QuoteReplyTopic: Cowboys, South of the Border: Spanish heritage Posted: 11-Aug-2007 at 20:41
Zoologists know horses evolved in the Americas, but species related to moder horses become extinct shortly after humans entered the Western Hemisphere. The horse made its way to Eurasia and in there it was domesticated. Spaniards brought it back to the Americas, and with them the traditions of the riders started. The "cowboy" was born in the ranches of the Spanish Empire in the 16th century, when the Spanish soldier stop to fight and has to work
The U.S. movie industry made famous worldwide the cowboy, the fellow that drove cows in search of pastures. It is less known, though, that the U.S. cowboy has its roots in the ranch farmers of Mexico. The cowboy lifestyle was in place in Latin America for centuries before the conquest of the west, brought by the Spaniards from Europe and addapted to the realities of the Western Hemisphere: a land that have lot of space where to grow cows.
Some of the best known Latin American cowboys are:
Charros, Mexico:
Llaneros, Venezuela and Colombia:
Chagras, Andes cowboys, Ecuador:
Gaucho, Argentina, Uruguay and Southern Brazil:
Huasos, Chile:
A form of soccer played with a cow instead of a ball :shock:
Jackal they weren't pre-columbian they were prehistorical.
Pinguin, in my family many like to compare the mind set of the Russians and Ukrainians who live in the great plains to the one of the US farmers of the MidWest. Kind off same space, same activity hence same thought (religious, strong on family, very patriotic). Are gauchos the same in your opinion?
Animals like the Eohippus lived in the Americas in prehistorical times
Many animals native to the Americas perished after man entered the continent 20.000 years ago, including mamuts, horses, the giant armadillo and the midolon. We know it because remains of those animals are sometimes found in the campfires of the earliest Americans.
I found this post somewhere in the web that may be interesting to find more sources,
Pinguin
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Humans Might Have Wiped Out Wild Horses By Bjorn Carey, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 01 May 2006 05:01 pm ET
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Already charged with eradicating mammoths, the first North Americans might also have wiped out wild horses in Alaska, a new study suggests. The end of the Pleistocene era, around 12,000 years ago, was coupled with a global cooling event and the extinction of many large mammals, particularly in North America.
This was also when humans first made their way into Alaska from Asia, leading some researchers to believe that extensive over-hunting helped drive the extinction of the massive beasts. Mammoths, for example, were a prime target of early hunters and were driven to extinction within roughly 500 years of humans' arrival on the continent. But another possibility is that a fast-spreading infectious disease brought down these and other animals. Horse history Horses originated in North America, but all the wild ones were killed by early hunters, researchers say. Some horses snuck over to Asia before the land/ice bridge disappeared. Those were domesticated by Asians and then Europeans, who reintroduced horses to the Americas. In recent times, Americans had large horse-raising ranches, and some of the horses escaped to become what are today known as "wild" mustangs. Since the most recent truly wild horse fossil dates to about 12,500 years ago, scientists had thought these animals died out before humans were a factor. Revising history In the new study, researchers reevaluated some of the unreliable data used in previous calculations and determined that when gaps in the fossil record and radiocarbon dating errors are factored in, it is possible that humans and horses coexisted. "The fossil record's very incomplete, and just because the most recent remain is from 12,500 years ago, that doesn't mean that the horse became extinct at this time," said study co-author Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Radiocarbon dating techniques-the most common method of determining the age of organic material-can be off by 200 to 300 years, a significant error when considering a thousand-year window. As a result, it is impossible to rule out human hunting as the cause, or major contributing factor, to horse extinction in North America, Solow told LiveScience. The study is detailed in online edition of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
... Pinguin, in my family many like to compare the mind set of the Russians and Ukrainians who live in the great plains to the one of the US farmers of the MidWest. Kind off same space, same activity hence same thought (religious, strong on family, very patriotic). Are gauchos the same in your opinion?
Yes. I had the opportunity of living in Canada, and be around the cowboys there, seeing aunctions of pigs, visiting farms and listening to country music, and I tell you, besides the superficial differences of culture, it is basically the same people. Even the musical tastes are similar: country music is just a form of "rancheras" addopted to the anglosaxon taste!
Yes, countryside people are religious, family oriented, love theirs lands, they are rough and can stand the worst weather conditions and calamities, and they love theirs horses!
Hopefully I'm not getting too much off topic, but some of what you say is kind of why I have little faith in national boundaries, or at least in my own national boundaries. Travelling in Mexico and rural France, or some (though not all) of the tourists I meet over here, or even some people on the internet, I find I have (relatively speaking) more common ground with these people (the guy working behind the desk at the hotel, or in the grocery store, or the blokes watching football in the bar) than with the trainee bank manager types who live upstairs or more or less anyone with even a tiny part in running this country.
"For as long as the world shall endure, the honour and the glory of Mexico-Tenochtitlan must never be forgotten."
