Pasture of dreams

During the American Civil War, longhorn cattle multiplied extraordinarily in Texas. Because there were no markets readily available to sell this almost immeasurable blessing of the Texan cattle region even after the war, the local ranchers could not afford to hire cowboys to work with the cattle. The herds grazed without human supervision. They weren't even worth the price of their hides. Nobody went to the trouble of branding their year-old animals anymore. And so, there was an enormous number of cattle in Texas, hundreds of thousands of them, without a branded ownership mark. The English word “maverick” came to be used for such free-roaming cattle. A certain Mr Maverick, one of the largest Texan ranchers, was the first to stop branding his animals. And because the unbranded cows multiplied and spread over an area the size of a European kingdom, they could later be found everywhere. It was assumed that they came from Mr Maverick's stock, and so everyone in Texas called them after him. Soon, any unbranded bovine that was already feeding itself without its mother's help and whose owner could not be determined came to be called a “maverick”. At that time, many people in Texas were interested in these free animals. More than one later large and important cattle breeder in the country started out as a “maverick” hunter, acquiring their foundation herd with a lasso in hand. Our story describes the journey of three cowboys who also caught a herd of free-roaming cattle and set out with them to find the pasture of their dreams.