many of them without having seen a rider, unless perhaps a Comanche. With peace established, the catching and branding of these cattle became in some regions almost the sole occupation of the returned men and developing youth. Even then, on some of the brushy and broken frontiers, for a decade mavericks developed almost as fast as they were caught out.

They were unbelievably numerous, and, therefore, cheap. Once, in a lull of Indian raids, Andrew Gatluf Jones and some other rangers took time off in the Nueces River country and caught four hundred head of mavericks, which they drove to Bandera and sold for two dollars a head—and as a result were fired from the ranger service. They were lucky to get that two dollars a head. Kil Vickers gathered up two hundred head of mavericks and big steers without visible owners, drove them to Rockport, shipped them by boat to New Orleans—and lost $2.50 a head on the deal.

Beyond the settlements there was a wilderness of mavericks. Not long after the war closed, a boy named Vinton James (who had just been cured of chills and fever by a tumbler of whisky mixed with the fire of an even one hundred Mexican peppers) went out with some men on the big divide above the headwaters of the Llano River. The first morning of the hunt, he says, “We succeeded, after a great deal of trouble, in gathering quite a bunch of all kinds of cattle. . . . There were many mavericks, among them a number of old bulls. These bulls absolutely refused to be driven or to leave the herd. They fought so viciously when we tried to cut them out, that the men drew their pistols and guns and killed several. Then a corral was built out of cedar and captured cattle were driven into it. That night, and every night afterwards, so long as we remained at this place, we kept large fires burning around the corral so as to keep the cattle from stampeding.”

According to an old saying representing a common belief, all it took to make a cowman—an owner—was “a rope, nerve to use it and a branding iron.” It took more than that. When mavericks were thickest, markets were remote and uncertain. Any man who developed a fortune on the open range was masterful enough to control his part of it and to maintain ownership of stock widely scattered and always being further scattered unless the scatterers were held down.

In the fall of 1876 Adolph Huffmeyer, twenty years old, was drawing thirty dollars a month branding mavericks for his employers and doing cow work generally. He had seen a man brand as many as eighteen mavericks a day; he himself had tied down and run the iron on a dozen in one day—for the men who had him hired. Some maverickers got paid by the head, fifty cents or a dollar being the standard price. Young Huffmeyer decided that if he mavericked on his own hook he could average at least six long-ears a day and in the course of a few months have a herd of his own. He had saved a little money. He bought three cow ponies, took a supply of coffee, salt and meal, a can for boiling coffee in, a skillet for making corn bread in, his overcoat, which would not shed water, two blankets, a running iron and an extra rope, and went to “laying out with the dry cattle.”

He was going to be a great cowman, and he decided to make his brand commemorate the year in which he began as an owner. Onto the left side of the first maverick that he roped, he burned 7 T 6—“Seventy-six.” His mark was a smooth crop on the right ear and under halfcrop on the left. After he had roped for six weeks, his tally showed around 250 head of cattle in the 7 T 6 brand. He was averaging six mavericks a day.

Then one morning a young cowboy friend rode up on him.

“Of course, you’ve got that brand and mark recorded,” the friend said when Huffmeyer told of his success.

The mavericker didn’t know much about records, had not though of the matter. At daylight next morning he was sitting on the courthouse steps in Frio Town waiting for the county clerk.

“What brand do you want to record?” the clerk asked.

“7 T 6,” and Huffmeyer scrawled it on a piece of paper.

In Texas brands are recorded by counties, not by the state. The law is that no brand may be duplicated in any county, and a brand cannot be legally claimed unless it is legally recorded. The clerk opened his brand book and scanned the pages on which brands beginning with the figure 7 were recorded.

“Why, just the other day,” he said, “So-and-so recorded 7 T 6 as his brand with the very earmark you give.”

That settled the matter. Adolph Huffmeyer did not have any cattle. He had branded 250 head for another man.

For all the good that the other man derived from his shoddy trick, he might as well not have played it. Two hundred and fifty head of jack rabbits in the chaparral, all branded in his name, would have been of just about as much worth to him as those two hundred and fifty wild cattle, scattered from hell to breakfast in a broken, brushy country as wild as they were. Unless the owner could be represented in many cow hunts, he would never get a tenth of the animals. It took far more power to gather, sell and collect the increase from a bunch of scattered mavericks than it did to merely rope and brand them. That was just the start. The open range was for the strong, for those who could hold as well as take.

Theoretically a man had no right to start a brand unless he had some seed cows to contribute to the general crop of calves, but in an enormous country of few people and many cattle this theory was often overlooked.

Young L. T. Harmon was working for a ranchman, branding mavericks, in Live Oak County, down in the brush country.

“Why don’t you brand a few for yourself?” the ranchman generously suggested.

“Why, I don’t have a stock of cattle and have no brand,” Harmon replied.

“Start a brand.”

Harmon started a brand. He became very energetic in applying it—X X X L. After he had worked on his own hook for several months, the man who had started him off bought him out, range delivery, for a thousand dollars. “You are not leaving me enough mavericks,” he said. Having a range of his own, and being potent enough to control his own brand, he could along with it take care of the X X X L brand. One cowman often gave a dozen brands concurrently.

