Kathy E <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Hi All I hope you don't mind this OT post, I have received private email
requesting a preview of what I'm doing for the kids on these histories,
here's one I've done, perhaps the teachers out here can also be a bit of
help by letting me know if you think it is understandable for a fourth
grader.
====================================================
It should have been the perfect animal to produce profits on the range
-- beefier than a longhorn, stronger than an ox, hardy and independent.
It's tough, wooly hide could be tanned into fine shoe leather or
stretched to make luxuriant fur coats. This marvelous beast grew fat on
the scrubbiest grass and lasted out the harshest of winters and most
searing dry spells. Half cow and half buffalo, it was called the
cattalo, and it promised to be a kind of bovine Santa Claus, giving
everything and asking nothing in return.
And the Western range, in the late 1880's, badly needed a Santa Claus.
Following a summer of devasting drought, severe blizzards during the
winter of '86 left frozen cattle strewn for miles along drift lines.
Ranchers were looking for herd replacements of the hardiest possible
stock. The question was where to find them?
The answer seemed obvious, once someone had thought of it: create a
brand-new animal, starting with the hardiest of all range creatures -
the Native American Buffalo. For numberless centuries the buffalo had
withstood blizzards and dry-ups on the high plains. But the beast was
virtually untamable, difficult to herd and almost impossible to rope and
brand without risking a terrible injury. Genetically, however, the
buffalo was a distant cousin to the more tractable cow. So why not mate
the two, combining the better nature of the longhorn with the buffalo's
ruggedness and heft?
The first man publicly to claim credit for the idea was a onetime hide
hunter, Colonel Charles J. (Buffalo) Jones. A spare, swashbuckling
Kansan, he announced in 1888 the arrival on earth of what he advertised
as the world's first cattalo and salvation of the Western livestock
industry. However, when other cattlemen took a look at the hybrid, with
it's buffalo hump, goatlike beard and voice like a low-pitched pig
grunt, they pronounced it to be nothing but a big mistake. And
furthermore one of the barons, Charles Goodnight, added that it was not
even new. For Goodnight himself had inadvertently become a cattalo
breeder some years before when a pet buffalo bull of his named Old Sikes
developed a strong romantic attachment for a number of Goodnight's
longhorn cows.
It was difficult to see why either Goodnight of Jones cared who took the
credit for so misfourtunate a beast. Besides being spectacularly ugly,
the cattalo could not even survive - much less increase - as an
independent species. The process of birth often resulted in either a
dead calf or a dead mother. Male calves that lived were quite frequently
sterile. Worst of all, the cattalo seemed to have lost so little of it's
ornery buffalo nature that even its most enthusiastic booster, Colonel
Jones, had to admit it was "somewhat inclined to be cross".
In short the marvelous creature that Jones had once trumpeted as "the
perfect animal for the plains" turned out to have no endearing - or
profitable - qualities whatever. And so within a few years it was
allowed to sink quietly beneath the Western horizon.
--
Kathy E
"I can only please one person a day, today is NOT your day, and tomorrow
isn't looking too good for you either"
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