Of course he was feeling something resembling pride when he went out on a routine cattle call one warm October morning in 2007 and looked around the east holding pasture. Donnell and the rancher sold seven shares of Revelation for $1,650 apiece and had 14 more ranchers ready to pony up. Brown Ranch, where it would enjoy higher visibility, the conditioning of an athlete and Donnell’s help in selling shares to investors. “You should syndicate Revelation,” Donnell advised, offering to bring the bull back to the R. Producing a bull whose offspring have even one of these super stats is like hitting the lottery. He told him that Revelation’s progeny were showing beef marbling scores that were off the charts, along with breathtaking rib-eye areas. “A superstar,” Donnell told him, pointing out, as he often has to do, that a bull in today’s marketplace is like a player in the NFL draft, except with a longer roster of stats. The weekend rancher from Houston didn’t quite know what he had, so Donnell called him to explain. Two years after he sold Revelation, Donnell’s dream came true: the bull’s babies were at the top of the class. No giving up on the four life goals he set for himself at age 23: get to heaven be the best possible husband and father be healthy and happy produce the most efficient beef cattle in the entire world by converting God’s forage into safe, nutritious, delicious food for His people. He wears a clean, straight mustache above an intelligent smile. No, cowboys in Throckmorton consider themselves West Texas cowboys: starched and ironed, just the way cowboys are supposed to be. Donnell is tall, slim, with a quarterback’s build and the deep blue determined eyes of a man who is hanging on with all his might for the ride. The spurs on his boots bear his initials, but he does not wear jingle bobs on them, those dangling silver baubles you see on flashy Arizona cowboys. It would be two years before anyone would know the quality of the bull’s progeny.ĭonnell wears creased Wranglers, a starched plaid shirt with long sleeves and a white hat with the brim cupped obediently up-not in some floppy, haphazard shape like East Texas cowboys wear. Donnell kept the rights to half of Revelation’s semen. In the breeding business, the buyer gets the animal, but the seller typically retains an interest in the genetics. Top breeding bulls-once they’re proven to produce prime calves-can sell for more than $100,000. In time, the bull could turn out to be worth much more. Brown Ranch Bull & Female Sale he sold Revelation to a Houston businessman with a weekend ranch for $12,000. Fathers, sons, grandsons-the ranch has passed through five generations. Donnell Brown, 41, is the current cowboy in charge, and at the 2005 R. Brown Ranch has been selling breeding cattle for more than a century, and where as many as 800 head will go at auction in a single day. He believed in his heart that Revelation, at just a year-and-a-half old, could become the most storied bull in the history of the Red Angus breed. Finally, after decades of tinkering: might this be the masterpiece?Įvery October, cattle buyers from all over the United States gather near Throckmorton, in north-central Texas, where the R.A. “We don’t intend to present this bull as divine,” the cowboy, Donnell Brown, would write in his 2005 sale catalog, “but we do count it a blessing to have raised him.” Brown was a salesman by nature, but not given to hyperbole. The cowboy who designed him, who chose the semen, selected the dam, prepared and inseminated the uterus, named him Revelation. He was the son of Cherokee Canyon, the grandson of Make My Day-a noble pedigree. There once was a bull, an astonishing bull with a handsome, wide muzzle, stunning scrotal circumference and a square frame solid as a sycamore.
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