Wild Cow Tales (3 page)

’Course him and Mr. Commission Man knew there wasn’t a chance for them wild steers to be on the stockyard that morning and that speech was meant to make me buy ’em at $40 a head. Well, I knew that was $200 for five head, and I was writin’ ’em out a check for the money and had told ’em that I was going to buy the cattle, range delivery. Mr. Packer Buyer was reassuring me that it was a smart buy, and that if they was on the stockyards that morning he would be glad to give eight cents a pound for ’em. I handed the commission man the $200 check and I asked him did he want to call the bank on my check. He said, No, sir. My check was good with him and that I had just bought and paid for five steers.

About that time the train whistle blew and there was a cattle train bein’ spotted, and the crew was about to start unloadin’ ’em into the stock pens.

I turned to Mr. Commission Man and said, “I consigned you a load of cattle that were shipped out of Weatherford last night, and they’re unloadin’ ’em now out there in the stock pens.” As I looked out the winder I said, “If you’ll look right quick you can see those five steers comin’ down the chute, and I’m instructing you to weigh ’em to Mr. Packer Buyer for eight cents a pound.”

C
ATTLE, PEOPLE, AND THE DIETS
of both have undergone revolutionary changes since the turn of the century. In the early days of the cattle industry the production of beef in the Western and Southwestern regions of the United States was carried on by cattlemen in such a way that, big beef steers could be produced on open range and fattened on the nutritious virgin grasses with the least possible expense without the use of any domestic feed grains. Another source of beef came from big aged cows that had failed to produce a calf and thereby had gotten fat and were considered to be excellent beef. Fat cows were generally butchered by local meat markets whereas big steers were usually driven and shipped to local and Northern central markets.

Aged beef can mean two different things. When a
cowman refers to aged beef he means cattle that have reached maturity and are no longer growing additional carcass and are fattened on the grass. To a packer, processor, or today’s housewife aged beef can mean beef that has been made from cattle slaughtered at any age, weight, or size, and the aging process referred to here is the length of time and the temperature that the beef has been aged in storage—but this is not the original meaning of the term “aged beef.” By the different use of the same wording much confusion can be caused among today’s modern amateurs in the discussion of beef.

In my days of growing up we worked outdoors in the wintertime and ate much more beef and pork than we did in the summertime. Pork was not considered good summer diet and in those days we never learned to use or knew what the word “diet” meant. People living in hot climates and working in the summer sun are more comfortable and withstand the heat better when they eat beef.

Refrigeration has been a contributing factor in changing the meat supply to the human race. It was a common practice on ranches, cow camps, and even in large families to hang a big aged beef, dressed, up in the top of the windmill tower, especially in the wintertime. By the use of pulleys and ropes the side of beef would be let down to arm’s level and the day’s supply would be sliced off whatever part of the carcass that was being eaten at the time. The remaining part would be hoisted back into the top of the windmill tower above the level of the ground insects, such as flies and so forth, where the air would cause a crust to form around the meat and keep it for several weeks in perfect condition. A more humid climate might
cause several ranches or several families to adopt the practice of taking time about butchering a beef and distributing it among several families in order that it be eaten up before it spoiled in the absence of refrigeration.

Another means of protecting meat was by constructing what was referred to as a screen house. Such a building would be located where there was usually a breeze and would have a roof and be closed in all the way around with screen wire to let the air blow freely, and with the exception of the very hottest of weather, this was a satisfactory way in dry climates to protect fresh meat for several days until it could be used.

I remember, as a boy, when the only known refrigeration in the Southwest was manufactured ice. (In the North people cut ice and put it in their own ice houses to be used in the summer.) Ice was not made in every community; only large towns and cities had ice factories, and the ice was shipped in freight carloads to smaller communities. Most iceboxes in the home were homemade and had doubled walls. The best ones were lined on the inside with flat galvanized sheet iron and the two or three inches spaced between the walls were packed with cottonseed hulls or sawdust and had heavy lids made of the same construction to fit these iceboxes. Manufactured refrigerators that stood upright and had doors that opened from the side with a separate compartment for ice were owned by people that were thought of as being well-to-do, and these iceboxes were almost prestige symbols. Of course with either kind the ice melted faster when we kids opened and slammed the doors.

