Texas Longhorn Museum

Under a moonless sky, longhorn aficionados stood on the patio of the Old Lajitas Trading Post as the Texas Longhorn Museum officially opened Saturday night in Lajitas with a ribbon-cutting ceremony led by Rita Yates, widow of third generation longhorn rancher Fayette Yates.
Fayette’s grandparents Ira and Ann, namesakes of that famous conjuncted Texas town, Iraan, bought cactus-studded country along the Pecos River in 1915 and barely survived with their nine children until 1926 when black crude bubbled out of their ground. Instantly endowed, they focused on their first love, ranching, and their favorite breed, the endangered Texas Longhorn.
Shipped over the Atlantic in the belly of Spanish Galleons, the longhorn was introduced to the Americas at the port of Vera Cruz, Mexico in about 1521. Gnarly and un-keen to be domesticated, many feraled and worked the low shrub and cactus country with their long legs and nearly hairless bellies north and west to Texas. Multiplying profusely in a fenceless land, they used their horns to fend off predators like the big cats and grey wolves of that time. They became part of the territory, and their hides originally black from Spain, mutated, turning out brindles, speckles, reds and whites, that blended with the earth and rock. They became regular denizens in northern Mexico and were known as “Corrientes,” a Spanish word meaning “common.”
At the age of twelve, in post-civil war Texas, Ira ran his first longhorns up the Goodnight-Loving trail to Dodge City where buyers bid cattle, primarily for tallow and hides, because meat and refrigeration had not yet co-mingled successfully. Up to 1890, it’s estimated that 10,000,000 of the feral beasts were rounded up by free-lancing cowboys and driven north to the slaughterhouses.
New breeds gened into existence with more grease and larger hides. These hybrids such as Charolais, Hereford and Santa Gertrudis displaced the pure Texas Longhorn, quickening its route to oblivion.
Ira’s son, Cap, born in 1886, and buried in a rock mausoleum, allegedly standing up, near the top of a peak in the Glass Mountains, served as an important link in the family effort to preserve the Texas Longhorn. Finding few pure strains in the southwest, Cap traveled to Mexico and rounded up descendants of those first four-legged Spaniards that walked down the ship’s gangway nearly four hundred years earlier with the Conquistadores. Cap’s eventual 1500 strong longhorn herd became the seed stock for most of the Texas Longhorn living today.
Cap’s son, Fayette Yates, continued the family tradition, keeping records, becoming the first charter member of the Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America and collecting horn specimens that were revealed Saturday night at the Old Lajitas Trading Post.
What other state would have a museum dedicated to cow horns?
That night under the patio’s ramada the two piece “Bent Lovehandles” band covered country songs, while the beer flowed. With the ribbon cut, longhorn lovers herded into the old adobe, to discover walls covered head to toe in skull racks, pure horns and stuffed bevos taking half a room.
There are over five hundred sets of horns in the five room museum, excluding the bathrooms where you can also find them. There are longhorn light fixtures and longhorn paper dispensers but the toilet itself is white porcelain.
Steers are the biggest part of the collection. Once castrated, nature perhaps pacifies the neutered beast by allowing their horns to grow extreme, some with spans beyond a big man’s stretched arms. It is a great display of calcium but I am later informed that it’s not only the horn cap that is similar to our fingernails in mineral content. Inside the horn cap is bone, calcified bone, that protected a vestibule of blood, long since drained, that would under certain conditions light up from a St Elmo’s fire, a devilish turbine of static, electrifying a herd of cattle, trailing through a dark desert, in a primal display of nature’s authority. I stepped back from the wall and looked for the shrimp cocktail.
The Texas Twist, as it is known, is part of the art of the horn. “Twisted like taffy,” John Galle a former director of the Texas Longhorn Registry and a friend of the late Fayette Yates, said.
Studied closely you can see the growth lines in the horns spiraling laterally from the poll: stretching, bending, twisting, out and up.
“Bass Brothers bred for the longest horns on their south Texas ranches,” he said with a quirked eyebrow. “They got’em long but they didn’t have the twist.” He put his hand to his mouth and lowered his voice. “That don’t count.”
Together we searched for bull horns and find only three in the collection. They have a slight hook, curved forward at the tips and are short in comparison to the steers and cows.
“Imagine those matadors.” Galle pumped his fist into his stomach.
In the main room a set of horns curved backwards like a ram, but wider and more irregular, the right horn higher with a tight curve and the left horn truncated abruptly – a Texas Twist gone mad.
“Lightening,” Galle said.
Some of the horns on display are over a hundred years old, but most, much younger.
“I knew this one,” Frank Sharp said. He is a Texas Longhorn breeder with a ranch outside of Brownwood.
He follows the growth line of the horn from his old friend as it double twists to the tip. Then he pulls the horn cap off and shows the white underneath.
“You can always tell if the caps are original,” Sharp said. “They have to fit just right.”
In front of the roast beef I met Rita Yates and asked if it’s true that her father-in-law Cap Yates was buried standing up in a mausoleum inside a mountain.
“Standing up?” She questioned. “I don’t know about that. I mean why?” She searched my face for an answer then said, “But he is buried in a rock mausoleum in the Glass Mountains.”
She shows me a painting, signed, Eva Lena Hill, 1960. A blue-gray triple peak shaped like a cathedral centers the oil painting with a white caliche road leading up to a dark cleft in the limestone just below the peaks and in the brush below a white longhorn feeds. “That’s where he’s buried,” she said, pointing to the cleft. “They were digging his hole before he died.”
I headed toward the bar. There’s a lot of tucked in shirts and big belt buckles, women in tight fitting blue jeans and a few children overcome with the adult curiosity in horns. Dallas oil man, host and proprietor of the collection and owner of the Lajitas Resort , Kelsey Warren, mingles in blue jeans and a crisp white shirt. The ever-ready operator of the resort, Edwin Leslie, stands near the door with a walkie-talkie at his mouth. A young UT Austin student explains to me how his English professor is using Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor and guide for students to find themselves. And later amongst the longhorns I hear someone mutter, “Personally I’m a Hereford man.”
Out on the patio, the Modelo’s cold, people are visiting, and the band is playing “Whisky River.” The sweet scent of wet creosote floats in the air. Straight out, across the river, a Mexican mountain looms dark and a night hawk dips below a floodlight. And briefly and assuredly somewhere a longhorn bawls. Texas.