Word: bison
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...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...
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...
...newly discovered ox possesses extremely primitive physical features which place the animal close to the ancient ancestral line of modern domestic cattle and as a form which probably branched off the main cattle family stem, before the bison, yak, zebu, gaur, and bantin about ten million years back, in the middle pliocene period...
...West he bullwhacked across the Plains, filled then with fierce bison, fiercer Indians. He got his lungs full of pre-Dust Bowl dust, his system full of alkali water. In Utah he discovered that "in this country you'll find only three seasons-July, August, and winter...
...hunt, along the "woodless prairies" beyond the Arkansas River, their venison often spoiled for lack of fuel to cook it. Indian police whipped the noisy and the neck-craners into discipline when game was near. They were skillful shots; one bullet or one arrow per bison was usually enough. Tixier predicted the extinction of the bison; the Osage killed them at random, usually left 150 Ib. of excellent meat on each carcass...