MAVERICK THE MAN
For some reason it proved difficult for me to associate the term "maverick" with a person - one man. It had always symbolized a stray, abandoned, scruffy and unmarked critter on the open ranges of the American western states.
It was a part of the verbal aura which surrounded the verbal patina which encrusted our special view of the Old West and kept it secure from change for us as devotees of the western films of long ago.
We had our own images of the way things should be ...saloons, cowpokes, gamblers, madams, boarding houses, and a maverick was an unbranded calf.
The man, Samuel A. Maverick was, I understand, a lawyer. He missed being at the Alamo with other Texas freedom fighters, because he had been elected by those who were there to be their representative to a forthcoming conference which would write the Texas freedom concept out as a legal document. He had come from South Carolina to Texas in l835 . At age twenty four, he was a rancher, and young man who was yet to take part in the Southern Cause when he accepted the job of being Assistant Treasurer of the Confederacy.
Even with all that, he would not have been remembered by most us except for one thing he did not do ...something he refused to do... which set him apart his fellow Texas ranchers. For some undisclosed reason which has never been made clear to me, Samuel A. Maverick would not brand his cattle. Yet, since they roamed the range with the polyglot herds bearing many symbols of ownership, and his unmarked animal caused confusion and trouble for other owners. So Maverick became the term describing any unbranded critter.
I have yet to come across a creditable reason why Maverick would have been so touchy about hot-iron-branding cattle. He was , certainly , not squeamish about such a thing, and it was far too early for the Animal Rights people to be on his neck. We'll, most likely, never know. It may well be that he was simply more of a lawyer than he was a cattleman.
He, was, we might say, a maverick.
A.L.M. April 25, 2003 [c568wds]
