The First Wise Traveler to the West - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 24

shipload of 100,000 hides left South America for Spain. The vaquero rode the grasslands,
and the vocabulary of his subculture embedded itself in New World Spanish: lasso, cor-
ral, chaps, sombrero, pistolero , and hombre . As the cattle-ranching culture moved north-
ward into what became the United States, vaquero became cowboy, and Spanish vocabu-
lary entered the American English language. More significant, the cowboy became Amer-
ica's mythic symbol: the solitary rider on the plains, slow to anger, deadly when aroused, a
straight shooter, defender of the weak, a man of honor, and a man of justice. The cowboy
became America's cultural icon long before Hollywood discovered him and put him on the
screen, but once there, he traveled the world—as an American can discover in remote Ch-
ina and Borneo, where boys rush him in pantomime challenges to a quick-draw shootout!
Figure 2.5. Gaucho
(OSU Special Collections & Archives)
By 1600, horses had made their way north beyond the Rio Grande. Plains Indians
took to the horse gracefully and with alacrity. Warfare on the plains was revolutionized by
the horse; raids and cavalry charges became the new style of war. The buffalo hunt also
changed—less exhausting and less dangerous for the hunter who no longer had to creep on
foot with bow, arrow, and spear to kill his prey. Indians quickly became dependent on their
horses, so much so that they came to believe that the horse had always been with them.
“The Great Father in the sky gave us the horse” was a common refrain of the day.