Steak - Mark Schatzker [4]
CHAPTER ONE
TEXAS
Texas is the beefiest state in America. Even my cabdriver, who was from Pakistan, knew that. He was driving me to the airport for my flight to Dallas and, talking at the rearview mirror, asked why I was going. “To eat steak,” I said. He thought I was joking and let out a fake but courteous little chuckle. When he realized I was serious, he had this to say: “Sir, I think Texas has the very best steak in the world.”
“Really?” I said.
“Of this I am sure.” Like all pontificating cabdrivers, he sounded sure.
The Plains Indian felt the same way. Before Europeans ever set foot in what we now call Texas, grass grew as tall as a deer’s head, and the land was thick with bison, which the Plains Indians loved to eat. Long ago, these people had been cultivators of corn, but when they learned how to ride the horses that escaped from the white people, they gave up corn farming so they could trail the bison herds and make eating their meat a way of life.
The first cattlemen in Texas spoke Spanish. Their cattle roamed not far from present-day San Antonio in tall grass prairies and salt marshes. These vaqueros, as they were known, invented the word ranch and other standout examples of the cowboy lexicon—lariat, lasso, mustang, corral. English-speaking cowboys didn’t get to Texas until around 1815, where they discovered a feast of grass waiting for their herds. Within ten years, cattle outnumbered people twenty-two to one. By midcentury a visitor traveling by stagecoach could peer out the window and see nothing for miles in every direction but cattle grazing on prairie, their heads lowered, their tongues ripping grass and pulling it into their mouths.
In the early 1880s, a Welshman named David Christopher Jones became a cowboy. He had left his home in Pontypool, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and made his way to the Texas Panhandle, where he bought a chunk of hard land on the banks of Palo Duro Creek. His cattle had red blotchy faces, grazed on buffalo grass, and sipped water out of the creek. When they got big enough, they were driven north to the Flint Hills, way up in Kansas, where they spent the summer eating the better grass that grew there. Come September, the cattle were fat, the technical term for which is “finished.” A cow getting fat is “being finished” the same way that a pie in the oven is “being baked.”
At one time, the only way a cow could get from Texas to New York was to walk. But by the 1880s, David Christopher Jones’s cattle were driven to the Kansas City Stockyards, slaughtered, and sent by train to cities. The very best parts of those cattle were cut into steaks, which were served at better restaurants or sold at high-dollar butcher shops.
The D. C. Jones Ranch is still owned today by some of his descendants, but they don’t live there anymore. A hundred and eleven years after Jones set foot in Texas for the first time, the family was driven off the homestead for good, and it was because of steak.
The trouble occurred on May 3, 1995, when D. C. Jones’s great-greatgrandson, John Bergin, who was two, had to be airlifted to a hospital in Amarillo because there was manure in his lungs and he could not breathe. The manure was inhaled in the form of a windborne substance called fecal dust. John’s dad, David Bergin, believes that it came from a feedlot on the other side of the creek called Palo Duro Feeders. Bergin is so sure, in fact, that he has brought a lawsuit against Palo Duro to recover damages for the injuries he claims that his son and family have suffered from the feedlot’s operations.
Palo Duro Feeders had been raising cattle since the 1960s, but in the early 1990s, a new owner had expanded the operation considerably. Thirty thousand head of cattle now live huddled together