"Trail Boss" Hollan Has Hauled
Cattle Going On 67 Years

FOWLERTON, Texas — Hubert Hollan is a legend in the livestock trucking business. After all, this 82 year-old has been hauling since FDR’s first term in the White House.

His CB handle, "Trail Boss", a name his sons gave him when CBs first came out, suits him perfectly, because like his ancestors Hollan has trailed cattle all over the country to delivery points in nearly every state and many a city from San Francisco to the East Coast and as far north as British Columbia.

He figures he’s traveled in the neighborhood of five million miles since he started driving trucks in 1935.

Before the modern-day 18-wheeler, he hauled in one of the old Ford bobtail trucks down dirt roads that in some cases were nothing more than cow trails. He swears it quit raining in South Texas the day they paved the roads.

"I’d rather drive one of those big trucks grossing 80,000 pounds any day than anything else," Hollan says. "I’m perfectly at home. I have the feel."

Hollan himself hasn’t had a wreck one, though he’s had two of his trucks wrecked by other drivers, and he’s only had five speeding tickets in his entire career.

His many customers are amazed that Hollan still climbs around on the cattle trailer like a monkey. He has a body more like a 50 or 60 year-old instead of an approaching 83 year-old. He loads the cattle himself, still even gets inside the trailer to push them up, a skill which at times requires him to be as quick as a rodeo clown.

Hollan has hauled whatever would haul, from barbed wire and bricks to sand and gravel. He hauled thousands of cedar posts out of the Texas hill country. He paid four or five cents for them and hauled them back to South Texas for anyone who might buy them. He hauled posts out of the King Ranch area to Fowlerton, as well.

During the 1950s drouth, he hauled trainloads of hay to the various ranches and lots of feedstuffs as well. He used to make a run to Laredo before he even had a license to pick up 100-pound sacks of cow feed manufactured in Mexico that came in by rail. He could haul about 70 sacks, or 7000 pounds at a time.

He even hauled home furnishings in his bobtail truck for a family moving to Oilton. The trip, which today would take a mere two hours, had Hollan traversing dirt roads and through and across various ranches, sometimes on nothing more than cow trails late into the night. Finally, just before sunup he could go no more, so the women lay across the seat and rested while Hollan and the other men in the family stretched out in the middle of the pasture. It was noon before they finally arrived in Oilton.

In the 1950s, he hauled loads and loads of five gallon cans of honey to Michigan in his K-7 International. He even hauled some into Canada for a time.

Despite his willingness to haul whatever he could fit in his trailer, it’s cattle that he’s hauled the most.

Hollan says he really has no idea how many people he’s hauled cattle for, but most everyone in the ranching business in South Texas knows him personally or at least knows of him.

One of his first big customers was "Grandpa Lowe". Roy B. Lowe was the grandson of early-day cattle king James Lowe, who ran cattle on the open range in much of South Texas. He was said to have had some 2000 different brands in his tally book.

"It would be hard to figure how many cattle I hauled for Grandpa Lowe," Hollan says. "Most of them went to the stockyards at San Antonio. He was always good to work for."

Hollan has hauled for three other descendents of the Lowe family, all Donnells. He’s also hauled a great deal for the King Ranch and many other prominent South Texas ranchers. Many of his customers today are descendents of early-day cowmen, men like Chip Brisco, Lew Thompson and Steven Mafrige, to name a few.

He hauled for a young Arizona rancher named Richard Walden. Walden had a feedlot at Saharita. One job entailed delivering 10,000 calves from Mentone, Indiana to Saharita.

"No telling how many cattle we hauled to the feedlots in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Colorado," he says.

Hollan figures his better years in the trucking business were in the 1970s and some into the ‘80s. There were more cattle in South Texas back then, "from the Nueces and beyond, nothing but cattle," he says. Today many of those cattle ranches are now strictly hunting and recreational showplaces.

He says one of the things he misses most about the old days is the chuckwagon and the good meals. Today there are but a few good truck stops left that serve a decent meal, and he says even those few are hard to come by.

Hollan’s truck hauling career started when he was just 15. On May 9, 1935, his father was in a serious accident. He was hit by a drunk driver and thrown from his truck, and the blocks of ice he was carrying rained down on him, breaking his back and several ribs. Hubert, being the oldest in the family, took the wheel then.

He went down to the McMullen County Courthouse, stood on tiptoes to peer over the counter and paid 25 cents to get his first commercial driver’s license. The speed limit then was 25 mph and the maximum load limit was 7000 pounds.

He didn’t get his first real cattle trailer until about 1936. It was 7.5 feet wide and 22 feet long and could carry about 15,000 pounds. Today’s trailers are double decks 48 or 50 feet long and eight feet wide.

Hollan bought his first double deck truck in 1965. At one time he had six of those trucks in his fleet.

The first sleeper truck he had was a 1965 Cabover International with a 220 Cummins motor. The truck he’s running now has a 550 horse motor.

