AN EAST TEXAS STEER MAN at heart, Doyle McAdams, right, has chased cattle through the pines and Gulf Coast saltgrass flats all his life. Beside him most of the way was Alvin Stutts, left, who began working for McAdams' grandfather as a teenager. The two have been in or near every kind of wreck including the Texas City dock explosion, which stampeded a herd they were gathering in the vicinity. After all that, McAdams says ruefully, he's about decided his country is best suited to growing timber.

East Texas Cattlemen Share
Stories From Earlier Days

By Colleen Schreiber

HUNTSVILLE — Doyle McAdams and Alvin Stutts have ridden many a mile together, roped more than their share of outlaw steers, and have wild tales to share for each and every escapade. The two have been friends since Stutts went to work for McAdams' grandfather when he was about 14, and they've worked alongside each other on and off ever since.

Stutts was born right around the bend from the McAdams homestead and has lived in the area his whole life.

The McAdams family migrated to Southeast Texas following the Texas Revolution. They came from just east of Nacogdoches, in the area that many referred to as the "outlaw strip" between the Neches and Sabine rivers. Outlaws killed one or two of the young kids, so the family moved south and settled along Bedias Creek (pronounced Bead-eye). The stream derives its name from the Bidai Indians, who inhabited land that is now in northern Grimes and southern Madison counties in the early 19th century.

Later a McAdams, Texas, was established. The post office, opened in 1888, used to sit right where the McAdams homestead is today. History books record that the town was likely named for John McAdams Jr., who served as a member of the St. Augustine Volunteers under Captain Bradley in the Texas Revolutionary Army. The McAdams home became the center of the rural community and the village soon supported a church and school. Sam Houston is reported to have been a frequent visitor in the McAdams home.

The Texas Gazetteer estimated the 1896 population to be near 15; in 1914 the community had a population of 60, two cotton gins and three general stores. The post office closed in 1917. In 1935 a schoolhouse, a church and a cemetery remained. Today only a cemetery still exists.

McAdams' grandfather, James Washington Hiram Walker McAdams, was the eldest boy of several children. His friends called him "Wash," and he used J.W. for business. His mother died when he was seven and his father remarried. The young McAdams didn't like his new setup, so he went to live with an uncle.

The 12 Bar brand, which is still in the McAdams family today, originated with his grandfather along about 1877.

"They were working cattle one day. My grandfather was just a young boy. When they got through, his uncle said, "Wash, what’s your brand? To which my grandfather replied that he didn't have a brand because he didn't have anything to brand. His uncle told him he had a heifer now, and took his "12" brand and used the "1" to put a bar underneath the 12."

In those early days, East Texas was predominantly farm country and cattle were mostly a sideline. Farmers raised lots of cotton, some corn, peanuts, and a few other crops.

"Each family might have 40 acres, maybe less, depending on the number of boys they had," McAdams says. "They’d farm a place until they burned it out."

"My uncle used to say that he got pretty wealthy on a $6 cow and 30-cent cotton," Stutts adds. "He bought quite a bit of land on a $6 cow."

McAdams says his grandfather was always a farmer at heart.

"He loved hogs and loved to farm and take care of the equipment," he recalls. "My dad didn’t care for farming, so he tended to the cattle. He kind of kept pushing Papa to quit farming. When a field played out, it went to pasture."

The last field that went to pasture is marked symbolically with an old cultivator and planter.

The Gibbs Brothers, who came into the Huntsville area around 1835, were the biggest ranchers in the area at the time. Back then it was free range. The brothers had a mercantile store, and when farmers couldn't pay their bill, the Gibbs brothers would take their land. They accumulated more than 200,000 acres in East Texas and had the largest bank in Huntsville. Early on, the Gibbs brothers concentrated on managing their land for timber.

McAdams' father, Doyle Frederick McAdams Sr., came back to the ranch in the mid-1930s after teaching school for a couple of years. Shortly thereafter he began leasing up considerable acreage. He leased land from the Gibbs Brothers at Durden Bend. Durden Bend was located in Polk County, west of Livingston. Much of the 25,000 to 30,000 acres was Trinity River bottomland that was heavily infested with brush. He leased another 10,000 or 12,000 acres near the McAdams homestead from the Gibbs brothers.

During World War II, big steers were a hot commodity and McAdams took advantage of this and built a business from the ground up. He bought yearlings and twos and kept them until they were four.

