![]() The train was leaving the station, literally. There, gasping for air, they asked the shopkeeper for three bolts of two colors. They jumped out of the train, sprinted up Congress Avenue and ducked into a general store. UT students had boarded a chartered train at the station downtown for the ride to Williamson County when two of them, Venable Proctor and Clarence Miller, realized no one had ribbons on. Instead, they wore their Sunday best and used lapel ribbons to show team spirit. ![]() Students around the country didn’t dress in their school colors to games back then. The team was scheduled to play at Southwestern University in Georgetown. In 1885, UT was less than 2 years old but it already had a baseball team. Orange and white are UT’s colors because one was very popular and one was very unpopular. (The state small mammal is the armadillo.) In 1995, the Texas Legislature even named the Texas longhorn the state large mammal. Their horns, which grow on males and females alike, can span 9 feet! With the cattle drives of the Old West still fresh in the public’s memory at the turn of the 20th century, nothing said “Texas” to citizens then more than Texas longhorn cattle, and conveniently, “Texas” was right there in the breed’s name. Then, of course, there is their namesake feature. They are famously tough, surviving in conditions most other breeds cannot. So why longhorns? (By the way, an animal breed is a common noun, so it’s usually lowercase, like collie, or palomino a team name is a proper noun, so it is capitalized.) The Texas longhorn had been a familiar and imposing character of the Texas landscape since herds began to escape the Spanish and become feral in the 1500s. The strategy worked, and in 1906, the name became official. In 1903, Alex Weisburg, editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan, instructed reporters to refer to every UT sports team as “The Longhorns,” and they’d soon have a name. 18, 1900, in the Galveston Daily News: “Football Game at Austin - Texas to-day avenged former defeats, and the long horns clipped the Tigers’ claws by a score of 17 to 11 in one of the most exciting games played in this city.” The earliest known reference to them as Longhorns in print was Nov. In 1895, the team became an official university club with the creation of the Athletic Council and the hiring of a coach. The football club at UT, first known as the Texas Varsity, was formed as an unofficial, student-run team in about 1893. Good question, but to find out why, it might help to find out when the animal became our mascot.
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