A COWBOY (slang cowhand and cowpuncher) is a farmhand on a ranch where cattle graze over large areas. Traditionally, his main job was to look after herds of cattle and he did this riding horseback.
A WRANGLER is a cowboy who only tends the horses used by the cowboys.
A COWPOKE was the hired hand who prodded cattle with long poles to load them onto railroad cars for shipping. He was not necessarily a cowboy at all.
HERDER/RANCHER During the late part of the 19th century, some lawless gangs rustled cows in the Great Plains. One famous gang who operated near Tombstone was even called the Cowboys. To separate themselves from these outlaws, many law-abiding cowboys preferred to call themselves herders or ranchers.
Cowboys have a special place in American history as the people who opened up the final western frontier. In 2005, the United States Senate declared the fourth Saturday of July as “National Day of the American Cowboy”.
Today most people live in cities and have little idea of what life is like for a cowboy. What they think of cowboys is often as a result of having watched ‘Western’ movies or read novels. They wanted to make out the lone cowboy to be a 19th century form of medieval knight on his charger, saving damsels in distress, while other cowboys were often made out as the bad men.
So what were cowboys like, why is what we know mostly myth, and what do they do today? To find out all of this we need to go way back into history, to the time when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The vaqueros (pronounced bak-air-o, note the b at the start) is a horse-mounted herder of livestock. The name comes from the Spanish word for cow, which is vaca (pronounced baka). The word buckaroo, is still used in the far west of the United States. It is a corruption of vaquero.
Spain has many dry and dusty areas like Mexico and western America. When the Spanish conquered Mexico they found that their horse-herding tradition was well suited to their new colonies, and as the Spanish colonial lands spread to other places, such as Texas and California, so the herding tradition spread with them.
When European-Americans came to Texas and California, they often worked for Spanish ranch-owners and so picked up the skills from them.
