Word: longhorn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
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...
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...
...Corps in the spring of 1915 he was 17 years old. The mechanically-minded son of a minister, he was already so tall (6 ft. 3 in.) that the primitive flying machines of that period could scarcely hold him. When he made his first flight in a Maurice Farman "Longhorn," with his doubled-up knees interfering with the "handlebars" that worked the ailerons, he could understand why the War Office had almost turned him down at first glance. For the airplanes at that stage of the War -the Avros, Moranes, Bristol Bullets, DH 4's-were designed with little...