We lived at the edge of the small town of Cumby,
which boasted two meat markets. These meat markets had what were called walk-in iceboxes, and the ice was hoisted overhead with a block and tackle and put in the top compartment; these refrigerators were no more nor no less effective for the purpose used than the home iceboxes, which meant that the local meat market operator butchered beef several times a week in order not to take any chances on it spoiling from this damp, imperfect sort of refrigeration.

Steak was the common diet for breakfast in the summertime. I slept on the porch all summer as a kid and kept my pony in a grass patch next to the yard. I would have preferred to have kept my pony in the yard where she could nuzzle her soft nose around on me in my sleep but my family had some kind of peculiar ideas about sanitation and keeping horses in the yard. However, I overcame this handicap when I went to cowboy’n’ and batch’n’. My first chore in the morning was to get up before the rest of the family and hop on my pony bareback and lope to town and get the steak for breakfast. Some people of course walked to the meat market, but there would be half a dozen other kids horseback that had loped to town to get steak for breakfast and the old meat market man would look out the door and see us waiting on our ponies and knew who we were, how many were in our families, how thick or thin our mothers wanted the meat cut, and pretty soon he would come out the screen door with his apron rolled up and hand us our separate packages of meat, and we would lope off home for breakfast. Needless to say, a kid sleeping on the porch in the open air, riding a pony a mile before
breakfast thought steak for breakfast was just the thing.

The meat in local markets would be from the carcass of barren cows or steers that weighed around 1,000 pounds and were thought of as lightweight, local-butchering-type cattle. Big steers that were shipped fat off the grass to supply the cities trade and especially Eastern markets were seldom ever weighed in at the packers under 1,400 pounds and 1,600-pound steers were ideal and thought to be more or less common to the finer trade. When T-bone, sirloin, or any of the better cuts were served in hotels or restaurants, all the tallow was cooked with the red meat and served on the platter. There was no air conditioning, very little if any so-called central heat, and closed automobiles referred to as sedans were barely making their appearance and we ate big heavy fat beef to supply energy to walk where we were going and the heat to maintain our bodies in bad weather. In all our ignorance the human race had not discovered vitamins and knew very little about minerals, food supplements, and so forth, and had we all stayed on a solid diet of aged beef, fresh vegetables and tree-ripened fruits, natural sun-ripened and carefully harvested cereal grains, it is just possible we might have never discovered the blessing of vitamins and other food supplements.

During this period of the development of the cattle industry, it is true that some aged steers were fattened in the Corn Belt states and corn-fed cattle were considered by some people to be superior beef to grass-finished cattle of the same age.

So-called milk-fed calf, baby beef and veal, was scorned as being a poor substitute for meat. Baby beef
might be served at a ladies’ luncheon but men scorned the stuff as a poor substitute for something to eat.

The transportation and living conditions of Americans began to change right after World War I to the extent that there developed a small demand for what was considered to be lightweight beef, meaning under one thousand pounds live weight. This trend was very gradual because people’s living habits still required a great deal of physical effort and hard food was still cherished and soft diets had not become the order of the day. Big steers and big-steer operators still enjoyed the major portion of the demand for beef. With much promotion on the part of cattle feeders and cattle breeders, baby beef began to make some inroads on the big-beef market. Land was continually increasing in value and the breaking up of large ranches had begun in an almost unnoticed way.

