THE TEXAS COWBOY

I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.

—Frank Maynard, Cowboy's Lament: A Life on the Open Range c. 1876, published 2010

The Texas cowboy was a legend in his own time. Even before the brief era of the epic trail drives had passed in the 1880s, the life and character of the cowboy had been romanticized and mythologized in autobiographies, songs, poetry, and pulp fiction that spread cowboy folklore to eager audiences at home and abroad. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and later Hollywood westerns made the myth international, involving many who had actually lived the cowboy life on the plains of Texas and the West. The qualities of endurance, independence, stoicism, and self-reliance, needed to sustain a cowboy in a harsh and often dangerous occupation, came to be incorporated into the quintessential American character.

The tradition of open-range herding using mounted herdsmen came from cultures extending back to Spain, England, and Africa, arriving in Texas from the American South and the northern Mexican borderlands. Like many other aspects of Texas history, the heritage of the cowboy is a tale of cultural complexity and diversity. Even the folkish name “buckaroo” may have origins both in the Spanish vaquero and the African Gullah buckra.

Spanish colonial ranches in northern Mexico employed vaqueros vaca, meaning “cow” to manage semi-wild herds on expansive semi-arid ranges. Stock-handling techniques using ropes lassos, lariats, whips, burning of grazing lands, roundups, branding, and the use of small, quick horses fitted with a horned saddle were picked up by Anglo ranchers and blended with similar methods brought from the eastern United States.

“The Texas cowboy, along with the Texas cowman, was an evolvement from and a blending of the riding, shooting, frontier-formed southerner, the Mexican-Indian horseback worker with livestock the vaquero, and the Spanish open-range rancher.

The blend was not in blood, but in occupation” J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1943], 89.

While the herding techniques as developed in the South Texas ranges in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a blending of southern Anglo and Hispanic ways, the material culture of the Texas cowboy was distinctly Hispanic. The components of the cowboy's outfit were well adapted to the environment and occupation: the broad-brimmed hat sombrero provided shade in a climate with long summers, and its high crown was useful as a water bucket; leather chaps chaparreras protected legs from the mesquite and other thorny shrubs of the South Texas ranges; the bandana a word of Hindu origin, a large printed handkerchief, protected the face from sun and dust; high-topped boots kept out water when fording streams and high heels provided a strong grip on stirrups; spurs were a necessity in horsemanship but also useful as branding irons, grave markers, and personal ornament; the Mexican saddle with a large front horn with a rounded cap used to tie off ropes and a large rear cantle, or seat back, for long hours on horseback; and a woven leather or hemp rope lazo, meaning “lasso”; la reata, meaning “lariat” with a running noose for catching cattle and horses.

The Texas cowboy was not only culturally mixed but racially mixed as well. Mexican vaqueros worked Texas ranges and ranches alongside Anglo cowboys, and black cowboys were especially prevalent in the counties of the Coastal Bend between the Sabine and Guadalupe rivers, which had been the predominant areas of slavery before the Civil War. One estimate places five of every eight cowboys riding on the trails out of coastal Texas as being black, a number of whom went on to become well known as professional rodeo performers, such as William Pickett. Charles Siringo, the first cowboy autobiographer, recalls several incidents in his 1885 book, A Texas Cow Boy: or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony, of being rescued from raging bulls and high water by black cowhands.

The cattle business evolved in the late nineteenth century with the fencing of the open range, the coming of railroads through Texas that eliminated the need to drive cattle to market in Kansas, the introduction of new weather-tolerant breeds, and the expansion of ranching into New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana. But the daily hard work of the cowboy remains and the myth endures.