Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend

by Lewis F. Fisher

Overview

By definition, a maverick is a “lone dissenter” who “takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates” or “a person pursuing rebellious, even potentially disruptive policies or ideas.” The word maverick has evolved in the English language from being the term for an unbranded stray calf to a label given to a nontraditional person to a more extreme “uncontrollable individualist, iconoclast, unstable nonconformist.” The word has grown into an adjective (“he made a maverick decision”) and become a verb (mavericking or mavericked). Of all the words that originated in the Old West and survive to the present day, author Lewis Fisher notes, maverick has been called the least understood and most corrupted. But where did the word come from?

The word’s definition is still such a mystery that Merriam-Webster lists it in the top 10 percent of its most-looked-up words. All of the origin stories agree it had something to do with Samuel A. Maverick and his cattle, but from there things go amok rather quickly. Was Sam Maverick a cattle thief? A legendary nonconformist who broke the code of the West by refusing to brand his calves? A Texas rancher who believed branding cattle was cruelty to animals? A runaway from South Carolina who branded all the wild cattle he could find and ended up with more cattle than anyone else in Texas?

Samuel A. Maverick was a notable landholder and public figure in his own time, but his latter-day fame is based on the legend that he was a cattle rancher. No amount of truth-telling about maverick seems to have slowed the tall tales surrounding the word’s origination. Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend is a whodunit, a historical telling of the man who unwittingly inspired the term, the family it’s derived from, the cowboys who embraced it as an adjective meaning rakish and independent, the curious inquirers intrigued by its narrative, and the appropriators who have borrowed it for political fame.

Texas historian (and secondhand Maverick by marriage) Lewis Fisher has combed through Maverick family papers along with cultural memorabilia and university collections to get at the heart of the truth behind the far-flung Maverick legends. Maverick follows the history of the word through the “Maverick gene” all the way to Hollywood and uncovers the mysteries that shadow one of our country’s iconic words. Taken as a whole, the book is a fascinating portrayal of how we form, use, and change our language in the course of everyday life, and of the Maverick family’s ongoing relationship to its own contributions, all seen through the lens of a story featuring cowboys, Texas Longhorns, rustlers, promoters, movie stars, athletes, novelists, lawyers, mayors, congressmen, and senators—to say nothing of named maverick brands ranging from Ford cars and air-to-ground missiles to computer operating systems, Vermont maple syrup, and Australian wines.

Ironically, given its literal meaning as unbranded, maverick is a brand name that helped shape the history of the American West and represents the ideal of being true to oneself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595348395
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Celebrated San Antonio historian Lewis F. Fisher, whose Maverick Publishing Company was acquired by Trinity University Press in 2015, has published forty-five books on topics ranging from San Antonio’s Spanish heritage to its urban development, and from the military to sports, architecture, and multicultural legends. A former member of the San Antonio River Commission, he has written numerous books himself, including Chili Queens, Hay Wagons, and Fandangos: The Spanish Plazas in Frontier San Antonio, winner of the 2015 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award, and Saving San Antonio: The Preservation of a Heritage, republished in a second edition, and Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend. Fisher has received numerous local, state, and national writing awards and was named a Texas Preservation Hero by the Conservation Society in 2014.
Among Lewis F. Fisher’s books are American Venice: The Epic Story of San Antonio’s River; Saving San Antonio: The Preservation of a Heritage; San Antonio: Outpost of Empires; Chili Queens, Haywagons, and Fandangos: The Spanish Plazas in Frontier San Antonio; and No Cause of Offence: A Virginia Family of Union Loyalists Confronts the Civil War. He has received numerous local, state, and national writing awards and was named a Texas Preservation Hero by the San Antonio Conservation Society in 2014.

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE

Who shot Liberty Valance?

In the western movie classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jimmy Stewart plays Ransom Stoddard, who gets credit for shooting the villain. John Wayne plays the character who actually fired the fatal shot. Ransom Stoddard rises to fame and high position after the event but finally confesses the truth to a reporter. The reporter, Maxwell Scott, realizing that Stoddard’s stature was based on a myth, throws his notes into the fire.

“You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?” Stoddard asks.

“No, sir,” the reporter replies.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Jimmy Stewart could have been playing Sam Maverick, a real-life Texan justifiably noted in his own time but whose latter-day fame is based on legends as stubborn to shed as Ransom Stoddard’s. No amount of truth-telling about the word maverick seems to have slowed those who enjoy regaling others with the tall tales, especially in the West, where the word originated.

