cowboy
- Key People:
- Trevor Brazile
- Bill Pickett
- Tom R. Ferguson
- Related Topics:
- livestock farming
- Black cowboys
- gaucho
- paniolo
- llanero
cowboy, in the western United States, a horseman skilled at handling cattle, an indispensable laborer in the cattle industry of the trans-Mississippi west, and a romantic figure in American folklore. Pioneers from the United States encountered Mexican vaqueros (Spanish, literally, “cowboys”; English “buckaroos”) on ranches in Texas about 1820, and soon adopted their masterful skills and equipment—the use of lariat, saddle, spurs, and branding iron. But cattle were only a small part of the economy of Texas until after the Civil War. The development of a profitable market for beef in northern cities after 1865 prompted many Texans, including many formerly enslaved African Americans, to go into cattle raising. (Though they have been almost entirely excluded from the mythology of the American cowboy, it is estimated that Black cowboys accounted for nearly a quarter of all cattle workers in the nascent American West during the latter half of the 19th century.) By the late 1800s, the lucrative cattle industry had spread across the Great Plains from Texas to Canada and westward to the Rocky Mountains.
Cattle could be managed most efficiently in herds of about 2,500 head, with 8 to 12 cowboys for each herd. In the autumn the cowboys rounded up the cattle, including ownerless ones from the open range, and branded those not already branded; in the winter they kept watch over the herd; and in the spring they selected the cattle ready for market and drove them to the nearest railroad town, often hundreds of miles away. There the cattle were sold to eastern buyers, and the cowboys enjoyed a brief period of relaxation before returning home to begin the routine of another year.
As the agricultural frontier moved west, the open range was transformed into farms, and by 1890 the cattlemen had been forced to settle on ranches with barbed-wire boundaries and usually close to a railroad. The legendary era of the cowboys was over, but in dime novels and other fiction of the late 19th and 20th centuries they attained immortality as the taciturn, self-reliant, and masterful hero of the West. Their popularity peaked in the middle of the 20th century, when western films, television shows, and novels found success in depicting the daring exploits of cowboys.