The Peterbilt trucks nowadays, Hollan says, are probably the best out there, but in the old days the Ford had an edge over the Chevrolet.

"A Ford could outpull a Chevrolet bad," he remarks.

One of the first real cattle hauling jobs Hollan did was for Grandpa Lowe. He charged him a flat rate of $18 with the promise to haul however many head he could cram into that 22-foot trailer.

"For a long time we made out like those cattle belonged to us, but we had to do that to stay in the business," Hollan says.

He takes some good-hearted ribbing from some of his customers who question why he doesn’t have mercy on them with this cattle market like it is.

"I don’t adjust my prices when the cattle market is bad, just like they don’t adjust their price to me when it’s good," Hollan states matter-of-factly.

Today he charges $2.25 a loaded mile, but nowadays because "no one wants to haul anything back to this dry country" he rarely has a backhaul and that substantially cuts into his profit. In the end, he says it boils down to about 25 cents a mile if running by oneself.

"When I first started hauling grass fat calves from the Laredo and Cotulla area into downtown Houston to Port City Stockyards or to the packing house across the street and sometimes to one in Beaumont, I was paying 10 cents a gallon, tax included," Hollan recalls. "There wasn’t a diesel truck on the road then. When diesel trucks came on, I could buy diesel for 25 cents a gallon."

Hollan says one thing he’s never done in his tenure is undercut someone else to get a job.

"We don’t ever haul cheap to get a job," he remarks. "Some people do, but then they get cheap service, too."

Good service, in Holland’s mind, consists in part of being there when you say you will and delivering on schedule.

"We hammer on them hard to get them there and get them on the ground. We don’t waste time in cafes drinking coffee and shooting the bull."

Hubert’s father, Hugh Stevenson Hollan, was born in Dewitt County in 1893. They didn’t have trucks in 1893, of course, and Hubert says that’s the reason his father never learned to back a cattle trailer.

One day after many attempts at trying to hit the mark on the chute, the elder Hollan barreled out of his truck in a rage, cussing at the top of his lugs, "It would be easier to build the damn chute."

The first truck Hollan’s dad used was a 1933 four-cylinder Model B-4 Ford, nothing more than a "glorified Model A," he says. It cost him $550. It came with an eight-foot bobtail. He and his dad discarded that one and built their own 10-foot bobtail. That meant it was two feet off-center, and Hollan says that got them in trouble from time to time. Like the time he was crossing the railroad at Pleasanton with a load of cattle.

"The cattle shifted to the back of the 10-foot bed, causing the truck cab to rise six feet in the air. The cattle took off into the night."

Hollan was born in Yoakum, Texas. The Hollan family had been in the Yoakum area since the early 1800s, long before the Civil War. Hubert’s father was in the farming and ranching business there, but the young Hubert had asthma since he was two months old and the doctor recommended that the family relocate. Thus they came to McMullen County.

The family packed their few belongings in their Model T truck and Model T car and headed out to the O’Conner Ranch near Fowlerton. It was August 1924 when they arrived. The young Hollan was to be five years old the following month.

"My dad hauled everything in the Model T truck, and us three kids and Mama, who was pregnant with Neill, rode in the car. Somewhere around Charlotte we had to cross San Miguel Creek. We didn’t have enough horsepower to get out," Hollan recalls. "We had a pretty good piece of rope, so Dad tied the rope to the truck and then to the car and told Mama to pull both ears down (spark and gas). We finally made it out."

When they arrived at the O’Conner Ranch, the elder Hollan went to farming and ranching again. Hubert remembers his dad clearing 80 acres with an old Fordson tractor.

For a time his parents also ran a small mercantile shop. They rented it for $5 a month and bought $25 worth of goods to get started.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Hubert’s father didn’t have the money to buy cattle, so he pastured cattle for those who did. Most of them came from the east on the railroad and were unloaded at the Fowlerton shipping pens, which were at one time one of the largest shipping points in the state. They drove the cattle the six or so miles to the ranch.

It was about that time that Hugh Hollan started hauling things in his bobtail truck. To say the roads were bad was an understatement.

"The pavement ended at San Miguel, and it was dirt from there on into Cotulla. The roads were barely roads, nothing more than dirt and rocks and mud when it rained," Hollan says. "When they paved the roads, it quit raining down here."

A story that Hollan has told many times is the one about the time that he, his brother Neill and his dad hauled two loads of Brahman cows to the Delaware Mountains in West Texas. It was 1938. They were in 1935 and 1937 Ford trucks with 28-foot cattle trailers. At Leakey they had to detour through Camp Wood. The roads that wound around the tops of those mountains were like goat trails, he says. Then they came to Pecan Canyon. The 85 horsepower engine barely pulled them up to the rim of the canyon, but once they reached the top and started over the top it was a different kind of ride. They didn’t have trailer brakes at that time, Hollan notes.

