The Origin of the Term 'Maverick' in Cattle Ranching
By: David Dary
Revised by: Lewis F. Fisher
Published: 1952
Updated: August 21, 2023
Unbranded cattle of landholder Samuel A. Maverick began spreading in the 1840s across the South Texas range, where they were known as “Maverick’s.” The term was later picked up by cowboys moving cattle north up the Chisholm Trail and soon after the Civil War had spread into the English language.
Maverick, a South Carolina native and Yale graduate who had settled in San Antonio, moved his family to DeCrow’s (Decros) Point at the tip of Matagorda Peninsula on the Texas coast for safety during the Mexican War. There he got into real estate development and bought half interest in a steamboat on the Colorado River. In February 1847 he bought a farm halfway up the peninsula from Charles Tilton, once based on Galveston Island as boatswain’s mate with the pirate Jean Laffite. The purchase included some 400 head of longhorn cattle, all bearing Tilton’s brand.
Eight months later, San Antonio was considered safe from military action, and Maverick moved with his family back to San Antonio. The task of managing the cattle was left to an enslaved nineteen-year old named Jack, who was soon reporting a need for assistance that went unanswered. Few if any of the calves were branded, and they began roaming up the peninsula and onto the Texas mainland. Nearby ranchers reported to Maverick that his cattle were being lost and stolen, but Maverick was preoccupied with surveying his new land purchases in West Texas and with serving in the Texas legislature. Finally, in the spring of 1854 Maverick set out with his two oldest sons and four Mexican vaqueros to drive the herd, which had shrunk to 250, from Matagorda Peninsula 200 miles west to Maverick’s 10,500-acre Conquista Ranch on the San Antonio River in Karnes County. But the overburdened Jack was still in charge of the cattle, and still few, if any, calves were branded.
Two years later Maverick sold his herd to neighboring rancher Augustine Toutant-Beauregard, brother of Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard. The sale was on range delivery, requiring the purchaser to round up the cattle—branded or unbranded—on the open range. The enterprising Toutant-Beauregard sent his cowboys into neighboring counties to round up all the unbranded cattle they could find and declared them Maverick’s, launching the use of “mavericks” in newspapers and common use. Maximilian Schele de Vere’s dictionary Americanisms: The English of the New World, published in 1872, linked the word with Samuel Maverick. As a noun the term came to refer to any living creature, human or otherwise, that goes its own way rather than acting as part of a group or herd. More recently it has been adapted as an adjective and as a verb. “Mavericking” became a general term for predatory roundups of unbranded cattle throughout the American West. In 1866 the Texas legislature passed a law against driving another person's livestock from its accustomed range and theoretically outlawed mavericking, and the Colorado legislature passed a law dealing with “Mavoricks” in 1879, but the practice was not generally considered theft until the late 1880s, after open-range ranching gradually came to an end and cattle ranchers began acquiring grazing land and fencing their property. In Texas the Cowboy Strike of 1883 occurred in part as a response to the ranchers' insistence that mavericks were company property and could not be taken by the cowboys as wages.
Bibliography:
David Dary, Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (New York: Knopf, 1981). Lewis F. Fisher, Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2017).
Categories:
Time Periods:
Places:
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
David Dary Revised by Lewis F. Fisher, “Mavericks and Mavericking,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mavericks-and-mavericking.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
PFM01
All copyrighted materials included within the Handbook of Texas Online are in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 related to Copyright and “Fair Use” for Non-Profit educational institutions, which permits the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), to utilize copyrighted materials to further scholarship, education, and inform the public. The TSHA makes every effort to conform to the principles of fair use and to comply with copyright law.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
- 1952
- August 21, 2023
