The Longhorn’s Long Journey to Becoming a Texas Icon

As we bounce along an overgrown truck path in the dense brush country of South Texas’s historic San Vicente Ranch, the Longhorns we seek elude us beneath the midday sun. José “Che” Guerra, a rancher and collector of art and artifacts from colonial New Spain, is trying to show me cattle descended from a herd of wild Longhorns that his father began building in the fifties. But the animals are wary today. A couple of stragglers hear our approach and swiftly make their way deeper into the gray thickets of cenizo on the Guerra family’s ranch. 

“The Longhorns in Mexico were called criollos because they were born in the wild in the New World,” Che explains as we tour the ranch about thirty miles north of McAllen. “Criollo”—the Spanish cousin of the French “créole”—was the same term the Sistema de Castas, Spain’s elaborate taxonomy of racial mixtures, used for Spaniards born in the Americas. 

At a bend in the road, we come upon a burnt-red roan cow with broad horns that end in short, spiraling twists. She is aloof, reclining stoically in the purple shade of a mesquite tree, and stares at us, unconcerned. Perhaps her imperial demeanor derives from her status as a wild and ungoverned beast in the cultivated world of modern animal husbandry. Or perhaps it’s a sign of her distinctive genealogy. 

This cow is the progeny of the wild herd gathered seven decades ago by Che’s father, the late Don Enrique Guerra Jr., who was the scion of a family with thirteen generations of roots in the Rio Grande Valley and Tamaulipas. The Guerra family, with whom I share maternal ancestry (Che and I know each other from serving together on the board of San Antonio’s Briscoe Western Art Museum), arrived in the region with José de Escandón’s expeditions from Querétaro, deep in the Mexican interior, in the middle of the eighteenth century. The horseback expeditions, accompanied by cattle, founded a constellation of settlements, many still extant, in what are now Laredo and the Mexican states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.

But when they arrived, they found wild herds already roaming the landscape, remnants of earlier Spanish expeditions.

“We’ve been around quite some time,” Don Enrique told a documentary filmmaker in 2002. The Longhorns have been around even longer.

“The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle the civilized world has known,” folklorist J. Frank Dobie famously pronounced in his 1941 book The Longhorns. Rugged, wild, and solitary yet filial, with a rack of horns that today can stretch more than ten feet across, the Longhorn, then and now, has embodied so much of what is mythically Texan—individualistic, indefatigable, improbably big. 

But this auspicious beast is also a reminder of Texas’s origins in colonial New Spain and, later, the Republic of Mexico. “The Longhorn was, as will be detailed, basically Spanish,” Dobie wrote, somewhat controversially at the time. “Yet, when he entered upon the epoch of his continent-marking history, he was as Texan as his counterpart, the Texas cowboy.”

The Longhorn, Dobie argued, was a Spaniard made Texan. 

Some observers, over the decades, have had trouble grasping this. The entry on the Longhorn in the Texas State Historical Association’s online Handbook of Texas takes issue with Dobie’s nod to the Spanish provenance of the breed, favoring the narrative that the animal was descended, in significant part, from imported British cattle. Published in 1952 and updated in 2017, the entry states that “some cattlemen observed that not only the horns and bodies, but also the colors of many Texas longhorns resembled the English Bakewell stock brought from the Ohio valley and Kentucky.” Curiously, the entry’s chronicle begins in the 1830s—long after the Longhorn became a fixture on the Texas landscape—and contends that Longhorns “emerged as a recognizable type” only by the time of the U.S. Civil War. “They behaved like Spanish stock but had an appreciable amount of British blood.” 

This is a questionable, perhaps indefensible, claim, but tracing the animal’s heritage is a tricky task. Today’s Longhorn only partly resembles the Longhorn of Dobie’s time; the bulls have been bred to feature horns of almost absurd length, and because most of them are now raised in captivity and benefit from modern husbandry techniques, they’re better-fed and stockier than the wild beasts Dobie knew. 

The Longhorn of the twenty-first century likely survives more because of its symbolic and sentimental value than because of any practical use Texans put it to; few of us feast on Longhorn ribeyes, and the days of the cattle drive have long since passed. Like the well-known definition of a celebrity—someone who is famous for being famous—the Longhorn is, in part, valued by Texans for being valued by Texans. And if recent sale prices tell us anything, many of them are valued more highly today than ever. 

Why do we hold this seemingly impractical animal in such esteem? Perhaps, even in 2024, the Longhorn has something to tell us about what it means to emerge out of Texas’s storied landscape. And perhaps what it tells us today is different from what it told us yesterday. Over the course of such a long journey together, understanding between man and beast can change.

