The Original Maverick

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Lexicon Valley Introduction

0:52Hey, this is Lexicon Valley host Mike Volo. Bob Garfield and I are away this week. Today's show, The Original Maverick, originally ran as a paywalled bonus episode. But here it is, unpaywalled and unbonused. Of course, if you become a premium subscriber at BooksmartStudios.com, it'll be ad-free as well. Enjoy. From Washington, D.C., this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

1:26I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo with our latest bonus episode. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bob. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. I'm great. But, you know, when we do these bonus episodes, I feel like we can dispense with these salutations at the top. Because these are for our premium subscribers only. They know you're splendid. They know I'm great. We can just get right into it. We? I believe you mean you. I don't care to dispense with niceties, just to save a little time.

2:02I have my own way of doing things, my friend. Oh, okay. You're an individualist, otherwise known as uncooperative. I wouldn't say that. You're stubborn, at least. Hmm. Intractable? Pig-headed? Contumacious? Possibly that last one. What does that mean? It means sort of ostentatiously flouting authority. You say that as if it were a bad thing.

2:34Perhaps you could consider looking at this in a more heroic light. Something more principled and courageous. Iconoclastic. Marching to a different drummer. Mike, I am a maverick. Who is the tall, dark stranger there? Maverick is the name. Ride the trail to who knows where. Luck is his companion. Gamblin is his game. Just saying. Right.

The Word Maverick

3:04So we stumbled upon the word maverick in our previous episode, which was about this guy who coined the word gobbledygook to describe the jargony language that he detested. And that word gobbledygook pretty much instantly caught on and entered the language. The guy's name was Maury Maverick. A guy with quite a pedigree, if I recall. It's not just that he lived up to his name by refusing to accept opaque officialese.

3:35His grandfather, Samuel Maverick, a soldier and a politician who actually figured into the independence of Texas from Mexico, inspired the very word we're discussing. So that's two words in one family. That's a pretty good track record. Now, the story of how that happened, the story of Maverick that you hear a lot regarding both the man and the word, it's not quite true. But I think I've identified the actual truth.

4:09Okay. I'm always looking out these days for some actual truth. It's hard to come by. Quite a rare commodity. All right, so let's establish a bit of background on who Samuel Maverick was, this politician and soldier, as you said. He was born in South Carolina in 1803, went to Yale, and then practiced law for several years before moving around quite a bit throughout the South. So, for example, there was a gold rush in Georgia in the late 1820s, apparently after some deer

4:43hunter tripped over a rock that was sparkling with gold. So Sam went there and operated a gold mine for like 10 minutes, and then he left. He ran a plantation in Alabama, which he reportedly did not like doing, and so he left. What he was really drawn to, it seems, what he had a knack for was what they used to call land speculation. Wait, wait, is that like, huh, I see some dirt ahead.

5:15I wonder if that's land. Is that the kind of speculation you're referring to? It was more like, huh, I see some dirt. I wonder who owns that land. I think I want to buy it. Ah. So, as Steve Martin so wonderfully put it in the movie The Jerk, so it's a profit deal. Yes, exactly. So, in 1835, he moves to San Antonio, where not many people are buying land because property

5:46rights were up in the air. As you alluded to earlier, Bob, Texas was still officially part of Mexico, but a lot of both Anglos and non-Anglos in Texas wanted to break away. So, war seemed inevitable, and the climate was very uncertain, because whose land would this be in another year or so? But Maverick starts buying up land anyway. War does, of course, break out just months after he arrives.

6:17He fights in what we now call the Texas Revolution. Texas wins, despite that infamous Battle of the Alamo that we all learn about in middle school. I know very little about this, but I seem to remember reading that Samuel Maverick was actually at the Alamo fighting, and unlike the others who were dead-enders and hung on to the very last bullet, he just decided to leave and go to Austin. Is that right? He left to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence.

6:51He came back sort of after it was over, but continued to fight until Texas became the Republic of Texas in 1836, which is kind of crazy, right? It was its own country. Maverick is elected mayor of San Antonio, and he keeps buying land. Mexico, meanwhile, tries to take Texas back. Maverick is captured, along with 50 or so other men, and he's marched 1,000 miles into Mexico,

7:24where he's put in chains and forced into hard labor. While there, he's elected to the Texas Congress in absentia. He doesn't even know about it. His captors then offer to let him go if he'll publicly declare that Texas belongs to Mexico. He refuses, but is eventually freed. He refuses on the grounds that lying, in his mind, is tantamount to a crime, and he doesn't believe that Texas belongs to Mexico.

