Old West cattle brands
By western author Nick Brumby
“Trust your neighbor… but brand your cattle.” — Old West wisdom
Cowboys have been leaving their mark on the world for a long, long time. There’s no better example of this than a well-designed Old West cattle brand.
Cattle brands must be simple, clear, distinctive, and they’ve got to be hard to (ahem) change. Oh, did I mention simple? No time for fancy spellin’ when the pressure is on.
The act of marking livestock with permanent scarring to identify ownership started in ancient times. First reports of branding date back to the ancient Egyptians around 2,700 BCE. Ancient Romans sometimes chose symbols with ‘magic power’ for their brands, aimed at protecting animals from harm. Cattle branding is also mentioned in the Bible.
However, brands only really became part of everyday life when cowboys started driving cattle across the Old West. Brands identified a cow’s owner, allowing cattle owned by multiple ranches to graze freely together on the open range. They also protected cattle from rustlers (cattle thieves) and helped to separate them when it came time to drive to market.
In the American West, a branding iron was an iron rod with a simple symbol or mark on the end, which cowboys heated in a fire. After the branding iron turned red hot, the cowboy pressed the branding iron against the hide of the cow, creating a permanent scar on the animal’s hide. Brands were mostly applied to the cow’s left hip. This
method was effective, visible on all colors of hide, and relatively quick to apply, though it is associated with momentary pain for the animal.
Just because branding made cattle harder to steal does not mean outlaws didn’t try. One common method was to ‘take’ ownership of a cow by ‘changing’ the brand. Cattle rustlers who were good at altering brands were called ‘brand artists’. These Old West cattle thieves used ‘running irons’ to do so. A running iron was a branding iron not bent into the shape of a specific brand. This tool allowed the user freedom to write over {change) an original brand into a new design, an essential step when claiming ownership of stolen cattle.
Spanish explorers brought the tradition of cattle branding to the New World when they introduced cattle in the early 16th century. The first recorded cattle brand is of three Latin crosses, which was the brand of Hernán Cortés, one of the greatest of the conquistador in southern Mexico in the 1500s.
Brands have a language all their own, which follows certain rules. The ability to read these symbols is referred to as “callin’ the brand”. Originally, most Spanish brands used pictograms rather than letters, often for artistic reasons. Early Anglo-American ranchers in Texas often referred to these traditional Spanish brands as “dog irons” or “quién sabes” (Spanish for “who knows?”) since they were not easily read. These Texans instead used the alphabet for their brands, to make them easier to read.
Like books, cattle brands are read from top to bottom and left to right. At its most basic, a cattle brand comprises a few simple letters and numbers, possibly in combination with a basic shape or symbols like a line, circle, heart, arc, or diamond.
However, these characters can also include extraneous ‘wings’ or ’feet’ added to a letter or number. Each character can also be rotated or reversed. Every addition and variation results in a unique character with a unique name. For example, the letters with ‘wings’ are described as ‘flying’, while those with ‘feet’ are ‘walking’. Upside-down characters are ‘crazy’ while rotating a character 90-degrees makes it ‘lazy’. In addition, a leaning letter or character is ‘tumbling’, while changing angular lines into curved lines makes a brand ‘running’.
Half-circles, quarter-circles, and triangles also featured regularly in late-nineteenth-century brands. An open triangle was called a ‘rafter.’ If a letter rested in a quarter-circle, it was said to be ‘rocking’. There were also ‘bars,’ ‘stripes’, ‘rails’, and ‘slashes’ that differed only in length and angle.
The creativity or simplicity of a brand was matched only by the creativity or desired simplicity of the brand’s owner.
As if all that were not enough, multiple symbols could be joined together to create a ligature – a term used in typography to describe a single character representing two or more letters, such as æ.
By the 1870s, many West Texas counties began brand registration, with letters, numerals, and even names registered as popular brands. While some brands are easily read, others with intriguing names must be seen and interpreted, such as the ‘Hogeye,’ ‘Fishtail’, ‘Buzzard on a Rail’, ‘Saddle Pockets’, and the ‘Swinging Blocks’. Brands resembling common objects as an anvil, a truck handle, hash knife, door key, bridle bit, spur, pitchfork, or rocking chair were commonplace for ranchers who may have been illiterate and who needed to find a brand that would distinguish his cattle from another rancher.
A particularly interesting branding tale involves Samuel Maverick, a Texas rancher in the mid-1800s. Maverick refused to brand his cattle. Because of this, any unbranded animal found on the range became known as a ‘Maverick’. Today, that term can also mean an independent thinker, someone who refuses to follow the crowd, or a rebel or nonconformist. That’s a lot from a single rancher who didn’t use hot brands!
By the early 1900s, the ranching world was changing. Barbed wire fencing had spread across the West, railroads reduced long cattle drives, and property boundaries became more defined.
Branding remained important, but the open-range era — when brands were essential — slowly faded. Today, many ranches use ear tags, tattoos, and microchips for livestock tracking.
However, even today hot branding remains the top preventative measure to combat cattle theft. Carl Bennett, director of the Louisiana Livestock Brand Commission, recently told USA Today that “We have yet to find a system that can replace a hot brand on a cow. There’s nothing in modern society that’s more sure.”
About Nick Brumby
I like a good story. And of all stories, I love westerns the most.
As a kid, I spent far too many afternoons re-watching Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, picking up ‘Shane’ for just one more read, or saddling up beside Ben Cartwright when ‘Bonanza’ was on TV each afternoon.
I’m a former journalist and I love horses, dogs, and the occasional bourbon whiskey. I live with my wife, daughter and our ever-slumbering hound in a 1800’s-era gold mining town – our house is right on top of the last working gold mine in the area. There may not be much gold left, but there’s history wherever you look.
I hope you enjoy my westerns as much as I enjoyed writing them!
Happy trails,
Nick