By the late 1920’s production costs had begun to make it less profitable to keep steers and other beef animals until they were several years old. Most of the people in America had begun to ride in automobiles and were burning less protein foods, and lightweight cattle had gotten into major demand. The crash of 1929 broke the buying power of the purchasing public and a cut off of a small beef was far more in reach of the average consumer and the luxury living class of Americans that had insisted on and demanded big finished beef was dwindling to a very small number. Big steers broke just about all the cattlemen that were specializing in them alone, and the cattle producers that survived had to change their operations to lightweight beef; the demand for baby beef and veal, which is a sucking calf that weighs less than 300
pounds, comprised most of the beef-tonnage turnover.

Young cattle in their growing years do not put on enough tallow under most grazing operations to produce a good quality of meat when slaughtered. The cry for quality at light weight stimulated the cattle-feeding business because young cattle had to be confined in feed lots on concentrated feed grains and protein such as cottonseed meal, soybean meal, etc., in order to fatten in spite of their growing age.

Cattlemen had been improving the fleshing qualities of their breeding stock for several generations and the so-called beef specialists from our various agricultural universities sponsored and demanded in the show ring a lightweight, heavy-fleshed, highly finished young animal and brought on the feeding and exhibiting of baby beef animals by our boys and girls that were studying animal husbandry and agriculture at all levels of education. Breeders, in order to satisfy the modern demand, were forced to breed square, blocky,’ short-legged, heavy-fleshed cattle that in reality and fact were less adaptive to the cattle grass ranches of the range country, and cattle of such conformation would naturally produce less milk for their offspring.

This trend for compact, smooth, showy feeder cattle in the course of twenty-five years has almost destroyed the practical purposes of large livestock in that, with their lack of milk and their burdensome conformation, such cattle are not capable of foraging over a wide range making a living as well as producing a big calf. I well remember when the first beef specialists were sent out to advise cattlemen as to how to improve and breed smooth,
typy, modern beef cattle. Before this time when we rode on a roundup it was necessary to ride to the top of the mountains, the bottom of the canyons, and the furthermost corners of a big pasture because range cattle then would be scattered and taking the best advantage of the most country within a fenced pasture, regardless of how large the pasture might be. Within three or four generations of crossing our good native range cattle with European breeds of bulls, I began to notice, as a cowboy and by then a rancher, that cattle didn’t graze as far up the mountain or as far from water and that range cows seldom ever had enough milk, that one had to be roped and milked when the calf was small to keep her bag from spoiling.

By the early 1950’s this clamor for baby beef, short, compact breeding stock, and from using the advice of educated specialists, cattle were so greatly improved that during winter feeding time or during drought they would meet you in the flat part of the pasture between the windmill and the feed trough and, needless to say, the struggle to try to make money off of such unproductive cattle with the constantly climbing overhead put the cattle industry as a whole in the category of a poor business that for the most part had to be subsidized by oil wells or some other source of income derived from outside the livestock industry. Cattlemen that through their stubbornness had stayed with crossbreed cattle still had cows that produced milk and raised big calves. This sort of operator was ofttimes condemned by the brilliant, educated specialists of the animal kingdom because of his cattle’s lack of uniformity in color or some other characteristic that
would not affect the weight of the cattle and would have no effect on the beef and, in fact, would be some criticism of no material consequence.

By the beginning of the 1940’s the American way of life had been modified by modern conveniences, easy modes of travel and air conditioning, to where the human appetite rebelled at the taste of excessive tallow or other fats. The modern housewife began to demand lighter cuts of beef with enough finish to ensure flavor and easy preparation in cooking and at the same time that the meat be trimmed of all excessive tallow and other waste materials such as cartilage, excessive bone, and so forth.

Tallow that is being trimmed from beef that sells for as much as a dollar a pound or more must be sold as waste for as little as seven cents a pound. This situation has caused packers to heavily penalize overfinished, over-fat cattle that carry too much tallow, and today’s trend in breeding cattle is to try to select breeding stock that will have a good growth factor and produce cattle that will gain economically to a point of light finish and will dress out with a minimum amount of waste with the maximum amount of red meat.