The modern gold-and-rhinestone, big-money televised sport of rodeo owes just about everything—its traditions, its attitudes, its fashions—to rough-and-tumble Mexican cowboys of the early 1800s. These ranch hands, known as vaqueros, perfected the roping and riding skills we see in today’s competitions. They also innovated rodeo fashion: leather boots, chaps, big hats and the rest. And it was in Mexico that the sport got its name, derived from the Spanish verb rodear: to encircle or round up.
These vaqueros were itinerant freelancers, owning only what they could carry on horseback and working on large ranches in the regions now known as Durango, Coahuila and Chihuahua—and well into what is now the United States. Among them you would largely find mestizo people (of mixed Native American and Spanish ancestry), Black people, Indigenous people and criollos (Spaniards born in North America). What they shared was the lifestyle and the sporting desire to determine who was best.
During downtime between drives or ranching gigs, vaqueros gathered to see who could ride the most fractious horse, or who was the surest hand with a rope. These informal gatherings evolved into competitions between different ranches that drew ever-larger crowds and increasingly took on a carnival atmosphere—the sounds of animals, the roars of the crowd, the odor of sweat and horseflesh. With no official rules, the entire enterprise was a free-for-all, establishing rodeo as the province of bold, individualistic outsiders. As Jerald Underwood, a historian of the American West, wrote in the 2001 book Vaqueros, Cowboys, and Buckaroos: “This space and the horse culture allowed men the opportunity to achieve the ‘Centaur Wish,’ to be one with the horse, to live the life of the gods.”
By the time the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845 and claimed a large chunk of Mexico along with it, the vaqueros were seeing their culture absorbed into the cowboy lifestyle of the American West. “It is a beautiful sight,” U.S. Army Capt. George W. Hughes, stationed in San Antonio in 1846, said after watching a vaquero perform. “He rides well and fearlessly, and throws the lasso with unerring aim...chasing down some refractory animal that he seldom fails to catch.” Freedmen also took up the sport, and in the decades after the Civil War, it's estimated that as many as one in four American cowboys was Black. Perhaps the most prominent was Nat Love, born into slavery in Tennessee in 1854; freed at the end of the Civil War, Love moved west and grew into an impressive cattle-driver. His rodeo career began when he happened upon a competition in Deadwood, in what is now South Dakota, on July 4, 1876. Love entered the fray and took first place in six events, kicking off a 15-year career that made him a legend across the country.