When the Cows Roamed Free

I grew up in Winn Parish, where the people have always marched to a different drum. In 1861, they defied Southern Democratic politics and voted against secession. But once civil war erupted, hundreds of its men fought to defend the state against invasion. Many died on the battlefield.

At the turn of the 20^th century, Winn turned socialist and voted for Eugene V. Debs for president, and a few decades later sent populists Huey Long, his brother Earl, and O. K. Allen to the governor’s mansion. Winn is the only parish to have produced three governors.

When I was coming of age in the 1960s, Winn and LaSalle parishes were said to be the only parishes that still had an open stock law. The story was that Gov. Earl Long had made sure free range remained in those two parishes because that’s where he ran his own hogs. I don’t know if that is true, but I do remember how cows and hogs roamed free and were a menace on the highways.

Cows, in particular, were a problem. The highways heated up during the day, and the cows would lay on the asphalt at night to keep warm. For some reason, they tended to congregate at certain places, and we knew to slow down when approaching those spots. Nonetheless, collisions occurred.

One of my earliest memories is riding with the family on Hwy 505 one night in the 1950s when it was still a gravel road. A car was stopped near Big Creek and the occupants were examining a cow they had struck and killed.

Fortunately, I never hit one, but there were a number of times when I came over a hill and had to lock up the brakes to keep from running into a herd lying in the middle of the road.

My Uncle Durwood Jones had free ranging cows, and in the late afternoon would call them in to feed on a high hill overlooking Dugdemona swamp. When hunting around sundown on cold, still days, I often heard his loud, unique whoop that carried a long way across the bottom.

Not long after we started dating, Carol and I were driving around and came across Uncle Durwood feeding his cows. He had a huge Brahma bull named Charlie that was calmly eating hay, and Carol stood in the back of Durwood’s truck to pet him. When she asked what the big hump was on Charlie’s back, Durwood simply replied, “Hamburger.”

In the 1970s, cattle thieves became a problem at times. They would drive the back roads in the wee hours of the morning to either shoot a calf small enough to throw into the back of a truck or lasso a cow and put it in a trailer. One day, Uncle Durwood was checking on his cows and found one that had escaped with a lasso still around its neck.

When the rustling was at its worse, my brother Larry and I would detour through the dirt roads when coming home from a night on the town in Winnfield to look for suspicious characters. One night we came across a truck with a bed camper parked on a seldom-used road with its lights out. We stopped at a distance, pulled out the spotlight, and lit it up.

A few moments later, a deep angry voice yelled out, “Have y’all seen enough?” We realized then that the man’s mind was probably entertaining his girlfriend and quickly departed.

The free ranging cows really began to aggravate me when I started deer hunting. Frequently, I would be way back in the woods sitting against a tree when a herd of Uncle Durwood’s cows would mosey past me. I was convinced that deer would not stay in the same area as cows and in exasperation would pack up and move somewhere else whenever cows appeared.

It wasn’t until after a stock law was finally passed and the cows were removed from the woods that I realized what an effect they had on the environment. When I was a youngster, there were open meadows several acres in size in a palmetto swamp, and you could see a long way through the woods in Dugdemona bottom because there was little underbrush.

I didn’t realize at the time that it was the cows’ heavy browsing that kept the meadows and woods open. Now, the meadows are mostly thickets and brush has greatly reduced visibility in the swamp. My old hunting spots look completely different today because the cows are gone.

Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. For a $25 autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, contact him at tljones505@gmail.com