The average cowman did not encourage cowless cowboys to “start a brand.” In the early seventies four brothers by the name of Dunn and young Ike Hewitt were branding mavericks at four-bits a head for cowmen operating on the Gulf coast. They figured their wages against the price of cattle and decided to start a brand of their own, which they recorded and went energetically to putting on what they could rope.

The cowmen who had employed these young men to maverick now looked upon mavericking in an entirely new light. One night a small posse captured the five, led them into a thicket, strung them up, and said adiós with a volley of bullets at the swinging forms.

One bullet entered Ike Hewitt’s body; another severed the rope by which he hung. It was a cold, cold night. Hours later he came to life. Dazed, he felt the bodies of his comrades. They were as stiff as frozen fish. Hewitt made his way to a friendly family, was nursed back to health, and became a coast freighter. He wore a coonskin cap and was known as “Coonskin Ike.” He never used his full name, and he never rode a horse after that night in the thicket.

Many little owners kept their stocks of cattle under day herd, penning them at night. When spring came, they would sell off their steers and keep the calves penned by day so that the mother cows would come to them each evening. Then while the cows stayed in the pen at night, the calves would be turned out to graze.

In 1871 Dan Waggoner, who ranched in northern Texas, made a trade with Joe Loving to handle a bunch of stock cattle for him for five years on shares. A partnership brand was put on them. Of course the more increase Loving could produce, the higher would be his portion. That fall he took an outfit of men and made a raid on counties to the south.

“We gathered,” says Dot Babb, who was working for Loving, “all the big early calves we could find that were not marked or branded. We took in the mothers of some of the calves and some we did not. When we did not want the mother cows, we cut them back, and if they returned we shot them in the nose or punched them. In this way we gathered about five hundred ‘mavericks’ and branded them, turning them loose on the Wagoner range. Then Joe Loving took his outfit in another direction and brought back all the big calves he could see or get, regardless of who owned them. The citizens very soon discovered what was going on, and there was talk of mobbing Mr. Waggoner. He knew nothing of the stealing—the ‘mavericking.’ As soon as he learned the facts, he bought out Joe Loving’s interest and made a satisfactory settlement with the rightful owners”—that is, the assertive owners who could get to him and prove their rights. “In those days,” Dot Babb continues, “unbranded cattle belonged to the outfits who could get to them first and then had enough fighting men to hold and keep them.”

The cattlemen were forced to make rules fixing dates for the beginning and ending of range work. Then every owner would have an even break, and the cattle would not be continually “choused to death.” “Sooners,” as men who rushed the branding season came to be called, violated the rules of course, but still the rules helped. In the fall of 1870 the cattlemen of Palo Pinto County assembled and fixed February first of the following year as the date on which branding should begin. One cold raining day not long afterwards W. C. Cochran was deer-hunting when he came upon a rancher named Will Allen hunting mavericks—legitimate mavericks this time—with dogs. There were not then any matches in the country, and the wood was too wet for Allen to start a fire with the flint, steel and punk that every man carried. He was carrying a chunk of fire from one bunch of cattle to another. He said he had caught and branded fifteen mavericks that day.

On the twentieth of January following he and his men appeared one evening at the pens of West Edwards’ ranch with about a hundred mavericks they had brazenly gathered on the Edwards range. He went to branding them under Edwards’ eyes. Edwards rode most of the night. By four o’clock next morning he had three hands, each with a blanket, some grub in a morral, a Winchester and two six-shooters each. They were “in good shape to work cattle.” They rode to Will Allen’s range and in two days branded two hundred and fifty mavericks.

In Hood County about the same time an enterprising rancher named Haley had a pen full of big calves and yearlings ready for branding just a day ahead of the date agreed upon for the community work to start. That night an indignant owner took some men, turned the mavericks out of Haley’s pen, drove them to his own, and then notified surrounding cowmen to come. They came, the percentage of calves going to each man being based on the number of cows he was supposed to own. There was no way of telling what calf belonged to what cow, but the aggregate of branded cows had produced the aggregate of unbranded calves. The owner on the open range kept tally of the calves he branded and of whatever he sold; he estimated the annual per cent of losses; and then he had a rough idea—sometimes very rough indeed—of the number of cattle he owned.

Mavericking was a sport in which the majority of ropers prized the game more highly than the property.

“We had no wagon,” a mavericker of 1866 wrote fifty-seven years later. “Every man carried his grub in a wallet behind his saddle and his bed under his saddle. A wallet is a sack with both ends sewed up and a slit in the middle. As a boy I had to stay on herd. I carried a lot of extra wallets on behind my saddle and a string of tin cups on a rawhide hobble around my pony’s neck. Whenever the boss herder couldn’t hear those cups jingling, he would come around and wake me up. We would corral the cattle every night at some one of the owners’ homes and stand guard around the corral. I didn’t stand any guard, but I carried brush and corn-stalks and anything I could get to make a light for those who were not on guard to play poker by. They played for unbranded cattle, yearlings at fifty cents a head, and the top price for any class was five dollars a head. If a man ran out of cattle and had a little money, he could get back in the game. For ten dollars, say, he could get a stack of yearlings. My compensation for light was two-bits a night, or as long as the game lasted. Every few days they would divide up and brand the mavericks and each owner would take his cattle home”—perhaps to day-herd them, penning them every night so that they would get gentle and locate permanently on his range—perhaps never to see them again.

