Sue Sanders: “Our old milk stock kept alive by eating mesquite beans and even twigs from the trees. The trees themselves were doing well to keep alive, and their foliage was mighty scarce. We couldn’t understand where the cows found water and how they managed to get there and back to the farm every night. But Old Spot, the herd leader, never failed to come walking in, bringing the rest of the herd with her. Even then I was proud of Old Spot. I had always held up for her when Ma had compared her to Jersey. But it wasn’t until later in my life that I realized what the spotted cow was made of. She could keep on living when the going was so tough that the jersey fell out and quit. Erath County then was no place for blue-bloods, whether man or beast.”

The Sue Sander’s Our Common Herd 1939 first edition was reprinted in 1980 by Annette Baxter, Leon Stein, and Barbara Welter (eds.) Signal Lives: Autobiographies of American Women, Arno Press: New York. I picked up the first edition in an Austin bookstore years ago as Larry McMurtry set it down and took a few steps away.