History with Horns

THE LONGHORNS--J. Frank Dobie--Little. Brown ($3.50).

As national emblems, the Harding-faced, carrion-rending bald eagle and the noble, hunchbacked bison are as familiar to Americans as Washington's profile or Lincoln's warts. Last week another great indigenous candidate for national beast got his first boost. He was the Texas Longhorn. His boosters were Texan Author James Frank Dobie and Texan Artist Tom Lea. How far their book could lift the Longhorn into the U. S. animal pantheon remained to be seen. But it was clear that he was eminently worthy of rescue from 50 years of near oblivion.

The Longhorns were descendants of those Spanish cattle which Columbus brought into the West on his second voyage. They evolved in the Mexican wilderness, perfected themselves in Texas. They had racehorse legs and tails that dragged the ground and defter noses than deer, being able to scent water at ten miles.

Their magnificent, subtly curved horns spread eight and nine feet tip to tip, and they were such sky-hardened athletes it was said you could pack all the roasting meat of any one of them into the hollow of one of those horns. A Longhorn bull was known to gore the life out of a grizzly; another scattered a U. S. regiment that had stood against Santa Anna. James Bowie used to ride amongst them, knifing them down.

The rawhide stripped from their carcasses for years "held Texas together." Streaming up the Chisholm Trail and across deserts motorists still shy at, they were the founders of the U. S. ranching industry. Theirs was "the greatest, the most extraordinary, the most stupendous, the most fantastic and fabulous migration of animals controlled by man that the world has ever known." They gave character to a wide new country, grand as Siberia; they gave soul and shape to a new human breed, the Texas cowboy. Says Author Dobie: "I do not believe that any kind of riding will pump virtue into a man like that in pursuit of wild, strong, mighty-horned cattle plunging for liberty or just walking like phalanxes of destiny towards the tail end of the world."

Between 1866 and 1890 something like ten million Longhorns were marched out of Texas into the North and West. Within a few more years, railroads had made possible the shipping of fatter, fancier meat. The Longhorn was doomed.

Today he is more nearly extinct than the bison. Great horns still spring above barroom mirrors; a proud, sad specimen stands stuffed at the Fort Worth airport; Texans still like to call themselves "Longhorns," or "Texas Steers." But until last week the Longhorn was without much honor, or the lore that might bring it to him, save in his own country.

J. Frank Dobie, who put the honor and the data together, is as Texan as the steers he celebrates. An anti-industrialist and individualist, he once went to jail rather than pay a $2 fine for violation of what he considered an unreasonable parking regulation. He likes to be called Pancho (or even Don Pancho), sports a white Stetson and a buckskin watch fob. His father and grandfather before him were vaqueros of the south Texas brush country; in that country Dobie was born, 52 years ago. He spent his first 15 years in a ranch boy's intimacy with cattlemen and cattle handling, went on to college (Southwestern, Columbia) and to war. He spent 1920-21 as a ranch manager, the only white man on his uncle's 200,000 acres. But his career since then has been academic: as head of the English department at Oklahoma A. & M. and, since 1925, at the University of Texas in Austin, where he was the first native Texan to get above an instructorship without a Ph.D.

Frank Dobie once rather embarrassedly confessed that he had preferred teaching to ranching because he liked the trembling sensations which English lyric poetry aroused in him. He is the nearest thing the Southwest has to a cultural voice. When he proposed to the English faculty a course in the literature of Texas and the Southwest, he was refused on the grounds that the Southwest had no literature. He forthwith proposed a course in Life and Literature of the Southwest, "guaranteeing that we at least had life," and has been teaching it, to thousands, for years. Gripes he: "I am at war with the damned academicians who have tried to choke all that is native in my country to death."

The Longhorns is Pancho Dobie's ninth book. Coronado's Children, though published in the Southwest, was a Literary Guild selection (1931) and he was called off a panther hunt to quaff Manhattan literary tea. In 1932-33, on a Guggenheim grant, he traveled 2,000 miles on muleback in Mexico, emerged with material for Tongues of the Monte, rich legendary dope on the lost Tayopa Mine (Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver). For The Longhorns he searched through thousands of pamphlets, talked to hundreds of oldtimers. Said an old trail driver of Frank Dobie: "He speaks our language--and he's got the right tune as well as the right words."

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