The year 1869 was exceptionally wet in southern Texas. “You could almost travel in a skiff across the prairies from Houston to Corpus Christi.” It was also a fine year for mavericks. That fall Jim (J. N.) Jones, who ranched on the San Miguel Creek in Frio County, threw in with five other men for a maverick hunt. They took along a nest egg of gentle cattle and were able to “ease” many mavericks into the herd without having to rope them. They held what they caught, intending to brand them at the end of the work. A lone mavericker or a pair of maverickers could not operate in this way, but a cow crowd could. After having hunted for a week or ten days, Jones and his companions got back to the San Miguel late one drizzly evening with 260 mavericks, and shut them in the muddy pens.

As the hungry and wet maverickers sat down in the warm kitchen to a supper of hot biscuits, fried steak, and beans and bacon with plenty of black coffee, the rain began to pour. After supper they started playing poker, mavericks making the stakes. Each of the six men was provided with forty-three frijoles, each bean representing a maverick, the two undividable animals being left for future disposition. The game of freeze-out to see who should have all the 260 mavericks began to get warm.

After it had gone on for some time and Mrs. Jones was through washing the dishes, she came to the table and called attention to the rain. “It is a regular waterspout,” she said. “With the ground already soaked, the San Miguel is getting up into the pens. I know it is.”

There was no move on the part of the gamblers. The woman’s eagerness to break the game up, and thus forestall the chance of her husband’s losing his share of the property, was plain. “The cattle are all in danger of being drowned,” she went on.

The men continued playing. Here was something, for the moment, more interesting than rain or cattle. An hour passed. The rain was still falling in sheets. Again Mrs. Jones went to the gamblers. “Don’t you hear those cattle bawling?” she said, her voice high. “They are in distress. I know they are. You had better stop and see about them. Those pens are in low ground.”

“The water will never get up into the pens,” Jim Jones answered. “I built them above the high-water mark. Let the cows low and the bulls beller. . . . Raise you a maverick.”

More time passed. Then suddenly Mrs. Jones exclaimed, “Look, the water is coming up into the floor. The San Miguel is raging like the Mississippi.”

Now the men stopped, each making count of the beans he had left. The deluge had slacked a little. Peering out, they were aware of a vast expanse of raging waters. They went to the pens, which were made of mesquite logs, the gates being barred with poles. The cattle were moaning and bawling. As the men approached, they heard that clicking of horns and snuffing that told them the mavericks were packed in a mill—were circling like a whirlpool. Flashes of lightning revealed a crazy mass of cattle wound into such a tight ball that a rabbit could not have squeezed to the center from the outside. Doubtless some of the cattle in the center were already down and being smothered and trampled to death. The men tried to break the mill but they simply could not. The only way to break it was to open the gate and get the cattle headed out. The waters of the San Miguel were already a foot deep in the pen.

Turning a maverick, not yet branded, out on the open range was like throwing a dollar into the open sea. The men hastily saddled horses, pulled down the bars, and prepared to do the best they could to hold them when the mavericks should bolt for freedom. The water had risen perceptibly. Not an animal would notice the open gateway. The horsemen rode against the mass. They could not budge it. Again the heaven opened. The flooded creek was rising fast. Jones and his friends now became alarmed for the household. They found Mrs. Jones and her children on the table, water two feet deep on the floor. They were carried to high land. By daylight the water had taken the roof off the house.

When the San Miguel subsided, a few of the 260 drowned mavericks were about the remains of the pen. Most of them had been washed away. The game of freeze-out poker was never finished.

There were other ways of seeing who should take "the whole caboodle."

When Seco Smith built his cabin on the creek in Medina County that still bears his name—the Seco—he had been a forty-niner. Once, on a scout out from San Antonio, he had lost the tracks of the Indians, though he was a noted trailer, because bears hunting Mexican persimmons were so thick they covered up all sign. Soon after building his cabin he married a young woman whom the Comanches had lanced, scalped and left for dead but who recovered sufficiently to help Seco raise a considerable family of children. At the age of eighty-six he had his third wife and fifteen living children, three or four of them still in the yearling age. When, in his palmy days, he came in occasionally to San Antonio, he'd give a warwhoop on Alamo Plaza that echoed against the cathedral walls on Military Plaza half a mile away. He was strong, wiry and untamed like the country—the country of mavericks.

One time Seco, George Redus, Lon Moore and perhaps another rancher or two went on a maverick hunt in the Frio Canyon country. At the conclusion of the hunt George Redus and Lon Moore, each of whom had thirty animals coming to him, decided to shoot at a mark with six-shooters to see which would take the other's booty. Redus won. Seco Smith then bantered him to shoot for thirty mavericks—and won. Characteristically, he gave the thirty back to his boon compadre Moore.

