Samuel Maverick - Cattle Branding

Cattle Branding

Maverick steadfastly refused to brand his cattle. As a result, the word maverick entered the English lexicon, meaning both an unbranded range animal as well as a slang term for someone who exhibits a streak of stubborn independence.

Maverick's stated reason for not branding his cattle was that he didn't want to inflict pain on them. Other ranchers, however, suspected his true motivation was that it allowed him to collect any unbranded cattle and claim them as his own.

Readers of the preceding accounts of Samuel Maverick's ownership and management or lack of management of cattle must make their own judgments upon the accuracy of the various accounts of the facts. Historians, however, generally give precedence to primary sources, albeit also considering any possible motives of those authorities to vary from the absolute truth. In the case of Maverick's cattle, Mary Maverick and George Madison Maverick may be considered as primary sources. They appended to her memoirs certain of her husband's correspondence and an extract of a letter from George, her son and collaborator, to the St. Louis Republic, apparently in response to an appeal to persons having sure information about the matter to convey their accounts to the editor.

George M. Maverick recounted that in 1845, Mr. Maverick acquired some 400 head of cattle that he, whose interest was in real estate, did not want in payment of a debt to him by a neighbor of $1,200, leaving the cattle to be managed by an African American family. The cattle were subsequently moved from the Gulf coast to the Conquista Ranch on the San Antonio River, still under the management of the same family, and left to multiply, graze, and wander away. Perhaps one-third were branded, and the caretakers apparently made no great effort to keep up with them and may have willfully neglected the branding in order that they might not be readily sold and themselves deprived of their easy position. The wanderings were such that in 1856, the herd could be estimated as numbering the same 400. Others in the area, though being aware that the unbranded estrayed cattle were likely Maverick's, followed the range convention of the time and burned their own brands into the "mavericks," as they had come to refer to the unmarked cattle. Mr. Maverick had little interest in the cattle, and Mrs. Maverick's appendix contains a number of letters advising him of the state of his herd. A Mr. Leo J. Toutant followed up on his own father's earlier offer to purchase Maverick's herd, and in 1856 did so himself. The correspondence relating to the sale appears in the appendix.

There is no evidence that Samuel Maverick ever owned any other cattle and no other stock at all, beyond a few horses. One can reasonably doubt that a man who was not in the cattle business and who did not work with or live near his herd would have been engaged in branding strays. The record suggests that it was nothing more than lack of interest in property he never wanted that led to his name becoming associated with one of the most enduring terms of the Old West and a natural subject for every manner of speculation and inventive tale. The accounts conveyed by other contributors have been left unaltered, to be taken, together with Mrs. Maverick's material, as illustrative of this phenomenon.