7:55So he goes back home after he's freed, and he continues buying land. Here's your report. Oh, thanks, Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you. Try LinkedIn HiringPro. It's more than a job board. It's like the recruiter you always wished you had. HiringPro uses real-time insights to match your role to LinkedIn's unique network of professionals and delivers a shortlist of best-fit candidates. You'll spend less time sorting applicants and more time talking to the right people. Let's do it. You're irreplaceable, Jane, but another you would be great.

8:25Hire right the first time. Post your job for free on LinkedIn today at linkedin.com slash quality. So that's Sam Maverick in a nutshell, and I have to thank the historian Paula Mitchell-Marx for this information. She wrote about the Mavericks in her book, Turn Your Eyes Toward Texas. So he comes back. He's in the Texas Congress, and he's got all this land. What does he do with it then? I mean, does he subdivide it into, you know, neighborhoods? Yeah, he's like the Levittown of San Antonio.

9:00No, no. So now it's 1845. Sam Maverick has a wife and a family and somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 acres of land in Texas. Now, as the story is often told, Sam Maverick becomes a prominent cattle rancher, having all this land. But for some reason, he refuses to brand his cattle. Now, there are conflicting stories about why he refused.

9:31Here is a clip of the late William Sapphire offering two possible explanations for him not branding his cattle. This is from NPR in 2008. He refused to brand his cattle, and the reason he gave was he didn't want to be cruel to animals. But all his friends and neighbors said that wasn't so. He was just going around trying to round up all the unbranded cattle and claim them for himself. If you don't know who William Sapphire is or was, he wrote a column in the New York Times magazine for 30 years called On Language.

10:08Bob, I looked forward to this column every Sunday like it was candy, starting in middle school, and I read it religiously. He was also, you probably know, a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew, but I don't like to talk about that part of his career. Yeah, he never, I mean, I don't remember ever seeing his politics, which were sharp right, seep into the column. When he was doing his linguistics etymology work, he was doing that in the purest form.

10:38He was, really. And, you know, for me, even though I disagreed with his politics, he will always be my favorite language maven. And he says, as you heard, that depending on who you believe, Maverick either didn't want to inflict pain on the cows, or Maverick was unscrupulously trying to claim all unbranded cattle as his own. Either way, unbranded cattle became known as Mavericks. By the way, the reason NPR was talking to William Sapphire in 2008 was because John McCain was running for president at the time, and...

11:18He called himself a Maverick politically. He was in a campaign bus called the Maverick Express. I've been called a Maverick. Sometimes it's meant as a compliment, and sometimes it's not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I don't work for a party. I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you. He's the original Maverick.

11:48One is ready to lead. McCain. In my opinion, and I am going to let my politics seep into this conversation about language, he was never a real Maverick. He pretended to be, he was friends with all the reporters, but he generally voted, with one major, major exception, voted along party lines, you know, with all the other Republicans in the Senate. So, yet another version of the story, in addition to the two we heard from Sapphire, suggests that Maverick's land was sort of naturally formed in a way that prevented the cattle from escaping, and so he just didn't bother branding them.

12:28But then one day they stampeded and got loose, and unbranded cattle became known as Mavericks. How different things would have been if he had just given them, you know, a house brand, not Maverick cattle or Twin Pines brand, but just like Kirkland?

12:48From Costco? Yeah, yeah. So, what is true then? Well, Sam Maverick's wife, Mary, outlived him by several decades, and in her old age, she collected her various diary entries from over the years into a memoir. Now, tucked away in an appendix at the very end of that memoir is the story of the word Maverick told by her son, George. He says that back in 1845, they had land all the way out on a barrier island on the Gulf Coast.

13:26This is 250 miles away from San Antonio. So, Sam had bought land out there as well, and he had a neighbor who, over the course of some time, ended up owing him $1,200. That's a lot of money in 1845. In fact, I plugged it into an inflation calculator, and it's the equivalent of about $50,000 today. So, to pay off the debt, the neighbor gave Sam 400 head of cattle at $3 a head, $1,200.

13:57George writes that his father, quote, did not want the cattle, but as it was a case of cattle or nothing, he passively received them and left them in charge of a colored family, his words, of course, not mine, a colored family, nominally slave, but essentially free, while he and his own family returned to San Antonio. Also, in this appendix of Mary Maverick's memoir is a letter dated November of 1849 sent to Sam Maverick on behalf of this black man, whose name we learn is Jack, who was left in charge of the cattle.