If it had not been for the Indians, the mavericks, which went on breeding more mavericks, would have been more quickly branded up. In the Palo Pinto country Indians kept ranchers afoot most of the time. Five of the Cowden boys and three neighboring Bradford boys began their mavericking operations barefooted and afoot. This was in 1867. These eight boys, with a man to bring up the drags, would get around a bunch of cows and manage them into a pen. What they could not pen they would catch with two dogs named Buck and Tige. Jeff Cowden could run the fastest, and he always took the lead. He was the only one of the brothers that did not make a fortune. After the Indians were cleared out and he had all the horses he could ride, he kept on running. He roped the smokestack of the first steam engine run over the railroad built into his country.

A good "catch dog" was prized as highly as a good horse. There were dogs so well trained and so intelligent that upon sighting a bunch of cattle they would single out the only maverick in it and hold it by the nose until a man arrived and roped it. Some maverickers, instead of roping, tailed their quarry down. To run up on a flying cow so that the rider could catch her tail, wrap it around his leg or the horn of his saddle, and then swerve with a jerk in such a way that she would have the "wind busted out of her" required a good horse, well trained.

After cattle became valuable and a pushing population afforded contenders, mavericks in the long run meant more trouble than prosperity.

In the seventies, Jake and Joel English with a hired Mexican vaquero were mavericking in the Carrizo Springs country west of the Nueces River. Population was not pushing very strong in that neck of the brush country at the time.

"One day," Jake English remembered, "we rode down a white-brush draw hoping to scare out something, when all of a sudden my horse, which was in the lead, gave a snort and a lunge to one side. There, swelled up on the ground bigger'n a skinned mule, was a dead sorrel horse.

"He had a bullet hole in his forehead. A few steps off was a two-year-old brown maverick bull with a lobo stripe down his back shot through the head also. On the other side of the horse from the bull was a new saddle hanging from the limb of a mesquite tree. Near it a new saddle blanket, grey with red stripes, was spread over two or three limbs so as to make a shade. Lying on his back under this blanket, was a man. A good hat covered his face. On his feet were a pair of fine shopmade boots, the Petmecky spurs still on the heels. He was dead with a bullet through his heart. He was a white man. We didn't know him. We didn't know who had killed him. The maverick bull explained in a general way. Whoever did the killing had made a neat job of arranging the corpse. Then he had ridden on. It wasn't any of our business. We rode on also, after mavericks."

John Champion, while mavericking on the Arroyo Tortuga in the same region, roped a dun maverick bull, only to discover that the thick brush he had been running through had grabbed his little branding iron. He tied the bull securely. The next day when he came back to brand it, the bull was gone. Near by Champion saw fresh horse tracks. After he had followed them a short distance, he heard brush popping and raking leather. He went to the sound.

A Mexican was leading the dun bull, though he had his own rawhide reata and not Champion's on it. The Mexican said he had found the bull running free on the range. Champion, with six-shooter drawn, called him a liar and several other things, told him he had stolen the bull from the tree, and made a dead shot. Then he put a bullet into the bull at the base of the ear. There was a kind of prejudice against a maverick that had brought on a killing. The most famous example in Texas and the whole West was the maverick branded M U R D E R.

In 1890 most of the trans-Pecos country was still unfenced, and in the timbered and brushed roughs plenty of Longhorn blood still ran wild. On January 28 of that year the small cattle owners operating around the Leoncita waterholes in northern Brewster County—which is as large as some states, taking in most of the proposed Big Bend National Park—held a roundup to brand what calves had escaped the fall work. Between two and three thousand cattle were thrown together in the herd.

The chief operators in this part of the country were Dubois and Wentworth. They did not approve of such early work and were taking no part in it, but one of their riders named Fine Gilleland was present to represent their interests.

Among the "little men" was Henry Harrison Powe. He was a Mississippian who had left college to fight in the Confederate Army and was one-armed as a result. He had come to Texas during the hard-handed Reconstruction days. Not many miles from the roundup grounds he had buried the body—eleven bullet holes in it—of a murdered nephew. He was considered an honest man, not at all contentious. His brand was H H P.

In the roundup, among other branded animals, was a brindle yearling bull. It was not following any cow, but the roundup boss and another range man informed Powe that the bull belonged to a certain H H P cow. They had seen him with the cow and knew both animals well by flesh marks. "Are you positive?" Powe asked. They said they would swear to the brindle's identity. Then Powe rode into the herd and cut the brindle out, heading him into a small cut of cows and calves being held by his own son.

Very soon after this, Fine Gilleland galloped up to the cut. "Does that brindle bull have a mother here?" he asked the boy sharply.

"No," the boy replied, "but the boss told Father it belongs to an H H P cow."

"He'll play hell taking it unless he produces the cow," Gilleland retorted. Then, without another word, he separated the brindle and ran him back to the main herd.

Powe saw the bull coming, followed by Gilleland. He rode out and the two men passed some words not heard by others. Then Powe turned back into the roundup and started to cut the brindle out again. Gilleland made straight towards him. Halted in the middle of the herd, the two men had some more words. They were very brief. Powe was unarmed. He rode to the far side of the herd and borrowed a six-shooter out of a friend's saddle pocket.