"In the fall we would buy all the threes we could, because we had a bunch of country down on the coast around Hitchcock and Liverpool. It was just one big open country. The average weight of a four year-old steer, McAdams says, was close to 650 pounds. "You kind of just warehoused them. They would weigh 500 to 525 pounds when they came in as two year-olds.

"They would do real well in the spring, but during the winter they had to make it on their own without any extra supplement. They'd be just as poor as rails when they came out of the winter," McAdams recalls.

McAdams came home to Huntsville when he got out of the service in 1946, but he didn't go back to cowboying full-time. Instead he worked in his dad's dry goods store in town for awhile. When he did come home to the ranch, his father was still running the big four year-old steers.

"One year we would work this country and get the steers out of here. The next year we would work down on the Trinity River at Durden Bend," McAdams explains. "You had to always work the wind in your favor," McAdams says, "try to be downwind. Those early cattle were like deer. You had to ride slow and easy and be quiet, and most important try to spot them before they spotted you.

"Once you saw them, you stopped and waited until they kind of accepted you and then you pointed them in the general direction you wanted them to go, allowing them to graze along the way."

McAdams bought a few steers out of auction barns, but in those days they didn’t have many auction barns.

"I remember one in Madisonville that didn’t even have seats. You stood around a big round pen. The buyers would get up on the rail and others would peak through the cracks."

Mostly McAdams depended on country traders who put together groups of 25 to 30 head at a time.

"Those buyers would come through the country horseback, bunching them up by buying one or two here and there and then driving them on down to the next place where they bought more."

Back then everyone disdainfully looked down on East Texas steers, McAdams says.

"After Big Doyle started contracting steers, he would request a certain type of steer," Stutts says, "but there would always be a couple of sorry ones in every bunch."

"And sure enough, those sorry ones were the ones that always drifted to the front and would be what the buyers would see," McAdams remarks. "There was one spotted, short-legged steer that we shipped to Dancer, Oklahoma, to finish him out on grass. This steer went to the Fort Worth Stockyards to be sold to packers," he recalls, "but a feller from here, who had more money than he had sense, bought that steer and him and a bunch of his buddies with the 12 Bar brand ended up back here right across the road."

In those days, cattle sold by the head. There weren't many scales around. In fact, the McAdams ranch had the second set of livestock scales in Walker County.

And everything, of course, was done horseback. Cattle were driven to the railhead, either at Huntsville or Riverside. Steers were shipped to the Osage the first Monday in April, McAdams says. It generally took five to six weeks to gather, a week per carload, usually 400 to 500 head.

"We tore up Huntsville several times," Stutts recalls. "We often had a rodeo in the middle of town. The steers would get loose and we would rope them right there in the middle of town."

The cattle drives came to a halt after about 500 head stampeded through the schoolyard and downtown Huntsville. They were a week getting the renegade steers gathered.

As soon as all the cattle were shipped out that spring, buying began again, fast and furiously, until along about August.

"By then the screwworms would be hitting us so hard that we had to stop buying and just doctor screwworms," McAdams recalls. "Then after the first good frost, the screwworms stopped and we could go back to buying.

"Seems that's all I did for half my life — doctor screwworms."

"When I worked for them, I generally doctored worms all day long, no pens, no nothing, just roped them out in the pasture, doctored them and turned them loose," Stutts adds.

Dogs, Stutts and McAdams say, were a basic necessity in that Southeast Texas ranch country because of the thick underbrush, but it took some persuading to convince the elder McAdams. Before dogs became popular, many, including McAdams, used goats to keep the undergrowth down. Before that the oldtimers used fire and later mechanical means.

"I remember the day Dad took a crew up the river and sent me down the river. It rained all day. I think we got in with about 18 steers and there were over 2000 steers in there. I was scared to come in. I knew Dad was just going to tear me up. That's when I told Dad that we had to have dogs to get the cattle out of there. He finally agreed."

Ol' Snip was the first dog on the McAdams Ranch. That dog and those to come later were raised and trained at the ranch. They were Cur dogs, McAdams says, with lots of hound in them.

"I can tell you stories about some dogs that we had here that I wouldn’t even begin to tell if I didn’t have witnesses," Stutts says.

"We had one dog, Smokey, that would run in front of a steer and catch him by the nose and flip him," he says.