So this book is a whodunit. Who said what to whom unfolds in a story that becomes a historical epic—a telling of the man who unwittingly inspires the word, of cowboys who spread it, of those who get puzzled over it, those who key off its sense of rakishness and independence, and those who make it a factor in presidential elections. Ironically, given its meaning as unbranded, maverick as a brand name has gone viral worldwide.

I like to think I’m no Maxwell Scott. I may have gone west, but I’m from the East, where my journalism training taught me that printing not legend but facts is what you’re supposed to do. My wife’s family happens to offer a great opportunity to address the consequences of Scott’s type of western journalism.

Mary is a Maverick, a great-great-granddaughter of Sam Maverick, whose unbranded cattle led to the origin of the word and to any number of stories why. Mary’s parents sent her to the University of Texas, close to home, so she wouldn’t marry a Yankee. But San Antonio’s military bases constantly bring in people from everywhere else. When I came to Lackland Air Force Base for officer training, I was eager to get off the base. I heard that Mary’s grandmother Maverick liked to meet long-lost relatives, even though I’m not kin on the Maverick side, so I called her up. She invited me to dinner to meet her granddaughter—my sixth cousin once removed, a senior at UT and a redhead. I was smitten but got sent overseas. We kept in touch.

Four years later my Air Force stint ended, and we were married and soon settled in San Antonio. I started as a daily newspaper reporter, we began a suburban weekly and added others, then got into regional book publishing. So I had distractions from taking on the maverick case. Plus, who would trust an in-law with doing an objective story? But I’d always been intrigued by outsiders’ astonishment at hearing that the word maverick came from an actual family, that one of its members had originated another word—gobbledygook—and that the family had a tangential relationship with a third word, lynch.

And I was still amazed by a comment from left field when, as a newlywed, I was getting my master’s in journalism at Columbia University. We had an assignment to find and interview someone of note. I took a shortcut and picked Mary’s cousin Ed Maverick, an interior architect who’d worked on some of the tallest new buildings in New York. My story mentioned he’d been born in Texas but went into little family background. It came back from my professor with a good grade and a note: “Perhaps you couldn’t be expected to know about the incredible family of Mavericks in Texas, politicians with conscience.”

So, I realized, this was a family that intrigued both those who hadn’t heard about it and those, even far away, who had. And it was a family with a patriarch burdened with all manner of oft-repeated myths. There was, indeed, a story here.

The Mavericks maintain a strong sense of identity but usually manage not to take themselves too seriously. I found them to be generally outgoing, articulate, inquisitive, and unpretentious, with a refreshing strain of quirkiness. I was advised early on that all Maverick women were artists and all the men were outspoken. One got by just fine as long as one did not call patriarch Sam Maverick a cattle thief. I learned why: countless writers had sworn through the years that he was a rancher who branded all the unbranded cattle he could find. But he didn’t, and he wasn’t a rancher, either.

I’ve benefited from the Mavericks’ propensity for saving important papers and their willingness to make them accessible. The Maverick Family Papers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History include a remarkably deep assortment of papers of Sam and Mary Maverick, contributed by several branches of the family and reaching nearly twelve linear feet. UT’s Maury Maverick Sr. Collection exceeds forty-seven linear feet. Through the years my wife’s late mother, Jane Maverick McMillan, accumulated an eclectic assortment of family memorabilia and helpful articles. Ellen Maverick Clements Dickson graciously turned me loose in her room of books and albums filled with references to the Maverick family.

I am especially grateful to my wife, Mary, for her objective and valuable critiques; to historians Paula Mitchell Marks, author and editor of several books on the Maverick family, and Mary Margaret McAllen, for her knowledge of the Texas range; to Bruce M. Shackelford, curator of the Witte Museum’s South Texas Heritage Center, who deals with Texas every day; to Trinity University Press director Tom Payton—whose puppy is a terrier mix named Maverick—for his enthusiastic encouragement; and to my granddaughter Christina Jane Fisher, eleven, a sixth-generation descendant of Sam Maverick, for pointing out the connection with Harry Potter that wound up ending chapter 10.

Editorial Reviews

In this fascinating, well-illustrated work, Fisher outdoes all his prior literary output in style and verve with a book that not only lets the real Sam Maverick stand up and be counted, but puts him in a historical and cultural context that reveals why he and his family name have become such archetypal features of the American psyche.”— San Antonio Express-News

"A good read and sheds considerable light on the murky origins of an American word." — Southwestern Historical Quarterly

"A delightful book." — Big Bend Sentinel

From the Publisher