Juárez-born, El Paso–raised photographer Joel Salcido recently set out on a quest to understand the Iberian origins and North American evolution of the Longhorn, an adventure that took him across Texas and over the ocean to Spain. “For more than twenty years I’ve been doing a photography project on the brave bulls [animals bred for the bullfighting ring] of Spain and Mexico,” Salcido says. “I was at a breeding ranch in Spain, and I kept asking the owners if they had any idea where the Longhorn came from. Nobody could answer that question, and that created an obsession for me. My logic was: If so many cattle and horses come from Spain, there should be a footprint of the Longhorn in Spain somewhere.”

Evidence of Spain’s mythical, coeval relationship to cattle can be seen in the cave paintings, some 15,000 years old, of broad-horned aurochs at Altamira, on the country’s northern coast. A source of sustenance and a lethal opponent in the bullfighting ring, these animals later accompanied the Iberians on their first journeys to the New World. Dobie observed, “Wherever the Spanish went, they took horses and cattle.”

Records of Columbus’s second voyage to the New World, in 1493, indicate that he took on cattle, likely of Iberian origin, during a stopover on the Canary Islands, just off Morocco’s coast, and disembarked them on Hispaniola, the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This was the first time in history that cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep were loaded up en route to the Americas.

Over the next few decades, livestock from Spain were led onto caravels that set out across the Atlantic for the Caribbean. And then in 1521, the year of the fall of the Aztec empire, Gregorio de Villalobos brought cattle—six heifers and a young bull, by some accounts—to Mexico from what is now the Dominican Republic, the first known landing of cattle in the continental Americas. A few decades later, when the first Spanish expeditions to northern Mexico and what is now Texas arrived and departed, they left behind many of these cattle. It’s unclear whether some strays got lost or proved too much trouble to bring back, or if they were deliberately abandoned to beget future livestock. 

But we do know that the bovines that remained found their way in the austere biomes of the land that became South Texas. They developed resistance to pests and resiliency amid drought, gradually becoming the Longhorns of today, though there’s likely been interbreeding over the centuries. When settlers with the Escandón expeditions arrived in the middle of the eighteenth century in what is now regarded as the borderlands, they encountered an astonishing sight: wild herds of Longhorns that had evolved prodigious horns to defend themselves from mountain lions, wolves, and other predators.

Three years ago, Salcido, who is based in San Antonio and spends a great deal of time in Spain, saw an article in the Spanish newspaper ABC about geneticists at the University of Córdoba who were researching the origins of the Longhorn. Their conclusion: the Longhorn is likely related to feral animals known as Marismeña that could be found in a preserve in Doñana National Park, outside Seville.

Salcido got in touch with the researchers, and after months of planning flew to Spain to encounter the Marismeña. But his contact, the geneticist Amparo Martinez, informed Salcido that even if he could get permission to go to the preserve, it would likely be a waste of time. “She told me, ‘The animals there are super wild, just like the Longhorn was [in Texas] in the 1800s, and you will not be able to track one down and photograph it. They’re not going to stop for you to get a picture.”

Instead, Martinez sent him to see Daniel López y Melero, who was raising a herd of domesticated Marismeña. López y Melero, a doctoral student in sports science, had inherited the responsibility for his father’s cattle ranch, which included a few Marismeña, and he fell in love with the animals. A decade or so ago, the Doñana reserve transferred four cows and a bull to his ranch, which allowed him to further increase the size of his herd. “They wanted to promote the breed and preserve their morphology,” he explains. “I have in my possession a representation of a nearly extinct genetic imprint that has been passed down from generation to generation and into my hands. To possess something this special and different means that you have something unique to offer the world.”

On López y Melero’s ranch—which is located, almost too neatly, perhaps a 45-minute drive from Cádiz, the port city from which many cattle embarked for the Americas—Salcido encountered the Marismeña for the first time. “My first impression was how the animals mirrored what I knew of the Longhorn of the nineteenth and early twentieth century,” says Salcido. “The Texas Longhorn that you see in Dobie’s book is a very rustic animal—it’s not a pretty animal. The hip bones are very pronounced; it’s a bony animal. It has a narrow face, and the horns are not huge—they’re pronounced, but they’re not huge. What I saw in Spain looked like a template of the classic Longhorn. It has all the qualities of the Longhorn. It can sustain itself through drought and minimal food. It can eat anything. It’s resilient to disease. When I finally saw the Marismeña, I felt like I was looking at the Texas Longhorn, but in Spain.”

The twilight of the wild Texas Longhorn began late in the nineteenth century. Along with the increasing use of barbed wire, which ended the animal’s open-range wanderings, the Big Die-Up, as the unusually harsh winter of 1886–1887 came to be known, took its toll on many livestock, including the Longhorn. Dobie’s 1941 opus was composed as a requiem, telling the vaunted beast’s story at a moment when he saw its extinction on the horizon. The cattle drives that the Longhorn were so well-suited to had long since ended, and, he believed, the lean Longhorn was being edged out of existence in Texas by fatter, cultivated beef cattle, some with Longhorn blood, engineered by the rising ranch industry.  