Back into the herd Powe now rode, found the brindle bull and started him for the H H P cut, following him out. Midway between the cut and the big herd, Fine Gilleland met them. He roped at the bull but missed. Powe pulled his six-shooter and shot at the bull but missed. By the time, Gilleland was off his horse shooting at Powe to kill. He killed.

Gilleland now remounted and left the roundup in a run. In all probability he was honest in claiming the brindle maverick for his employers. Perhaps he hoped to make a reputation. There was a strong tendency on the range for little owners to "feed off" any big outfit in their country. The big spreads sometimes hired men to be hard.

The Powe boy rode immediately to Alpine to notify rangers of the killing. Meanwhile men remaining with the roundup branded-out the calves and yearlings, the H H P stock included.

When the brindle bull was dragged up to the branding fire, there was a short discussion. He was thrown on his right side. Then a man with a running iron burned deep into the shaggy, winter hair on his left side the letters M U R D E R. The letters ran across the ribs from shoulder to flank.

"Turn him over," the man said. The bull was turned over. With a fresh iron the man branded on the right side, JAN 28 90. The bull was not castrated or earmarked.

A few days later two rangers killed Gilleland in the mountains. What happened to the brindle maverick, with that brand that no one would claim, is not so definitely settled. R. W. Powe, the son of the man who was killed, whose account of the matter has been followed in this narrative, says that the Murder Bull was eventually driven out of the country with a trail herd bound for Montana.

Whether he was or not, many stories still circulate over the wide spaces of the trans-Pecos country about "the maverick branded M U R D E R"; How for years he wandered a lone outcast on the range, never seen with other cattle, and, for that matter, seldom seen at all. How he turned prematurely grey, the hair over the scabs of his bizarre brand showing a coarse red. How cowboys in the bunkhouse at the Dubois and Wentworth ranch one night saw the bull's head come through an open window; he was looking, they imagined, for the man responsible for that brand of horror traced on his own side. Some brands grow in size with the growth of animals; generally they do not. According to the stories, the M U R D E R brand grew until the elongated letters stood out in enormous dimensions, making one familiar with literature think of the pitiless Scarlet Letter that blazoned on Hester Prynne's breast and in the soul of every being who looked upon it.

The Murder Maverick became a "ghost steer." A cowboy might see him, usually about dusk; and then he "just wasn't there." There were some who did not want to see him. Eugene Cunningham, Barry Scobee and perhaps other writers have woven "the murder steer" into Wild West stories for the pulp magazines. The gray Confederate coat with slit sleeve worn by the murdered Powe of one arm is in the little college museum at Alpine, under the mountains where the roundup was held, JAN 28 90. That brindle bull hide with the outlandish brand on it really would be a museum piece.

"Maverick steer," a phrase often come upon in fiction, is a contradiction of terms. A bull calf or yearling is turned into a steer—a bull of some age, into a stag—by the simple process of removing his testicles. When a bull is castrated on the range, he is invariably earmarked and branded or—in the occasional absence of iron or fire—at least marked. He is then no longer a maverick; he is a steer, though he may be wilder than he was in the maverick stage. Science does not record examples of males being born without testicles. Nevertheless, according to family tradition, John Mercer while killing wild cattle to supply beef for Sam Houston's army, during the Texas Revolution, shot a very large and fat "maverick steer."

It does not take a range man to understand why various Western states passed laws strictly defining a maverick and making mavericks and orphan calves of the open range public property to be disposed of according to law.

A stockman finding an unbranded animal a year old, or older, in his fenced pasture, where only his own cattle range and breed, calls it nowadays a maverick, though there can be little question of ownership.

About the opening of this century, the Leahy family had a ranch, well fenced, of ten or twelve thousand acres along the lower Nueces River in the thickest part of the brush country of Texas. Their cattle were so wild, the brush was so thick and the river water so uncontrollable that, though they had introduced graded bulls, maverick Longhorn bulls kept the old strain going. To clean out all this outlaw stock, the Leahys finally fenced off about three thousand acres against the river, where the outlaws were concentrated. They caught what they could with dogs and ropes. Everything that was roped fought. A two-year-old heifer when she hit the end of a rope would bounce back charging man and horse with the ferocity of a bull. One such heifer—black, mealy-nosed and line-backed—jabbed her dagger-pointed horn through the heavy leather leggins worn by the brush hand who roped her, through the calf of his leg, and into the vitals of his horse, completely disemboweling him.

By 1900 steer horns of the old length and size had become scarce. In the Leahy thickets were steers with prize horns, old mossy-heads that by day laid up in brush utterly impenetrable to horse and man. At night they would stalk forth on little openings, where they bawled long and mournfully, expressing to the starts their fierce wildness and the utter loneliness of the liberty that their aboriginal strength, their ceaseless wariness, their primitive instincts and keen senses preserved to them. No rider of moonlight or dawn could slip up within a rope's length of them on the circumscribed opening where they pawed the earth like bulls and bellowed their challenges. Age and bullets could alone remove them from the range. The Leahys were determined to clear them out. Hunters with high-powered rifles came from Kansas City and other places, to shoot them for their mighty heads. Thus ended the day of their destiny, though here and there, in the Mexican part of the great brasada, or brush country, a sprinkling of Longhorn mavericks and branded outlaws endured some years longer—for a similar fate.