- Chimalpahin Quautlehuanitzin
<a href="http://www.theotherconquest.com
Fishermen of any culture have a lot more in common between themselves than the populations of a city, like Ohio or Paris!
In the case of cowboys, they have the same style all over the Western Hemisphere, from Alaska to the Land of Fire, and I would include places like Australia as well.
American cowboys roots are in the cowboys south of the border, particularly from Mexican charros. The origin of the American cowboy is in Texas and California, where the American and Mexican influences collide and then fused. Canadian cowboys also have its roots in Texans. This is the story:
The Spanish were adept at herding livestock. In fact the Spanish invented what we now know as the cowboy tradition beginning in the Middle Ages in Spain. During the 16th century, they brought the tradition with them to the New World through New Spain (later Mexico. Actually, what is usually believed to be an American icon, is in reality a New Hispanic tradition originated in the Central States of Mexico, Jalisco and Michoacan, where the Mexican cowboy would eventually be known as "charro". In the northern parts of Mexico (New Mexico) in its original configuration included most of the territory of the American southwest including Texas. In the early 1600s, Spain, and later Mexico, began offering empresario grants in what would later be Texas to Americans who agreed to become citizens and convert to Catholicism. In 1821 Stephen F. Austin and his East Coast comrades became the first English speaking Mexicans. Following Texas independence in 1836 even more Americans immigrated into Texas and to the empresario ranching areas. Here they were absorbed by the Mexican vaquero culture, borrowing vocabulary and attire from their counterparts.
The buckaroo, also a cowboy of the vaquero tradition, developed in California and bordering territories during the Spanish Colonial period. Buckaroo is the anglicized pronunciation of vaquero and is still a common term in the Great Basin and many areas of California and the Pacific Northwest. Following the Civil War, their culture diffused eastward and northward combining with the earlier cowboy tradition that was following the cattle trails out of Texas northward and westward. Sharing the same base, their traditions became indistinguishable with a few regional differences still remaining.
Over time, the cowboys of the American West developed a culture of their own, a blend of frontier and Victorian values. Such hazardous work in isolated conditions bred a tradition of self-dependence and individualism, exemplified in their songs and poetry.
By the 1890s, the open ranges of the Indian Territory were gone and the large cattle drives from Texas to the railheads in Kansas were over. Smaller cattle drives continued at least into the 1940s, with Arizona cattle driven to the railhead at Magdalena, New Mexico. Meanwhile, ranches multiplied all over the developing West, keeping cowboy employment high, if somewhat more settled.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Western movies popularized the cowboy lifestyle but also formed persistent stereotypes. In pop culture, the cowboy and the gunslinger are often associated with one another.
Much has been written about the racial mix of the cowboys in the West, but cowboys ranked low in the social structure of the period and there are no firm figures. The Cattle on a Thousand Hills by John Ambulo in the March 1887 issue of The Overland Monthly states that cowboys are "... of two classesthose recruited from Texas and other States on the eastern slope; and Mexicans, from the south-western region. ...". Census records bear that out. The cowboy occupation undoubtably appealed to the freedmen following the Civil War. It is estimated that about 15% of all cowboys were of African ancestryranging from about 25% on the trail drives out of Texas, to very few on the northern ranges. Similarly, cowboys of Mexican descent also averaged about 15%, but were more common in Texas and the southwest. American Indians also found employment as cowboys early in the history of the West. Many of the early vaqueros were Indians trained to work for the Spanish missions in caring for the mission herds. Following the dissolution of the reservation system around 1900, many of the Indian trade schools also taught ranching skills to Indian youth.
Cowboy - Paniolo
The Hawaiian cowboy, the paniolo, has as rich a history and tradition as the mainland cowboy. As with the mainland cowboy, the paniolo learned their skills from Mexican vaqueros. Hawaiian King Kamehameha III brought these vaqueros over from California in 1832 to teach the Hawaiians how to handle their cattle. At that time California was still part of Mexico, and Hawaii was known as the Sandwich Islands. The term paniolo is thought to have originated as a Hawaiianized pronunciation of espaol.
Cowboy - Cowboys of other nations
In addition to the original Mexican vaquero, the Mexican charro, the North American cowboy, and the Hawaiian paniolo, the Spanish also exported their horsemanship and knowledge of cattle ranching to the gaucho of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and (with the spelling "gacho") southern Brazil, the llanero of Venezuela, the huaso of Chile, and, indirectly through the Americans, to Australia. In Australia, which has a large ranch (station) culture, cowboys are known as stockmen (with trainee stockmen being known as jackaroos and jillaroos).
In the British Isles and New Zealand, the term cowboy is derogatory, and usually applied to tradesmen whose work is of shoddy and questionable value, e.g., "a cowboy plumber". The term predates the discovery of the New World and originates from the perception that herdsmen are unskilled laborers.
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