Hollan says he took to mechanizing like a duck to water, and that was most important because the trucks broke down nearly every trip, sometimes two or three times. A motor might last 20,000 miles, Hollan says. Today a good diesel truck might make several hundred thousand miles.

The tires weren’t much better. Standard equipment in those early days before roads were paved, he says, was a Goldenrod hand pump, a ratchet jack and Monkey Grip tire patches to fix flats.

The old Model T that moved the family from Dewitt County to Fowlerton had Riverside tires. His dad ordered them from the Montgomery Ward catalog.

Brother Neill was still in the business with Hubert when they took on a job to haul two loads of cattle from Houston to the terminal island at the Los Angeles port. They were to be loaded onto a Swedish freighter en route to Thailand. At the last minute, the brothers learned that the ship’s captain refused to set sail without a qualified caretaker. Neill was anxious to go, and he fit the bill as a caretaker, so on went the cattle and Neill.

They unloaded the cattle there in Thailand and then Neill conveyed them with bobtail trucks up through the mountains of Thailand. He got back home some 40 days later.

The longest haul Hubert ever made was to Kelona, British Columbia, a 2800 mile trip. He made many a haul to parts of Florida beginning in the early 1950s. The train would only promise a 10-day delivery, Hollan says, and the price was much higher than what he charged to truck the cattle, so many ranchers began trucking their cattle rather than sending them by rail.

He loaded most of the cattle out of the Cotulla and Laredo area. It was 1559 miles from there to the Miami airport. During those trips, he caught quick naps along the way on the top of the trailer with nothing but a tarp stretched across.

"To do the 1559 miles running single it took from Friday evening until sometime Monday morning to get there, and that was running hard as you could go. We rested the cattle one time, as a rule," Hollan says.

"They weren’t nearly as strict with their regulations. We didn’t have to keep a log book back then documenting when we stopped and started, how long we drove, etc."

Beginning in the 1970s, for seven years straight he hauled cattle to Pennsylvania for Helen Kleberg Groves.

"One time I put seven double decks together for Helenita," Hollan says. "Over about a two-month period in the spring of 1973, 1974 and 1975 I hauled a total of 11,000 to Pennsylvania alone."

Trucking has long been a family affair at the Hollan house. Florine, his wife of 65 years, has done most all the book work, except work up the weigh bills. In her spare time she managed to raise four kids and take a road trip with Hubert every now and then.

"I used to flirt with a boy that was at the auction in Victoria, and one day I told my uncle that he was my dream guy because he drives a truck, hauls cattle and is a rancher. When I described him, I was really describing Hubert.

"My uncle said, ‘Well if that’s what you want, I know one.’"

He was thinking of young Hollan. Hubert had just gone into the Service and Florine’s uncle somehow got the two to start corresponding. She was attending a Houston business school at the time, and Hubert was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

After an extended courtship via the pen only, the two finally met in San Antonio. That was in 1942 and they’ve essentially been together since.

All three of their boys were involved in the family trucking business at one time or another. Even their son-in-law drove for a time.

"To be a good trucker you have to have lots of patience," Hollan says. "I cuss on occasion, but it doesn’t do any good.

"Now, I have nothing against city boys, but you can’t take a city boy who has no cattle or livestock or country sense and make a cattle hauler out of him. I’d rather take a cowboy right off a horse, especially one who has pulled a gooseneck.

"You have to know something about cattle in order to load them," he continues. "One thing my daddy always said was that you had to be smarter than the cow."

In February 2000 Hollan received the American Truck Historical Society’s Founders Award. Two of the biggest changes in his life-long trucking career, Hollan says, are diesel trucks and good roads.

"Course, now you have to deal with clogged highways and road rage."

Hollan says he doesn’t have plans to retire anytime soon, though every year their insurers really "raise hell" when their policy comes up for renewal.

"Last year the guy up in Waco, when he looked at my birthday, September 17, 1919, he raised a ruckus and said, ‘Tell that old man he can’t drive anymore.’"

His CDL is good until he’s 85. How is it that he’s 83 and still in such good shape? Hubert says, "I’ve been blessed by the good Lord and a good wife. She’s about half of it," he says. Then he adds, "I never did smoke or drink, and I’ve never taken any kind of dope. I drank lots of tea. I like hot tea and cold tea."

He no longer does any out of state hauls, but he continues to make several hauls a week and many of them to places as far away as the Panhandle or to parts of far East Texas.

Hubert admits he doesn’t know anyone his age doing what he does on a regular basis, but he figures why quit. Even Florine says she doesn’t worry about him still being on the road.

"He’s more in control when he’s in that truck," she says of her husband. "He’d come nearer to hurting himself raking the yard than he would in that truck."

And so it seems that’s how it will be. Hubert Hollan will continue trucking on, at least for another two years, or until the authorities tell him he no longer can, whichever comes first.