J. Frank Dobie, The Longhorns

Ancestors of the Texas Family

The Rev. John Maverick arrived in New England 30 May 1630, nine and one-half years after the arrival of the Mayflower. His oldest son, Samuel, had preceded him to the New World by six years, having arrived in 1624 with the first contingent of men from Dorsetshire, England. The Rev. John Maverick, first generation of Maverick in the New World, we shall call John. He was a Puritan Teacher and the father of eight children, most of whom migrated to America.

JOHN MAVERICK (sometimes spelled Mavericke or Mavracke) was baptized at Awlescomb, Devonshire, England 28 December 1578. He was the son of the Rev. Peter Maverick, Vicar of Awlescomb, and of Dorthie Tucke Maverick, whom we shall consider the fountain-head of the Mavericks of America. John received his B.A. and Master degrees at Exeter College, Oxford. On 28 Oct. 1600 he married Mary Gye. From 1615 to 1629 he was Rector of Beaworthy, Devonshire. He was chosen a Teacher in the Puritan Church, and shortly thereafter sailed for New England. In Massachusetts he took the Oath of Freeman in May 1631. He died at the home of his son Samuel on Noddles Island.

"3 Feb. 1636, Mr. John Maverick, Teacher of the Church of Dorchester, died, being nearly 60 years of age. He was a man of very humble spirit, and faithful in furthering the work of the Lord, both in the churches and civil state." (John Winthrop). The eight children of Rev. John and Mary Gye Maverick were:

Samuel, born about 1602 in Devonshire, England.

Ellias, born in England about 1604. Came to New England in 1630. He married Anne Harris. Their 5 sons lived in Massachusetts. He died in 1680.

Aaron, baptized at Huish, County Devon, England 6 March 1608. He probably died young.

Mary, baptized 6 January 1610 at South Huish, England. About 1635 she married Rev. James Parker of Dorchester, Mass. (He died in Barbados in 1652.)

Moses, known as "Moses Maverick of Marblehead" (Mass.), baptized in Huish, England 3 Nov. 1611. Came to New England about 1630. He married Remember Sara Allerton who had come over in the Mayflower. They had 7 children (Mayflower descendants), and he had four more children after the death of his first wife, and his marriage to Eunice Roberts in 1656.

Abigail, baptized in Huish, England 20 March 1614. Came to New England before 1638 and married John Manning of Boston. She died in Boston 25 June 1644.

Antipas, born in England in 1619. Came to New England before 1647. He died 2 July 1678, leaving several children.

John, born in England about 1621. He was later known as "John Maverick of Charleston" (S.C.).

Members of the Maverick family became quite numerous in New England. All of them must have been very proud of their ancestor, the Rev. John and of his oldest son, Samuel, for it seems that every John had a son named John and another named Samuel, and that every Samuel had a son named Samuel and another named John, while those not themselves so fortunately named, had at least one son named John or Samuel. (A Samuel Maverick, killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, is buried on the Boston Common.) This multiplicity of John Mavericks and Samuel Mavericks makes it very difficult to trace the exact line of descent of the Mavericks of Texas. We shall follow the fortunes of only two of the children of John and Mary Gye Maverick, namely, the oldest, Samuel and the youngest, John.

SAMUEL MAVERICK, first Maverick in the New World, was born about 1602 in Devonshire, England. He arrived in New England in 1624 and settled at Winnissimet (now Chelsea) on the Mystic River.

"Here it was that Samuel Maverick
broke the land and sowed the crop,
Built the barns, and strung the fences
in the little border station,
Tucked away below the foothills where the trails run out and stop."

About Jan. 1629 he married Amias Cole Thompson, widow of his late friend, David Thompson. In 1633 he received a grant of "Noddles Island" (comprising what is now East Boston). In that same year smallpox, "the White Man's Scourge", attacked the native Indians. The wild men were much impressed to find that though their own people forsook them, the English came daily to attend their needs. "Among others" writes Winthrop, "Mr. Maverick of Winissimet is worthy of perpetual remembrance; himself and wife and servants went daily to them, ministered to their necessities, and buried their children". In 1638 John Josselyn wrote of his visit to America:—"July 10 I went ashore to Noddles Island to Mr. Samuel Maverick, the only hospitable man in all the country, giving entertainment to all comers gratis". Samuel was appointed by Charles II as one of a Royal Commission to demand the evacuation of the Dutch New Netherland government from what is now New York. For his success in this undertaking, he was granted "a house on the Broad Way" (now No. 50 Broadway, New York City.) He died about 1679, probably in New York City. Samuel and Amias Cole Thompson Maverick had 3 children, the oldest of which was Nathaniel, named for his great-uncle, Nathaniel Maverick, a lawyer who had remained in England, and was Chief Clerk to the Town Clerk of London.