14:39Now, the letter writer says, among other things, that Jack, quote, is very anxious to see you, Sam, as without assistance, he finds it quite impossible to pen and brand your cattle on the peninsula, and the stock is consequently becoming more wild and unmanageable daily. Clearly, these cattle are not Sam's first priority. So, at some point in 1853, the cattle are all moved from the Gulf Coast up closer to where the Mavericks live along the San Antonio River.

15:17George goes on to say in his account that the cattle were left there to graze, to fatten, to multiply, and to wander away, which has such a beautiful cadence to it. I love that phrase. And if you notice, I think the cadence is a result of each of those words or phrases increasing by one syllable. Graze, fatten, multiply, wander away. Mm-hmm. Very observant of you. Now, the reason they could just wander away, says George, was that fences were not yet widely used to keep the cattle on your land.

15:54And, quote, no owner could know his own cattle on the range except by the brand. Thus, the unbranded stray calves in those days were dubbed Mavericks, for they were most likely Mavericks, apostrophe S now, at least in that neck of the woods. The name took and spread, for Texas was then the heart of the cattle industry of the United States. Well, I mean, it's striking that a word should enter the language that way.

16:25It's striking how close the myth hues to the actual truth, if it is that. Mm-hmm. And it's also striking that a man with $50,000, $20,000, $25,000 worth of assets just lets them stroll away. It doesn't seem, you know, to be all that fazed by it. No, so finally, in 1856, Sam sold all of his cattle, and that was that, right? Now, my favorite part of this account by George is the last three sentences, and here they are verbatim.

17:02He's addressing now the myth which had already become prominent by that time. He says, The truth is, Mr. Maverick, his dad, was never a cattle king, for with the exception of the herd mentioned and a few necessary cow ponies, he never owned any cattle or horses. To the stockmen of the West, I submit this account and would remind them that of the thousand and one versions of the story, only one can be correct. Be assured, this is the true account, George M. Maverick.

17:38So what I find fascinating is that the word Maverick was used in Sam's lifetime to refer to unbranded cattle, but it wasn't until after he died, sometime in the 1880s, that the word started being used to mean a nonconformist or an individualist. You know, Sam Maverick was a lot of things, but he was not an individualist or a free thinker when it came to cattle. He was not a thinker about cattle at all. He was simply indifferent and consumed with his actual passion.

18:12As George put it, Sam didn't want to be encumbered by the cattle because he was, quote, absorbed in real estate. So he was absorbed in real estate and had to deal with this 400 head of bother. Or not deal with it. Or not. So I'm kind of curious, Bob, why you used a 60s TV Western at the top of the show to claim your supposed maverickness when you could have used, you know, the Top Gun movies with Tom Cruise.

18:45Maverick to range control. Entering point alpha. Confirm green range. Uh, Maverick range control. Uh, green range is confirmed. I don't see an event scheduled for you, sir. Well, I'm going anyway. Nice. Fair question. It's because I once had the most fantastic lunch with James Garner, who was maverick on TV, and who, at the time I was speaking to him, who, at the time I was speaking to him, was in the midst of an epic struggle to fight Hollywood's crooked accounting and finance standards.

19:24He, uh, displayed a contumacious refusal to just go along and get along like all the other actors did. And you identify with James Garner, then? Maybe.

Moral of the Story

19:36Maybe.

Moral of the Story

19:37One more thing. I'd like to wrap this up with what I think is the moral of the story of Samuel Maverick. If somebody owes you money and you're not prepared to be a rancher, don't accept cattle as payment. I wouldn't. I live in the suburbs. What am I going to do with 400 head of cattle? He had all this land and he didn't want them either. Figure out something else. It's don't take cattle. You know what I could do if somebody gave me 400 head of cattle?

20:07I could rent out the vacant anchor store at the mall, fill it with grass, and put them there. So there would be Macy's at one end, Nordstrom, and then, you know, Mike's leather factory and meat farm. That is some real estate speculation that I can respect. Malls are dying all over the country, hence the vacant anchor store in the one near me. This could be a way to revive them. I think you're right.

20:38I mean, first, let's take care of the coal industry because obviously that's on the verge of renaissance. And then let's deal with the anchor stores at the mall that's fallen on hard times, absolutely.

20:52Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. She would play the Tom Skerritt character Viper in our little production of Top Gun. Well, you know, if you're Maverick, Bob, then I guess I'm the Val Kilmer character. I'm the Iceman. Please visit us at BookSmartStudios.com to leave a comment on this or any episode. Say hello on X, Facebook, Blue Sky. We are at Lexicon Valley everywhere. All right, Mikey. We done here? We are done.

21:22Roger and out, Iceman. You can be my wingman any time.

21:28Bullshit. You can be mine. Yeah!

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