McCain and the Maverick San Antonio Connection So why does McCain have San Antonio to thank for that maverick label? Because the word maverick was born here in San Antonio, though it didn't originally have quite the macho or honest reformer connotation it does today. Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870) is variously described as a land speculator, rancher, merchant and lawyer who was born in South Carolina, went to Yale, then wound up in Texas in 1835 just as the push for independence from Mexico began. Maverick was actually in the Alamo compound in March of 1836 just days before the famous battle and he might have died there with the other defenders. But they happened to elect him a delegate to a convention 150 miles to the east of San Antonio. So he was gone when Santa Anna finally laid siege to the Alamo. Instead, Maverick was signing the Texas Declaration of Independence, then helping write the constitution for the new Republic of Texas. Maverick bought some cattle and here is where the real maverick connection begins-- though there are a few different versions of exactly how it happened. He either refused to brand his cattle or just neglected to do it. Either way, in these years before there were any fences to separate one ranch from another, cowboys would find stray, unbranded calves and came to refer to them as Mavericks. Within a matter of years the maverick label would be applied to all unbranded cattle no longer part of the herd. And later "mavericking" became a not-so-flattering verb meaning to go out and round up any unbranded cattle and brand them as your own. That finders-keepers-losers-weepers meaning morphed into stealing and was outlawed by the 1870's. By the end of the 1800's a maverick also had come to mean a person who refused to be branded or part of a herd. A nonconformist or rebel. Independent, unconventional and unorthodox. Someone who won't be constrained by party labels. Something like Samuel Maverick himself, a lifelong Democrat....