"I remember driving a bunch of steers along, and one of the steers broke out. One dog caught that steer in the nose and another caught his tail, and they had that steer wrapped around a tree," McAdams says.

Another adventure the pair share is the day Texas City blew up. Just so happens they were moving a herd out of the area on that very day.

"It was 1947, the first year that we took cattle to Texas City," McAdams recalls, "and none of us knew the country very well. We looked like a bunch of gypsies going through Houston. We camped at Hitchcock that first night. We were gathering the herd the next morning when the explosion rocked the area."

The SS Grandcamp, a French-owned vessel carrying ammonium nitrate, caught fire at the docks. While attempts were being made to extinguish the fire, the ship exploded. The entire dock area was destroyed, along with the nearby Monsanto Chemical Company plant, other smaller companies, grain warehouses, and numerous oil and chemical storage tanks. Smaller explosions and fires were ignited by flying debris. A 15-foot wave caused by the force swept the dock area.

"I had an uncle living five miles from there, and there was a piece of I-beam stuck in the highway in front of his house," Stutts remembers.

Another ship, the SS High Flyer, in dock for repairs and also carrying ammonium nitrate, was ignited by the first explosion and it exploded later that night.

"The cattle stampeded that night," McAdams recalls, "and the only way we could see the cattle was those tanks kept blowing up."

Eventually the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. McAdams remembers those early automobiles, but not fondly.

"We had a little black boy that rode on the fender with a bucket, and every time we came to a hole of water he filled up the radiator."

Both remember well the 1950s drouth, though they say it wasn't as bad here as in West Texas.

"We didn't have the sand dunes like they did out west, but it was bad enough," McAdams says.

"Down at Durden Bend, there were some fellers who had a contract to cut down some of the oak timber that had moss in it. The moss was filler. Those fellers cutting those trees said as soon as the cattle heard them crank up their chainsaws they’d come a'running."

"You could winter cattle on it," Stutts adds.

"When I was just a kid, we would ride around with long sticks and twist the moss around it and pull the moss down for the cows to eat," McAdams recalls.

As far as he knows, he says, he was the first in the area to use urea. He mixed it with blackstrap molasses brought in from Louisiana.

"When the first truckload came in, we spent from about four in the afternoon 'til 11 at night just getting enough mixed up for one trough. The cattle loved it and they did well on it."

Later McAdams was the first in the area to use liquid feed.

McAdams grew his operation over the years, buying more steers and buying and leasing more land, some 50,000 to 60,000 acres by some estimates. He wintered steers on the Gulf Coast and summered cattle in the Flint Hills of northern Oklahoma and southern Kansas.

"I figure Dad was running the most steers right after the War, and I'd say we would ship every bit of 2000 head a year."

Auctions eventually set the market, but early on, McAdams says, his father basically set the price.

"He knew what the going price was because he was about the only one buying large numbers of these steers in that area."

The toughest year McAdams himself remembers in the steer business was 1973-74. He rode the steer business as long as he could, changing his program up several times throughout the years to accommodate the times. The big steer business as McAdams and Stutts knew it went by the wayside in the early 1960s, so they started putting together yearlings and selling them as two year-olds.

They continued to grow them in East Texas, and some were sent to the Coast to salt grass. In the spring they continued to ship them to grass in the Flint Hills, where they were finished out. Occasionally, depending on the market, they were fed out by a farmer-feeder in the Midwest. One year he even sent some to California to run on beet tops, thinking it would be a deal, but McAdams says it never quite worked out like that. He also sent many to Union Feed Yards in Blythe, California. Most were fed out there on their greenchop program.

A banker friend once told McAdams, "Son, I’ve never known a cow-calf man that made much money. Stay with the steers as long as you can."

"I tried to hold to that advice," McAdams says. "I’ve always been a steer man at heart."

"I don’t know for how many years there were only two cows on this whole ranch, and that was the two milking cows," Stutts adds. "I'm like Doyle, I'd a lot rather fool with a bunch of steers than a bunch of cows and calves."

The last several years that McAdams was in the cattle business, however, he ran cows and calves, a good F-1 cow with just the right amount of Brahman blood, he says. For the last six years he's had the ranch leased out and today the large majority of the income is derived from timber production.

"This country is really best for planting timber," McAdams admits. "I've spent all my life trying to clear it, and now I'm planting it back."