Dobie’s elegy crescendos with an operatic nostalgia: “The Longhorn is of the past—a past so remote and irrevocable that sometimes it seems as if it might never have been, though in years it was only yesterday.” According to the historian Alan M. Hoyt, by the twenties, “. . . the Texas Longhorn had become nearly extinct. What few were left were usually hidden back somewhere on the ranch to enable their owner to escape ridicule from nearby cattlemen.” The Longhorn was said to be closer to extinction than the bison had been in the late nineteenth century. 

But the Longhorn survived.

In 1927, when the Longhorn’s dire prospects were already evident, Congress appropriated $3,000 for the U.S. Forest Service to tend to a group of Longhorns from South Texas that had been moved to the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge, in Oklahoma, a haven that survives to this day. A veritable secret society of Longhorn whisperers emerged in the forties and fifties. Dobie enlisted financial support from Fort Worth oil baron Sid Richardson to gather more wild stock, which was placed at state parks across Texas. 

In the late fifties, Don Enrique, a member of this society then in his late twenties, began venturing into the sierra of Nuevo León to seek out Longhorns to build a herd of his own. As the Guerra family relocated northward in the sixties and seventies, some of his cattle joined the migration. The Longhorns at the Guerra family’s San Vicente Ranch today are descendants of that original feral stock.

Don Enrique was proud of his herd. “My dad loved to see them almost every day,” Che remembers. “He’d go for his morning walk to see his herd. And in the evening, he’d go right back out. They gave him a lot of joy and peaceful gratification.”

Don Davis’s great-great-grandfather Bill Blocker was one of the renowned trio of Blocker brothers, who in the second half of the nineteenth century drove thousands of cattle from their ranch in Blanco County to northern railheads. Much of the family gave up on ranching after Bill Blocker died in the twenties. 

Don, who has a degree in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, grew up hearing tales of his storied ancestors. In 2003, about a decade after he and his wife, Deborah, resumed the family business, he retired from his architecture practice. Their outfit, DWD Longhorns, located at Seco Valley Ranch, near Utopia, about an hour-and-a-half’s drive west of San Antonio, began when Don gave Deborah two Longhorns for her thirtieth birthday. Today, on a range bordered by rolling hills, they run forty head of grass-fed cows, one mature bull, and another “in training” and are dedicated to helping others nurture their herds. “We chose grass-fed because it’s good for the environment and, nutritionally, for human health,” she says. 

Deborah, who currently serves as the president of the nonprofit Cattlemen’s Texas Longhorn Conservancy, estimates that there are only three thousand historic Texas Longhorns living today, which qualifies them as “critical” on the conservation priority list managed by the Livestock Conservancy, a national conservation group. This is a much smaller number than the hundreds of thousands of Longhorns that the Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America says can be found throughout the country. The TLBAA uses a broader definition of what qualifies as a Longhorn than the Livestock Conservancy does. 

But Deborah has her reasons for defending a stricter definition of the animal. “When people see a Longhorn, they think the Old West, they think Texas, they think cowboys,” she says. “It’s an icon of our history, the history of this country.” 

That history has recently been complicated by a growing body of genetic analyses of the Longhorn, performed by the conservancy and a host of academic researchers. The Longhorn, like many of us, has a long and tangled immigrant story to share.

There is some ambiguity regarding the lineage of the Longhorn, but in recent years researchers have made significant headway in understanding the genetic makeup of the first cattle that came to the Americas. A 2013 study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that the breed has what the school called a “hybrid global ancestry.” The researchers uncovered evidence that it can be traced back to “Columbus’[s] second voyage to the New World, the Moorish invasion of Spain and the domestication of the aurochs in the Middle East and India.” But David Hillis, an evolutionary biologist at UT, cautions that only so much precision is possible. “In Spain, some of the cattle were selected for fighting, some for pulling oxen, some for milk production, and some for beef production,” he explains. “The Texas Longhorn shares genetic alleles with Spanish breeds, but there are four hundred years of separation. You won’t be able to establish direct descent from any currently existing herd.”  

Yet the researchers at the University of Córdoba whom Salcido had contacted have drawn a connection between the Longhorn and the Marismeña. In a 2012 paper they wrote, “It is generally believed that, since Columbian times, the Marismeña has been kept . . . in semi-feral conditions in a natural park near the original point of departure of Spanish sailors. Our results confirm that it could represent a remnant of the animals taken to the Americas in the early period of settlement.” The study concluded that some two-thirds of the modern Longhorn’s genes derived from the ancestors of today’s Marismeña. 

