Joseph Cox was born in 1836 on a stock farm in the pine country of northeast Texas, in what became Harrison County. He was born the same year Texas won its independence, and he will tell you so. The family Bible says Joseph, but he has answered to Jay his whole life. His people were poor stockmen on the edge of plantation country, and he learned cattle the East Texas way: hunting half-wild cows out of the brakes and bottoms with dogs and a stock whip, working them by ear in the thick brush. His father had lived through the Regulator-Moderator feud in the counties south of home, and often told how Sam Houston brought in the militia to stop it. Jay took one lesson from those stories: a feud eats the men who feed it.
He rode out of Marshall in 1861 with a Harrison County cavalry company and spent the war in the saddle west of the Mississippi. After the war, he moved west to the Lampasas country, where he could make a living working cattle on the open range. Comanche raids were still a concern in the late sixties. He gathered wild cattle out of the brush there and spent his thirties going up the Kansas trails with Lampasas herds, often working alongside much younger hands.
When the state rebuilt the Rangers in 1874, the Frontier Battalion signed him at thirty-eight. He was older than most recruits and knew the country west of home. He put in two years with Company D, scouting, then spending more of his time pursuing stock thieves and fugitives. The legislature cut the money in 1876 and he took his discharge at forty.
He went back to Lampasas in time for the Horrell-Higgins feud. He knew men on both sides, the way every stockman in a small county did, and both sides offered work to the former Ranger. He turned them down flat. When pressed about it, he said he'd heard this story as a boy and knew the ending. He was on the square in June of 1877 when the two factions fought a running gun battle through the middle of town, and still there later that summer when Major Jones brought the Rangers in and got both families to sign a peace. The peace held. In the spring of '78 he took a Lampasas herd north as trail boss.
“The name stuck. Nobody argues with a cook.”
The name came that summer at the Platte crossing. Dry lightning after midnight put three thousand head on their feet and running toward a steep cutbank. The night guard pulled back. Jay put his horse at the point of the run and held there, turning the leaders by lantern light until the herd bent into a mill and wound itself down. In the morning the cook looked the ground over and said the herd had been turned by a man who stood like an old bull bison in the current. The name stuck. Nobody argues with a cook.
He came home that fall with the name and a trail boss's wages, and did the same for two more seasons. By 1881 he had a place of his own in the Big Valley bottoms on the Colorado, with water for his cattle. He registered a brand and built the herd a cow at a time from she-stock he took in place of pay. It was Lampasas County then, a long ride from the courthouse, which suited him. He still does his own gathers and his own fence work, using much of his old trail gear. His rigging has gone soft from twenty years of Texas weather, and his spurs are older than any hand he hires at roundup. His discharge paper is still folded in oilcloth in the bottom of his war bag.
Then the railroad came through in '85 and put a town called Goldthwaite where there had been a pasture, and in the spring of '87 the state drew a new county around it and told the people in it to pick a sheriff. The big outfits stringing wire across the range and the small men cutting it had started talking about each other in a way Jay recognized, and he had walked out of enough rooms where that talk was starting that both sides trusted him, each for their own reasons. His name went on the ballot and he carried every precinct. So at fifty-one he is the first county sheriff and a cattleman still, riding to a courthouse in a town younger than his youngest horse. The star sits on his vest next to the watch chain, and he is selling steers this fall while his neighbors hold, because the range is stocked too heavy and two years of drought have left little grazing. The young hands think he is overcautious. He would rather sell now than lose cattle through the winter.