The Marshall Tucker Bull

There is a farm on the Orangeburg Scarp in South Carolina, that we called ours for 94 years until 1984.

And on that farm we had some cows which made necessary a new bull every year or so. In the winter of 1978-'79 we had a dream of getting in on the ground floor of the next big thing and started putting together some Black Maine Anjou heifers. We purchased a string of pretty good Black Maine heifers from the League Ranch up on the Brazos River near Red Springs, Texas. We wanted a Black Maine bull from an "easy calving" bloodline to sire those first calves from the Texas heifers. We found a bull sired by Cunia for sale at Highview Farm, Bellefontaine, Ohio, the breeder sounded like a nice fellow, and the price was tolerable.

One of the League Ranch heifers

T and Tatum and I left the farm on a January Friday afternoon after work and drove the brown 1974 Chevrolet C-20 and Hale gooseneck trailer all night arriving at Bellfontaine, Ohio after breakfast. Bellefontaine is up north of Dayton and is the highest point in Ohio. We pulled up on the hill to the breeders farm and there was snow and ice up there and it was clouding up fast. The bull was sound and exceeded our expectations and the weather looked like it was closing in so we loaded up and headed south.

It started snowing hard about Dayton and by the time we reached Cincinnati there was enough accumulation to provide the locals with the opportunity to demonstrate that folk in southern Ohio aren't any better drivers on snow than folk in Columbia, South Carolna. We coaxed and threaded our rig down to the river through out of control traffic without incident and made it across the bridge into Kentucky but that long steep hill from the Ohio River up onto the bluff at Covington began to present a problem. There was almost a half foot of snow by now, much of it collected on the roadway, and our footing was not good. But we had half of the weight of the trailer and the 1800 lb. bull pressing down on the tires of the pickup truck so we thought we had enough traction if our luck held and everyone else could keep moving and we could avoid exchanging paint with anyone. This uphill dance was playing at a tempo of about three miles per hour at the most and the '63 chevy four door ahead of us was struggling to keep moving. Several times forward motion seemed to stop and just as we touched the car ahead we could feel the bull take one step backward in the trailer which, the law of inertia being what it is, would propel us forward giving the car ahead a nudge which fortunately was all he, and probably the cars ahead, needed. I have a reasonable doubt that the bull knew what he was doing, but he did it every time that we needed it, and we eventually made it to the top of that long steep hill at Covington.

We usually made those livestock hauling trips with a stash of bakery bread, peanut butter, honey and fried country ham. Whatever we had with us we didn't stop for lunch and it took all afternoon to make the 80 miles from Covington to Lexington where we declared "!no mas!" and checked into a Holiday Inn, watered the bull, had a good supper and listened to a good Blue Grass band with a great fiddle player. We rose early the next morning and got breakfast. It was a brilliant day and there was no traffic moving in the 6 to 8 inches of snowfall. Just as we got back to the room we heard a set of tire chains go by on I-75 but nothing else.

We got out of the room and into the street and took the ramp, which was totally undisturbed snow, onto I-75 and settled into the one set of vehicle tracks that we found there in the right lane and headed for home at about 35 MPH. We had turned the radio on and settled into the routine when I noticed a rooster tail plume of snow topping a hill several miles behind us. This apparition overtook us very quickly running on the undisturbed snow in the left lane at seemingly about twice our speed. It was a black show bus, and as it blew past we could read "Marshall Tucker Band, Spartanburg, South Carolina" in not so large lettering by the entrance door. Those boys were heading home and they swept the highway clean for us. They were leading a charmed existence that day and so were we.

We made it home with out further incident  and called the bull "Mr. Dickerson" in honor of the nice man who sold him to us. We missed a wonderful opportunity to call him "Marshall Tucker".

The Marshall Tucker Bull