This Iberian descent is almost certainly key to the Longhorn’s success in the Americas. Because Spanish cattle had a greater share of South Asian and African genes than, say, those from France or England, they were a better fit for the hot, dry climes of Texas than were the British breeds that arrived later. As Larry McMurtry wrote of the central plains in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, “The cattlemen had brought the wrong animal—English cattle—to an arid grassland to which they were not well suited. South Texas cattlemen, raising Mexican Longhorns that were well adapted to their environment, did, on the whole, much better.”

And if Texas continues to get hotter and drier, as it almost certainly will, the Longhorn may find even greater advantage over its bovine brethren. Though even this hardy beast may be challenged by the extreme weather we’re already experiencing. The Davises have felt compelled to cull their herd in recent years. “We’ve had to reduce due to climate change,” Deborah says. “This area can no longer support the number of animals it used to be able to feed.” 

In the twenty-first century, Longhorns aren’t a major source of meat. They simply don’t gain weight as fast as other beef breeds, and their leaner beef isn’t appealing to some steak lovers. (Though a recent taste test revealed one of the Davises’ ribeyes to be tender with a nutty taste that carried a sabor of pasture herbs.) There has been an uptick of interest in Longhorn meat among heart-conscious consumers in recent years, but it’s still a niche market. (The niche does seem big enough that an outfit called the Grijalva Cattle Company opened four years ago with a focus on breeding and raising Longhorns for show and for slaughter—in, of all places, Connecticut.) 

Today’s Longhorn is often regarded instead as a source of visual splendor. “Between the horns and the variety of colors, Longhorns always have the potential to be beautiful pasture ornaments,” says rancher Ross Ohlendorf, of Rocking O Longhorns, in Lockhart. And the animal’s cosmetic appeal has grown wildly in recent years. As recently as a decade ago, a steer with horns that measured one hundred inches from tip to tip was considered the gold standard. Today that standard is closer to eleven feet—and at least one rack has been measured at wider than twelve feet. (Whether such animals actually qualify as historical Longhorns is a matter of some contention.)

Others make a grander claim, that the Longhorn carries a profound symbolic weight. When we encounter it in Lonesome Dove or as a sigil on a UT athletic jersey or treated as an icon of sardonic merriment in this magazine’s annual “Bum Steer Awards,” we’re trading on a meme that harks back to Dobie’s romantic vision of the animal as an avatar of Texas’s maverick spirit. That vision was given official recognition in 1995 when the state legislature, with Governor George W. Bush’s assent, designated the Longhorn as the official state large mammal.

The Longhorn’s combined ornamental and symbolic status is a powerful one, if we judge by the market. According to John Clark, a breeder who with his wife owns Buffalo Gap Longhorns, in Abilene, individual cows sometimes sell for as much as $200,000. Two years ago one fetched a record-breaking $700,000. 

Nearing death in 2016, Don Enrique Guerra lay in a Houston hospital bed, unable to speak. Che, who had promised his father he’d take care of the herd, says he told Don Enrique to squeeze his hand if he wanted to return to Rancho San Vicente. Don Enrique squeezed.

The ambulance took five hours to travel from Houston to the Guerra family’s home. When the caravan turned the last corner on the ranch camino, Che says, they encountered a spectacle. The elusive, ever-solitary and aloof Longhorns were gathered, as Che had never before seen them, on the grounds surrounding the ranch house. They bellowed as the ambulance slowly moved to the driveway. And they remained there, in vigil, as Don Enrique died that night.

When we look into the eyes of a Longhorn, we see a reflection of ourselves—or of how we wish to see ourselves. For decades the Longhorn played a fundamental part in a Western mythology that celebrated the Anglo conquest of Texas. But the miracles of genetic science have excavated a more complicated story: The Longhorn, a creature of hybrid heritage and foreign origin, is more cosmopolitan than the romantic beast of Texas frontier lore. It is still a symbol, but one that represents an emergent Texan ethic. Like the Longhorn, we too are the endangered children of the wild, our migrations and evolutions in deep time largely undocumented. We hail from every corner of the globe, and though we once wandered without borders or fences, today we find ourselves ever-more domesticated. 

But we got here. The hardscrabble land has sustained us, if just barely, even as we push against its limits. Perhaps, as Texas grows hotter and drier and less accommodating to our needs, we will develop new powers that will protect us and make us more wondrous. Or perhaps we will edge toward extinction. For now, the Longhorn continues to accompany us on this journey.  

Joel Salcido received financial support for this photography project from the Cattlemen’s Texas Longhorn Conservancy and the Cattlemen’s Texas Longhorn Registry. Historian Ricardo Romo contributed to his research.

This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the title “The Longhorn’s Long Journey.” Subscribe today.

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