Hi Art,
This song appears in the collection "He Was Singin' This Song" by Jim Bob Tinsley. It is a "collection of Forty-Eight traditional songs of the American Cowboy...University Presses of Florida, 1981.

The book says, "A pioneer settler in the upper Pease River country of Texas composed a poetic requiem to the Texas longhorn and to the cowboy in 1899 that in time became the song "the Last Longhorn." John Wesley wrote the verses for a friend, to be read at a regular Saturday night lieterary meeting in the town of Margaret."

On my latest trip to Brisky Books in Micanopy Florida I picked up this book along with several others, and intend to transfer some of it's songs to the DT.

"The distinctive longhorn emerged from the unclaimed cattle that wandered off the old Spanish ranches in Mexico. By the mid-nineteenth century they ranged over the vast Texas plans in almost unlimited numbers...The longhorn was to be remembered because it revived Texas economically following the Civil War and provided a land of grass with a productive cattle industry. " pp. 222