Spanish ranchers in early Texas allowed their bulls to fight each other for control of the herds to keep them tough and difficult for Comanches to rustle. Before mixing with European breeds produced the longhorns, these feral cattle escaped from missions and ranged along the Central Texas rivers for over a hundred yers. They were of Moorish stock, black, and with “with horns set forward to kill, like the buffalo.” These cattle were described as “quick, restless, constantly on the lookout for danger, snuffing the air, and moving with a light elastic step. In their sense of smell thy were fully the equal of deer. A wounded bull has been known to hunt for his enemy by scent, trailing him on the ground like a bear.” Unlike buffalo, these cattle browsed back the shrubs along the Bosque, encouraging the growth of thorny red and black haws, which came to dominate the river’s vegetation until the late 19th Century. The first Erath settlers were able to fill their baskets with haws until the thorny bushes were crowded out by the increasing non-thorny vegetation. Allan Nelson, Tarleton biologist, has declared the haws extinct in Erath County. There is specimen of black haw on the Stephenville Museum grounds in front of the Carriage house.

J. Frank Dobie, The Longhorns, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982; May Theilgaard Watts, Reading the Landscape: An Adventure in Ecology, New York: Macmillan Co., 1963; and Interviews with Stephenville retirement home residents in the 1980s.