Influences in Cowboy Culture Jackson Knight

Cowboys, buckaroos and vaqueros ( ‘vaquero’ being the Spanish word to describe tenders of western
cattle in the 18th and 19th century). The three are also sometimes referred to more formally as cowhands or ranch
hands. They were, and still are, a staple of Spanish cultural influence in the United States. In the early 1500s, the
Spanish arrived from Mexico with horses and cattle imported from Spain. Ranches developed, and thus did the
ranch working cowboys that tended to the cattle. Because of a cultural isolation at the time, cowboys had their
own flare unlike anything. They spent the large majority of their time on horseback tending to cattle, dressed in
boots (sometimes with spurs), ten-gallon hats, and ponchos of prismatically brilliant color. The whole of Cowboy
culture is very intimately tied into the large availability of extensive, large rangelands that were at people’s disposal
in Texas, New Mexico, and California. There is still quite a culture of ranching today, but it has steered off from
being so obvious in wear and culture, and it has seeped into the pits and crevices of modern day American culture
in many aspects like music, fashion, and speech. Ranching has continued through the generations because to those
who do it, it is a way of life. From the start, and through their golden age (1866 - 1886) cowboys have never
ranched with the intention of fortune, and they’ve always done it instinctively.
The three aforementioned groups of ranchers were in actuality quite different from each other, despite all
having the same function of tending to and herding cattle throughout the West. Vaqueros came before and heavily
influenced the more broadly-termed cowboys. Buckaroos were cowboys and vaqueros taken a step further, as
they drew an extreme influence and evolved the cowboy nature . Buckaroos are much more elaborate and flashy -
they always had more elegant and complex spurs on their boots, and their horses were bridled with more
decorative bits. Buckaroos were much more over-presented compared to cowboys and vaqueros. Both cowboys
and vaqueros were on the more rugged, ragtag, get-the-job-done side, whilst buckaroos are their stylish,
sometimes over the top contrast. The differences between all three of them become apparent when we look at
the way they roped cattle. Texas cowboys were never particularly captivated with the art of roping. It was picked
up by necessity from the past vaqueros who traveled to South Texas. Cowboys used short, heavy, durable ropes.
They tied it very tightly to the saddle horn, the protruding bar at the front of every saddle made for this very
purpose. The Californian vaqueros had a more laidback style of rope. It was usually much longer, sometimes 60 to
70 feet long, and they tied it looser to the saddle horn. As for buckaroos, they often traded higher failure or injury
risk for more finesse. Their ropes were very slender and were commonly made of rawhide, grass, maguey (a
flowering plant native to Mexico), hemp, or hair. Beyond this, both cowboys and buckaroos tended to have
different horse training equipment. Buckaroos usually started their horses off in hackamores, a type of headgear
with a nosepiece that requires the user to know what they’re doing. Cowboys, on the other hand, use to snaffle
bits or smooth curved bits. We can draw the conclusion that Texas cowboys are very directly influenced from
Spanish vaqueros, and that cowboys show how culture evolves as it mixes together.
The general consensus of the word ‘buckaroo’ is that it had evolved from ‘vaquero’ because the letter v in
spanish is pronounced like the letter b, meaning that ‘vaquero’ is said more like ‘baquero’. But Julian Mason’s “The
Etymology of Buckaroo“ from ​American Speech vol. 35 ​theorizes differently. Mason references Lorenzo Dow
Turner’s citation of the work ‘bakra’, which means ‘white man’. The word comes from ‘mbakara’, a word that is
spoken in the the southern Nigerian languages of Ibibio and Efik. Furthermore, there’s a good chance that the word
‘buckaroo’ was not first spoken by someone familiar with Spanish, since the word was found in ranching country of
the West and Southwest. Mason’s basic hypothesis is that the word was created by black cowboys who got
undermentioned by writers of Western fiction who wrote for primarily white audiences and didn’t know the reality
of the West, and the considerable amount of slaves in the old West (especially Texas). It was commonplace that
slaves would have words with double meanings that were very valuable to them in the presence of their owners
and enemies. From this, Mason draws the conclusion that the word ‘buckra’ was used so commonly by these
people that it got confused with the very similar ‘vaquero’. It might appear that the word ‘buckaroo’ is not actually
straight from the word ‘vaquero’, but rather a symptom of the similarities between ‘buckra’ and ‘vaquero’. This has
some interesting implications as for influence from Spanish colonization onto Cowboy culture because it potentially
begs the question of whether or not there’s some unseen influence from slaves and minorities on cowboy culture.
