The cowboy's vocabulary is Spanish
Cattle herding in North America began with Mexican vaqueros, and the trade came north with its words intact. RANCH comes from rancho, LASSO from lazo, RODEO from rodear, meaning to round up, and lariat from la reata. Chaps are chaparreras; a bronco is Spanish for rough. The saddle, the SPURS and the techniques came the same way.
The COWBOY himself was far more varied than the films suggest. Historians estimate that perhaps a quarter of the cowboys on the great cattle drives were Black, many of them formerly enslaved men from Texas, and a substantial number more were Mexican. The job was hard, poorly paid, and mostly done by young men in their late teens and twenties.
The cattle drive was a supply chain
After the Civil War, Texas had millions of longhorn CATTLE and no market, and the eastern cities had the opposite problem. The answer was to walk the animals hundreds of miles north to the new railheads in Kansas, where a steer that fetched a few dollars in Texas could sell for many times that.
A drive of around 2,500 head needed about a dozen riders, a cook with a chuck WAGON, and three or four months. The whole era was short. Barbed wire, patented in 1874, fenced the open PRAIRIE; railways reached Texas directly; and the brutal winter of 1886–87 killed a large share of the herds on the northern plains. By about 1890 the long drives were over, only a generation after they started.
Towns had strict gun laws
Many cattle towns banned carrying guns within town limits. Visitors handed their REVOLVER in at the MARSHAL's office or a hotel on arrival and collected it on leaving, and signs at the town edge said so. Dodge City, Wichita and Tombstone all had such ordinances.
Homicide rates in the famous cattle towns were lower than the legend suggests — a few killings in a typical year — and the quick-draw duel at noon in the street is largely a creation of dime novels and later films. The gunfight near the O.K. Corral in 1881, the most famous of all, began when the town marshal, Virgil Earp, and his deputies set out to disarm men who were carrying guns in breach of the local law. It lasted about thirty seconds.
Somebody else's home
The FRONTIER was only a frontier from one direction. The plains and mountains were home to many Native American nations, and westward settlement came through treaties, broken treaties, forced removals and war. The near-destruction of the buffalo herds, from tens of millions to a few hundred animals by the late 1880s, destroyed the economy several of those nations depended on. It belongs in any honest account of the period.
The rest of the grid is the working vocabulary: the SHERIFF and DEPUTY, the SALOON, the STAGECOACH, the OUTLAW, BANDIT, GUNSLINGER and cattle RUSTLER, the HOLSTER, and the STETSON, designed in 1865 by John B. Stetson as a hat for the plains. The GOLD RUSH of 1849 started much of the westward movement. Our horses page covers the animal that made the whole job possible.