Hispanic Roots

   One out of every three cowboys in the late 1800s was the Mexican vaquero, says Kendall Nelson, a photographer from Idaho whose recent book, Gathering Remnants: A Tribute to the Working Cowboy, showcases the few remaining cowboys of the West. Nelson is currently working on a documentary of the same title, capping an eight-year documentation of the last cowboys.

    The story of Nelson's photos and Costner's Open Range really begins in the Southwest, two decades before the pilgrims landed in 1620 on Plymouth Rock, when adventurous criollos (Spanish-born Americans) and mestizos (mixed Spanish and Indian settlers) pushed past the Rio Grande River to take advantage of land grants in the kingdom of New Mexico, which included most of the western states.

   They were called caballeros, says Donald Gilbert Y Chavez, a historian of the cowboy's Spanish origins.

"One of the highest stations you could have in life was to be a caballero," said Chavez, a resident of New Mexico whose lineage can be traced to the Don Juan de Oñate colony, the caballero who was among the first cowboys in the U.S.

"Even the poor Mexican vaqueros were very proud and there were few things they couldn't do from a saddle."

   Caballero is literally translated as "gentleman." The root of the word comes from caballo—Spanish for "horse." For every caballero there were perhaps dozens of independents—the true "drivers" of cattle: vaqueros.

"All of the skills, traditions, and ways of working with cattle are very much rooted in the Mexican vaquero," Nelson told National Geographic News. "If you are a cowboy in the U.S. today, you have developed what you know from the vaquero."
  

   Vaqueros were proverbial cowboys—rough, hard-working mestizos who were hired by the criollo caballeros to drive cattle between New Mexico and Mexico City, and later between Texas and Mexico City. The title, though denoting a separate social class, is similar to caballero, and is a mark of pride. "Vaquero is a transliteration of the words 'cow' and 'man.' Vaca means 'cow,'" said Chavez. "Interestingly enough, in Spanish, we call ourselves cowmen; in English, it was demoted to cowboys."                           

Texas Longhorn for the Taking

   In 1821 Anglo settlers arrived in Texas and became the first English-speaking Mexican citizens in the territory. Led by Stephen F. Austin, they arrived in San Felipe de Austin, Texas, to take advantage of the vast expanse of cattle, free for the taking.

"There were millions of longhorn cattle in the brush country of Texas that were loose, strayed, and had multiplied," says Nelson. All the new settlers had to do was round up the cattle.

   It was something the vaqueros had been doing for 223 years, since 1598, when Don Juan de Oñate, one of the four richest men in New Spain (present-day Mexico) sent an expedition across the Rio Grande River into New Mexico.

Oñate spent over a million dollars funding the expedition, and brought some 7,000 animals to the present-day United States. It eventually paid off; the first gold to come from the West was not from the Gold Rush, but rather from its wool-bearing sheep and then its long-horned livestock.

Modernization and Civilization: A Cowboy's Culprits

   By the conclusion of the Civil War the cattle-driving industry was at its apogee. But the top was about to spiral downwards with the invention of barbed wire in 1873, inciting a rapid rise in large private landholdings.