Beyond cowboys, buckaroos, and vaqueros, there is a fourth type of ranch hand that showed up earlier than
expected: the Hawaiian paniolo. In the timeline of the Old West, paniolos came about quite early. They were nearly
direct descendents of the California vaqueros. In 1793 cattle first arrived to Hawaii, and 10 years later came horses.
The primary name for cows in Hawaii was ‘pua’a pipi’ which quite literally means “beef pigs”. At first, the new cattle
actually scared the Hawaiians. The King called them large hogs, and it took him some close encounters to be
comfortable around this strange new animal. By 1813, the cattle had become quite a bit more populated. It became
a destructive nuisance, destroying crops and walking over whatever people planted. This is where the Paniolo
comes in. The first paniolos were, like many other things, imported from the mainland of the US, but they slowly
became Hawaii-born. Near the 1850s, under the employment of the King, paniolos moved to ranches throughout
Hawaii, and began honing their skills as ranch hands. They used the most cliche, spaghetti western way of lassoing
wild cattle possible: two or three twirls around the head and then a toss towards the target’s horns or limbs with
spectacular accuracy. The lot of the paniolos also dressed in the same attire that cowboys on the mainland did -
the spurs, the ponchos, and the hats. They also had a technique of cattle-keeping influenced by vaqueros. They
would tie the cattle to trees to huddle them up at the end of a day doing ranch work. The next day, when the cattle
was tired and sore-horned, they’d lead it back to corrals. They also used large pits as cattle traps along trails where
cattle moved very actively. They would then rope the entrapped cattle, and repeat the same process of leading
them to corrals. It’s a very intriguing fact that cowboy culture (and for that matter, Spanish colonization) seeped
into even Hawaii, and to this day, Hawaii is a rather large producer of beef which is directly tied into the need for
paniolos and the initial bringing of cattle into Hawaii by Spanish colonizers.
Cowboy culture has stayed consistent in a lot of it’s ways with those who still herd cattle, but it’s also
found it’s way into everyday American culture. The wearing of the original western shirts by vaqueros and
cowboys that influenced the creation and popularity of flannel shirts acts as a great showcase of how the original
Spanish vaquero has through, even if by many steps, leaked into modern, popular culture. Cowboys as a whole
were a very unique, culturally isolated kind. This isolation was comparable to as if they had locked a Spanish
colonizer and a Texan American from the dawn of the United States in the same room, gave them horses and wild,
rampant cattle, and told them to figure out what to do. The breaking of early cowboy culture’s isolation by way of
the continued growth of a nation spread influence massively. For example if you look at the way that nearly every
ranch hand around today dresses and speaks, you’ll find direct influence and sometimes a jarring resemblance to
the original Spanish vaquero. Cowboys were most definitely a perfect blend of Spanish influence and North
American progress. When the Spanish brought horses to the United States, they also brought over influence on
what to use them for, which in turn ended up being influence in attire and technique. Cowboys, buckaroos,
vaqueros, and paniolos for that matter are a great window into the influences on the United States that Spanish
colonization had in all things, including language and tradition. The presence of early Spanish colonizers splashed
contrasting colors onto the culture of the American West at the time of their arrival. Cowboys were (and still are)
one of if not the most unique and influenced cultures from the early life of the United States. From the influence
onto them from Spanish colonization, they have been the main influence on all of the Western United States since
their golden age.