The word Maverick defined

I would like to offer a clarification of the word “maverick” for once and for all. Clearly the body politic is not that interested in looking up words and is intent on rough riding our language. Today is the beginning of the end of that bring down.

A maverick is simply an unbranded calf, akin to a motherless child. It is not a “rogue” or a “renegade”, or an animal with his/her own mind. Generally speaking a Maverick might well be expected to be poorly fed and quite thin, due to his/her lack of maternal attention. Bawling or excessive mooing might be another characteristic. Further, he/she might well be expected to be hard to get along with, i.e. cranky, not because of an elevated brain pattern but simply because he/she has to “make a living” without any help from the older generation.

The most common usage for this term occurred when the calf was born in the early Spring out on the “open range”and the mother cow didn’t survive the birth. Naturally, the calf wouldn’t have a brand to determine ownership until later on in the Spring roundup. These roundups were generally run by the larger ranches but the word Maverick had been hatched earlier.

It seems there was a Texas rancher named Maverick who took 100 cows and a few bulls to an island in the Gulf of Mexico. He just dropped them off, figuring that in a few years he would have doubled or maybe tripled his investment, simply by leaving the animals to their natural ways. A few years later, Maverick returned to the island and was disappointed to see that the only animals on the island were the ones he had brought over and which bore his brand. His neighbors, you see, had learned of his investment scheme and had visited the island in his absence and simply took the unbranded calves. The “get rich quick and without work” scheme was indeed a scheme that didn’t/couldn’t work. Thereafter, the neighboring stockmen would see an unbranded calf and say, “That must be one of Maverick’s.”

Okay, that’s enough for today. Next stop, decimating.