Ranching in Spanish Texas

Abstract

IT IS FAIRLY well-known among twentieth-century Americans that the open-range cattle industry originated in Spanish Texas more than a century before its romantic heyday after the Civil War. Yet little specific information has been available about this aspect of the cowboy complex. The usual impression today is that while present cattle-handling methods have vague roots in the Spanish past, their development was uniquely an AngloAmerican adaptation of vaquero practices. Almost unknown is the fact that this industry was widespread in Spanish Texas, and that cattle and horses were the major export from the province during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Present-day ignorance about the magnitude of ranching in Spanish Texas is primarily a result of the paucity of records kept about the industry. Cattle raising apparently was so commonplace that the Spaniards generally overlooked it when they compiled their otherwise elaborate statistics and made their endless reports about life in the colony. Beginning in 1778, however, tax-hungry government officials turned their attention to the large herds of livestock roaming the plains of Texas, necessitating the keeping of records-records that allow a tantalizing glimpse of this ranching activity. Alonso de Leon and Domingo Teran de los Rios probably drove cattle with them to East Texas in 1690 and 1691 respectively, but it was the expedition headed by the Marquis de Aguayo in 1721 which first brought livestock to the province in significant numbers. This herd consisted of 400 sheep and 300 cattle from Nuevo Leon.' Sheep increased very slowly in the new environment because the area was thickly wooded and abounded in predatory animals, and because many of them were lost owing to a shortage of trained herders. In the brush country of South Texas, however, cattle thrived and became a primary source of food for the early Texans. Livestock also constituted the principal wealth of the missions.2