The Longhorn

The Texas longhorn came from Spain by way of the Caribbean. Spanish colonists landed the first cattle on Hispaniola in 1493, on Columbus's second voyage, and over the next two centuries their descendants moved north through Mexico into Texas, where they ran wild and hardened into a breed that could live on thin grass and little water.

After the Civil War, longhorns in the millions were driven north on trails to railheads in Kansas. The breed then slowly dwindled, and by the 1920s pure longhorns had almost vanished. In 1927 a group of Forest Service men gathered a small herd to breed at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma. Texas named the longhorn its state large mammal in 1995.

The horns are the whole advertisement. Some animals spread more than eight feet, and in 2022 Guinness recorded a steer whose horns measured just over ten feet from tip to tip.

The steer faces straight out of the picture, horns sweeping to both edges, with a brindled coat of rust and cream, a pale blaze down his nose, and dark, level eyes. Behind him the grass and dust blur into one warm haze.