Dobie's Beast of Burden

[1]

Seen above: The Mustang statue at the Texas Memorial Stadium

Dobie's Mustang

Don't get me wrong. I like the mustang statue at Texas Memorial Museum (seen above). But it doesn't give me the same inspiration as the Longhorn. I'm surprised Frank Dobie had any love left over for the Longhorn after he was done doting over the Mustangs. He says,

Like the longhorn, the mustang has virtually bred out of existence but mustang horses will always symbolize western frontiers, long trails of longhorn herds, seas of pristine grass, and men riding in a free land.[1]

Somehow, I think he manages to diminish the Longhorn in lieu of his boyhood ideal of the Mustang. Like most Cowboys, Dobie seems to exaggerate throughout his text which is typical of the "historians" of the time and region. He seems to think that it was horses that gave him his "freedom" from the Indians. Another Cowboy, John Bainbridge, wrote it differently,

The Indians, moreover, won out in the battle for survival They devised winning battle plans and strategies out of their commitment to retaining their way of life. The Spaniards held the advantage while they alone possessed horses and superior weapons, but by the early seventeenth century, the Plains Indians were the match of any other horsemen. They could swoop in, raid, pillage, kill, and then flee from the stationary outpost of European civilization. The Indians planned their attacks so as to enjoy numerical strength. And they had no villages to be defended or large armies to be defeated. Their constant raiding, thus, weakened the white man's hold on the frontier.  [2]

The Mustang is not, as Dobie claims,  a symbol of [Western] freedom that happened upon us because we're from this side of the planet, "No one who truly conceives him as only a potential servant to man can apprehend the mustang. The true conceiver must be a lover of freedom - a person who yearns to extend freedom to all life. "  Rather, it is a cross-cultural symbol that stands took place when the Spanish explorers and the colonial settlers discovered America. It's a remanent of the past, but it doesn't belong to any certain side or entity. The sense of entitlement to the mustang seems sort of silly when he's saying, at the same time, "a person who yearns to extend freedom to all life."  In the below video, J. Dobie extends his thoughts of freedom in cyberspace. Listening to his thoughts remind us how far we've come:

[4]

I guess before I put Dobie's argument about the Mustang belonging in Longhorn territory to rest, I could also say that though Dobie has been somewhat 'bred out of existence', that he's still with us in spirit in my blog. I don't mean there on your blog space, "But here, beautiful and free, he lives for the centuries to come" [5] as well as at Texas Memorial Museum. In light of Harry Ramsom's quote his memory is left here highly regarded.

"I think Frank Dobie was one of the greatest teachers the University of Texas ever had, . . . . on of the truly great natural historians.. . . And this insight into nature, I think, needs to be continued as a Dobie tradition here if the University is really going to realize its own promise."

- Harry Ransom
























[1]http://www.utexas.edu/student/cmhc/intern/Images/horses.gif
[2] Course anthology, Dobie 840
[3] John Baimbridge, The Super-Americans (Garden City, New York: Double Day, 1961)

[4] Course anthology, Dobie 846

[5]

http://z.about.com/d/austin/1/0/3/9/tmm4.jpg