Belle Sarcastic (1890—1903)
Belle Sarcastic, circa 1900. Photo Credit: M.S.U. Archives, which has adopted her as an unofficial mascot.
Belle Sarcastic was a Holstein-Friesian cow owned by the Michigan Agricultural College in the 1890s. For a dairy cow, she garnered quite a bit of fame in her lifetime, and was a source of great pride for the College.
She was bred by H. P. Doane of Duffield in Genesee County, and calved on January 18, 1890. Belle was acquired by the College soon after, but nearly became an early cull. In 1893, Clinton D. Smith arrived at M.A.C. to become Professor of Practical Agriculture and Superintendent of the Farm. He described three-year-old Belle Sarcastic as “decidedly beefy and steer-like,” “simply a square brick,” and deemed her unfit as a dairy cow. Smith later wrote,
As I made my first official visit and inspection, I told the herdsman, Richard Harrison, the best cow feeder in America, that there was one heifer that should go to the block. His mind was less clouded by theory than mine, and he plead for her life for another year. I let her live. You know the result.[Holstein-Friesian Herd-Book, vol. 19 (1901), p. 75]
The result was that within a year, Belle had given birth to her second calf and, to Smith’s surprise, “from a fine beef animal, she developed into an ideal dairy cow.” Although her milk and butterfat production were prodigious, she “consumed absolutely less than the standard required,” with “dainty” eating habits and, somewhat idiosyncratically, “a very strong liking for roots.” In 1895 she gave milk for 738 pounds of butter, a feat that Professor Beal saw fit to include in his “College as a River” timeline, a foldout addendum to his History of the Michigan Agricultural College. Two years later Belle outdid herself, producing 23,190 pounds of milk and 722 pounds of fat—a world record that stood for eleven years.
Surprisingly, in that record-setting year of 1897 Belle Sarcastic was quarantined from the herd when she was diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis, a frequently occurring ailment in that era. Given that the disease can cause loss of both appetite and weight, this makes her record all the more impressive. Professor Smith, in his annual report to the Board of Agriculture, blamed the inadequate design and poor condition of the old cattle barn (built in 1862) for the illness—a situation that was soon remedied with the construction of two new dairy barns.[36th AR (1897), p. 31]
Sarcastic Lad (1897—1910)
Belle Sarcastic’s greatest production, however, was undoubtedly her fourth calf: Sarcastic Lad, bred at the College and calved on October 18, 1897. The bull was sold before birth to noted breeders W. J. Gillett & Son of Rosendale, Wisconsin. In 1904, Sarcastic Lad was exhibited by the “World’s Fair Holstein Association” at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis—better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair—and won the Grand Champion title in his class (and a $75 prize). He was described as “a typical dairy bull, weighing 2,200 pounds, [with] the active, aggressive dairy temperament. He walks as if he owned the earth.”[37th Annual Report, Missouri State Board of Agriculture (1905), p. 343]
Sarcastic Lad, 1910. Public domain image courtesy of University of Illinois Archives.
After the fair he was acquired by the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he headed that school’s herd until his death in 1910 “at the advanced age of thirteen years.” Sarcastic Lad became “one of the noted sires of the breed,” renowned for passing along his dam’s “ideal dairy cow” aspects to his scores of children, hundreds of grandchildren, and generations beyond. Assuming that trend continued, it is possible that thousands of registered Holstein cows today might trace their bloodlines to Sarcastic Lad.[Holstein-Friesian Herd-Book, vol. 55 (1925), p. 99]
Traverse Colantha Walker (1916—1932)
Traverse Colantha Walker, date unknown.
One notable descendant was Traverse Colantha Walker, a great-great-granddaughter of Sarcastic Lad calved in 1916. She was bred and owned by the Traverse City State Hospital, also known as the Northern Michigan Asylum, which operated a sizeable farm as part of its design for self-sufficiency. “Sizeable” would describe the cow as well—she was “so large that the official measuring sticks of the State Department of Agriculture were a couple of feet short.” She was another world record holder, setting a lifetime tally of 7,525.8 pounds of fat and more than 200,000 pounds of milk over nine lactation periods. Her death in 1932 was marked by a memorial banquet at the hospital and an obituary in Michigan Farm News that likened her to Paul Bunyan’s legendary purple cow Lucy. The following year, an appropriately large granite stone was placed upon her grave.[Michigan Farm News 10(2), 23 Jan 1932, p. 2. Coloma Courier 35(26), 18 Jan 1929, p. 6]
Today the hospital site has been adaptively redeveloped as “the Village at Grand Traverse Commons” and Traverse Colantha Walker is the asylum’s most famous former resident. Popularly known as “Colantha” (though there have been thousands of others with Colantha in their names), she is the subject of a children’s picture book of historic fiction. For several years an annual festival was held in her honor, although it appears that the celebration did not continue into the post-Covid era. In 2022 a bronze statue of the cow was unveiled at the botanic garden about a half mile south of the Village main buildings, near her gravesite which remains a popular destination for curiosity-seekers.
Traverse Colantha Walker’s gravesite, 2007. Photo by takomabibelot, used under CC BY 2.0.