NATHANIEL MAVERICK (son of Samuel) was born in New England in 1629. In 1649 he sold Noddles Island (with the permission of his family) to Capt. Briggs, for 40,000 lbs. of white sugar. He moved to Barbados, one of the Windward Islands, an English possession near South America. Nathaniel became a very substantial plantation owner in Barbados. He helped finance the new settlement of Charles Town, South Carolina, but he did not go there. On 16 Aug. 1670 (at the age of 41) Nathaniel signed his last will. He died in Jan. or Feb. 1673. He bequeathed his soul to God who gave it, in assured hope of being saved through the merits of Jesus Christ. He expressed the wish that his body be buried under the south-east window of St. Lucy's Church, next to the grave of his son, Moses Maverick. After his death, an able and honest man was to be employed to manage the estate. He desired that his father come to the Island of Barbados and be allowed full maintenance from the estate. Should his wife remarry, she was to be allowed an interest in the estate, but if possible should remove therefrom. To his daughter, Mary Maverick, he bequeathed 40,000 lbs. of Muscovato sugar, paid in installments of 10,000 lbs. each; the first installment to be paid at her marriage or when she reaches the age of 18 years. Each of his overseers was to receive 500 lbs. of sugar to buy a mourning ring with the inscription "The memorial of a dear friend". After his just debts had been paid, the remainder of the estate be divided equally between his three sons: John Mavericke, Samuel Mavericke and Nathaniel Mavericke.

When each son had received his education, he was to be appointed to some able merchant as an apprentice, or otherwise at the descretion of his overseers. No son was empowered to sell his interest in the estate before 24 years of age. "Memorandum:—Mother, Amias, £ 10 per annum. Sister, Mary Hooke, 10,000 lbs. of sugar to buy a mourning gown".

JOHN MAVERICK (eldest surviving son of Nathaniel) later moved to Charleston, and he may possibly be ancestor of the Mavericks of Texas.

JOHN MAVERICK, youngest son of the Rev. John Maverick, was born in England about 1621. He was married in London, 15 April 1645 to Jane Andrews. They lived for a time at Dorchester, Mass. but left there for Barbados before 1670. He was a man of consequence, as the records show that "he came from Barbados with his servants, and settled in Charleston". In 1672 he was elected to the first Parliament of the Province of South Carolina, and was known as "John Maverick of Charleston". John and Jane Andrews Maverick had one son named John and probably other children. John Maverick is considered by some students as the most probable ancestor of the Maverick family of Texas.

Charleston was devastated by fire in 1740; by hurricanes in 1752 and in 1854; by epidemic in 1854; by an earthquake on 31 August 1886, which damaged 90% of the buildings. These calamities have made it very difficult to find old records there.

PART II

THE TEXAS MAVERICK ANCESTORS

"SAMUEL MAVERICK of Charleston", the earliest authentic Maverick ancestor of the Texas Mavericks, was born at Charleston S.C. about 1715. He was a shipbuilder on James Island, S.C. He married Catherine Coyer, who was born in London, England in 1720, and was brought to Charleston as a young child. Her family were Huguenots who had come from Montpellier in Southern France. She died at Charleston, 3 Oct. 1799 and is buried in St. Phillip's Episcopal Church Yard. Samuel of Charleston and Catherine Coyer Maverick had five children, the oldest of whom was:

CAPT. SAMUEL MAVERICK, born at Charleston, S.C., 3 Jan. 1742; baptized at St. Andrews parish church in September of that same year. On 5 March 1772 he married Lydia Turpin, daughter of Capt. Joseph and Mary Brown Turpin. Capt. Samuel was, like his father, a shipbuilder on James Island, S.C., and is said to have owned 15 sea-going ships. Capt. Samuel and Lydia Turpin Maverick had six children, but only the oldest of these, Samuel, survived childhood days. Their youngest child was born at Providence, R. I. and died there. Capt. Samuel Maverick was taken prisoner during the American Revolution, and lay in irons off the New York coast for 11 months on the British prisonship "Old Jersey". Released in 1778, he walked the entire distance to Charleston, suffering great privation. In the fall of the following year, and not long before the British succeeded in taking Charleston, Capt. Samuel, his wife, their 7-year-old son, Samuel, and Mrs. Maverick's father and mother and her brother, William Turpin, left Charleston. They traveled overland to Providence, R.I., arriving there in the winter of 1779. They stayed at the home of Mrs. Maverick's grandmother Turpin. On 3 Jan. 1784 Capt. Samuel died of dropsy caused by broken ribs he had received while a British prisoner of war. He died on his 42nd birthday, when his oldest child was 11.

