Jay Tanner was born in 1836 on a stock farm in the pine country of northeast Texas, in what became Harrison County. Born the same year Texas won its independence, and he will tell you so. 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 country where a man couldn't see thirty feet. His father had lived through the Regulator-Moderator feud in the counties south of home, the one that ran so long Sam Houston finally marched militia in to stop it, and told the stories often. Jay kept one lesson out of all of them. 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. He came home to Reconstruction, decided cotton country held nothing for a man whose trade was cattle, and drifted west in the late sixties to the Lampasas country on the edge of the hills. Open range, cedar brakes, Comanche raids still coming down on the moonlit nights. He gathered wild cattle out of the brush there and spent his thirties going up the Kansas trails with Lampasas herds, a grown man working among boys.
When the state rebuilt the Rangers in 1874, the Frontier Battalion signed him at thirty-eight. Captains wanted a few older heads in companies full of nineteen-year-olds, and Tanner knew the country west of home. He put in two years with Company D, scouting for Comanche sign that got scarcer every season, then hunting stock thieves and fugitives once the Indian trouble was done. 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 had work for a level ex-Ranger who could shoot. 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 cutbank that would have piled them thirty deep. The night guard gave way, which was the sensible thing to do. Tanner didn't. He 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. A man who had watched Lampasas nearly burn over cattle had learned to want his own iron, and by 1881 he had it: a place in the Big Valley bottoms on the Colorado, where the water was his, a registered brand, and a herd built 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 work. His own gathers, his own branding, his own fence, which is why nothing he owns looks new. Texas rigging gone soft from twenty years of Texas work. Spurs older than any hand he hires at roundup. His discharge paper 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 Tanner 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 the sky has given up no rain worth the name in two years. The young hands think he is overcautious. He has been wrong about plenty of things, but not yet about weather.