Passage II

Vaqueros, the Original Cowboys

Many who think of the cowboy as an icon of U.S. culture, might be surprised to find out that cowboys learned their craft from Mexican vaqueros. In the early 1500s, Spanish colonists began to bring horses and cattle to North America. Large ranchos, or ranches, were established for raising livestock on the open plains of central Mexico. (17) The first ranch hands, or vaqueros, were Indians. They became spectacular horsemen and developed the tools and skills of the cowboy trade as it is known today.

[1] Vaqueros from neighboring ranches joined together to ride the range and flush the free-roaming cattle from their hiding places and send them trotting toward a central roundup ground. [2] The first cattle roundups—called rodeos, from the Spanish word rodear, which means "to surround"—were held in the 1520s. [3] There the cattle would be sorted for new calves branded. (20)

The vaqueros developed the lazo (lasso), or la reata (lariat) , as an everyday item that the vaquero made by hand with great care. It was a braided rawhide rope with a slipknot, or running noose, at one end. The vaquero while riding at full gallop became an expert at twirling a lariat above his head and then throwing the noose to snare a cow on the run. (24)

During the 1700s, cattle ranching was introduced to Mexico's northernmost region—what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. After declaring it's independence from Mexico in 1836, Texas began to be settled by significant numbers of Anglo-Americans. When they decided to try to herd the wild longhorn cattle that roamed the Texas plains, they turned to the Mexican vaqueros for help. Watching the vaqueros round up steers, the cowboy trade was learned from experts. (28) The word vaquero, as pronounced by U.S. cowboys in their speech, became buckaroo.

Like the cowboys, the vaqueros were poorly paid laborers, but no one looked down on a vaquero on horseback. To shield his head and eyes from the sun, he wore a wide-brimmed sombrero, the precursor to the ten-gallon cowboy hat.