SAMUEL MAVERICK, born at Charleston, S.C. 30 Dec. 1772, (Mentioned above as the oldest child of Capt. Samuel and Lydia Turpin Maverick). He was in Providence R.I., when in Dec. 1782, at the age of 10, he started his career as a merchant, or, as he said, a "trader". He made molasses candy in his great-grandmother's home, and sold it on the bridge in Providence. Soon after his father's death, Samuel and his mother, and her mother and father and brother, William Turpin set sail on the John Brown, bound Providence to Charleston. Encountering a great storm, the ship was at sea for 21 days. It reached Charleston not long after that city had been evacuated by the British. Times were hard in Charleston, and Samuel had to spend the money he had saved from his trading, but his grandmother gave him five marbles which she had found. These he sold for five coppers, and so started again in business. In later years he wrote to his 10-year-old grandson, Samuel Maverick in Texas, telling him that ten years of age was a good time to start making money; "but" he warns, "if you should go into the marvell trade, you must be sure to take the advice my Uncle Turpin gave me:—to be sure never to play marvells for winning, as that is gambling, and that will never do; it would spoil all your money if you mix it with good honest trading money". Telling of his early life, Samuel wrote: "Capt. I. L. Tilden, an old and respected acquaintance of my grandfather, Joseph Turpin, continually came to our house in Tradd Street, Charleston, on his way to Bordeaux in France, and used to return to Charleston to sell his cargos, for he owned ship and cargo, and was a rich man in those days. He, seeing that I was a trading character like himself, he told me that he would carry a venture for me to Bordeaux, and I sent 5 crowns by him the first voige, and afterwards more, and directed him to buy ostrich feathers, ladies' fans and umbrellas, which he did, and I made a handsum profit,—sold them for more than double the cost. There was no duty on importing goods in those days, or very little, and my Uncle William Turpin, with whom I lived as shop boy, allowed me to sell tarr by retail to the waggoners to grease their wagons, and in December 1792 I sent an adventure to Bordeaux of 65 French Crowns, but this I lost by the French Revolution. The merchants' property was confiscated, and on 1 January 1793 I took stock, as you will see by referring to my little ledger kept at that time, I had gained after losses and paying for schooling and clothing 12/0/1, and Wadsworth and Turpin then owed me for nine months wages 25/0/9 so that when I was (20) twenty years old I was worth, clear of the world and by my own exertion, 37/8/1, which is $161.31, fair and square, and I well recollect that I was delighted with the future prospect, and, although I have met with sad accidents in trade since, and by loss of stock in the National Bank, yet the idea of independence is the thing; by one's own industry, no matter how small or how great; and to trust in the providence of God in a kingdom of itself".

On 17 April 1793 Samuel's mother, Lydia Maverick ("a wealthy widow of Charleston") married Gen. Robert Anderson, and went to live with him at Pendleton, S.C. She died 19 Jan. 1803 and was buried on the Anderson plantation at Pendleton.

Samuel lived with the Turpin family at Charleston. He became quite a prominent merchant, and it is said that he shipped the first bale of cotton from the United States to England and that he "sent ventures to The Celestial Empire". On 5 October 1802, at age 29, he married Elizabeth Anderson, a daughter of Gen. Anderson, and moved soon thereafter to Pendleton, in the hills of western South Carolina. Samuel Maverick became a prominent plantation-owner and horticulturist at Pendleton, a large land-owner, and was said to be "the richest man in South Carolina". His plantation was named Montpelier, after the ancestral home of his grandmother, Catherine Coyer. Samuel and Elizabeth Anderson Maverick had five children. She died at Pendleton, 27 Sept. 1818, when her oldest child, Samuel Augustus Maverick was fifteen years old. Samuel Maverick did not remarry. He died at his plantation home at Pendleton 28 April 1852.

SAMUEL AUGUSTUS MAVERICK was born at Montpelier Plantation, Pendleton, S.C., 28 July 1803. He graduated from Yale College, and studied law in Virginia before moving to Texas in 1835. He was elected by the men in the Alamo, and as their representative signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. On 4 August 1836 he married Mary Ann Adams at her home at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and with her returned to San Antonio. "The Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick" give a wonderful account of how a lady of energy and high moral character met the trials, the dangers and the adventures of life on the Texas frontier.

Samuel Augustus Maverick became one of the largest landowners in Texas. He died 2 September 1870 after a life filled with service to his fellow men . . . Mary Adams Maverick died 24 February 1898. Both died at San Antonio Texas, and they are buried side by side there in the old City Cemetery. . . .

Samuel Augustus and Mary Adams Maverick had ten children, six of whom grew to adult age. These six were:

SAMUEL MAVERICK, born 15 May 1837 at Pendleton, S.C. Died 28 Feb. 1936 at Austin, Texas. Married 14 May 1871 Sarah (Sally) Frost. They had two sons and five daughters.

LEWIS ANTONIO MAVERICK, born 23 May 1839, First American boy born and reared in San Antonio, Texas. Died 16 June 1866 at age 27, from tuberculosis contracted while he served as an officer in the Confederate Army. Married in 1865 Adah Bradley. No offspring.

GEORGE MADISON MAVERICK, born 9 Sept. 1845, at Matagorda, Texas. Died 16 Sept. 1913 at London, England. Married 26 June 1872 Mary Elizabeth Vance. They had two sons and four daughters.

WILLIAM HARVEY MAVERICK, born 24 Dec. 1847, died 10 Dec. 1923 at San Antonio, Texas. Married 23 June 1873 Emily Virginia Chilton. They had four sons and one daughter.

MARY BROWN MAVERICK, born 17 June 1851 at San Antonio, Texas. Died 2 Jan. 1891 at Brussels, Belgium. Married 17 Aug. 1874 Edwin Holland Terrell. He was United States Ambassador to Belgium. They had four sons and three daughters.

ALBERT MAVERICK, born 7 May 1854, died 24 Jan. 1947 at San Antonio, Texas. Married 20 March 1877 Jane Lewis Maury. They had six sons and five daughters.

James Slayden Maverick, 1969