What ethnicity were the first cowboys

Californios: The Saga of the Hard-riding Vaqueros, America's First Cowboys.

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Californios:
The Saga of the Hard-riding Vaqueros
America's First Cowboys

by Joseph Jacinto Mora

In the days of the vaquerosAmerica's first true cowboys

Long before cattle or cowboys first appeared in the American West, men were herding livestock in Spanish Mexico. Conscripted by wealthy Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, these Native American vaqueros became spectacular riders and ropers as they mastered the art of cow herding. Three hundred years later, they taught the inexperienced settlers of the American West how to round up cattle, bring down a steer, and break a wild bronco. It was from the vaqueros that cowboys derived their distinctive clothing, saddles, and lingo -- words like lasso, dally, and buckaroo. But it is the cowboy whose fabled reputation we remember, while the vaquero has all but disappeared from history. Russell Freedman tells the fascinating story of the vaqueros in this dramatic account of the first true cowboys, illustrated with evocative period paintings and drawings.

The role of the vaquero -- the Hispanic cowboy -- in U.S. ranching history has been overlooked and misrepresented, particularly in popular culture. With this book, he intends to rectify that wrong and does so quite successfully. Sandler notes the role that Spanish explorers such as Cortes and Coronado played in the introduction of ranching to the continent, as well as the importance of the Spanish mission system. The systematically arranged chapters also follow a fairly direct chronological progression and present the tools and skills of the vaquero, later adapted by Anglo cowboys, and aspects of daily life. The chapter on the tales the vaqueros told to amuse themselves in the evenings will be especially interesting to students who relish ghost and scary stories. Sandler also addresses the "silencing," as it were, of the vaqueros-the deliberate denigration by Anglo writers and their removal from the accounts of the "Wild West."

The vaquero influence persisted throughout the 1800s. Cowboys came from a variety of backgrounds, and included European immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans and Midwestern and Southern settlers. In the nineteenth century, one out of three American cowboys in the south was Mexican.

From PBS - independent lens

The first cowboys commonly were 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."

From Jonathan Haeber article

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La música ranchera es la "Quinta esencia" de la forma de la Canción Mexicana.

The roots of the vaquero tradition are long and tangled within complex histories of colonialism. They extend from Northern Africa with the Muslim conquests in the mid-seventh century to the 16th century, when Hernán Cortés brought the first horses to what would become Mexico and Gregorio de Villalobos followed with the first cattle. To the Mayans, the mounted Spaniards were a terrifying sight: half man, half beast. After the conquests, the Spanish maintained their dominance by decreeing that any Native American caught riding a horse would be put to death.

But the livestock multiplied quickly and needed keepers. At first, Cortés and the conquistadores, who considered themselves above such labor, assigned the work to their Moorish slaves. According to Vaqueros, Cowboys, and Buckaroos, these enslaved Black Muslim men were the first true vaqueros—a term that translates to “cow men”—in North America. As the need for vaqueros grew, the Spanish law changed to allow Native Americans to ride horses, but only for work and only without saddles, which were the mark of gentlemen. Unwittingly, the Spanish ensured that Native Americans became superior horsemen.

By the 17th century, descendants of the Spanish and Native Americans (and, one can speculate, the Moors) were working cattle using Spanish methods. This was the first generation of Mexican vaqueros—men who had first ridden horses on cradles strapped to their mothers’ backs, learning as children how to snare small game using ropes made from native fibers such as maguey, lechuguilla, and horsehair. Later, they made lazos out of cowhide, a tedious process of drying the skins, cutting them into strings, and weaving a rope of six strands up to 60 feet.

They adopted sombreros for shade and leather chaparreras (later abbreviated as chaps) to protect their legs from thorny brush. They could throw la reata (later Anglicized as “lariat”) to catch the front feet or heels of an animal. They developed the technique called dar la vuelta (“dallying”) in which they wrapped the rope around the saddle horn instead of tying it off hard and fast. Both methods required immense skill to avoid getting dragged or maimed when roping wild cattle from the back of a horse galloping through the open frontier.

By the early 18th century, vaqueros were driving herds of cattle, horses, and sheep alongside Spanish missionaries to settle beyond the Rio Grande. But Texas—then still a part of Mexico—was harsh and unforgiving, marred by violence, heat, and drought. In the 1830s, to increase population, the Mexican government encouraged migration from the United States, setting the stage for Texas’ battle for independence and eventual annexation.

Enter Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, friends and business partners who had served together in the U.S.-Mexico War and saw an opportunity in Texas’ herds of wild Longhorns, descended from the original Spanish breeds. Together and separately, they began to acquire huge swaths of South Texas acreage in the 1850s and ’60s, which would become the venerable King and Kenedy ranches, according to Voices from the Wild Horse Desert by Jane Clements Monday and Betty Bailey Colley.

At the time, though, King and Kenedy had no livestock experience. While Kenedy eventually hired vaqueros from the Rio Grande area, King traveled to Cruillas, Tamaulipas, in northern Mexico, offering the entire impoverished town housing and jobs for life if they would move back with him to his ranch. About 100 families accepted. Over time, they adopted the moniker of Kineños, or King’s men. (On the Kenedy Ranch, they were Kenedeños.)

The Mexican vaqueros taught King and Kenedy everything: how to work cattle and train horses, how to cull and keep the best stock, how to build a ranch. King and Kenedy trusted the vaqueros implicitly and took paternalistic responsibility for their well-being, and the vaqueros rewarded that trust with their loyalty. With his Kineños, King went on to drive tens of thousands of head of cattle to northern markets, helping establish the American ranching industry and building the most successful beef-producing operation in the U.S.