C AREERS WITH HORSEPOWER The Enduring PHOTO: ISTOCK/CG BALDAUF ISTOCK/CG PHOTO:

74 ’s Equine Guide 2018 CANADA’S HORSE INDUSTRY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS The Enduring Cowboy

By Margaret Evans

If you watch a cowboy at work today, forget that it’s 2018, and skip back in time to catch a glimpse of a working cowboy in the 1870s, they would look surprisingly similar. They would be doing basically the same cattle management tasks, be dressed in similar clothing, have similar core skills, and be thriving with the same horsemanship abilities that have made cowboying an enduring career for centuries.

The origin of North America’s cattle industry were not native to North America. But the absence of and the need for mounted cowboys can be these two species was to change with the arrival of credited directly to the Spanish explorers. explorer Christopher Columbus. Due mainly to rapid climate change, the “In 1493, on Columbus’ second voyage to horse, which evolved in North America the Americas, Spanish horses representing and spread over several million years to Equus caballus were brought back to North Asia and Europe, vanished from this continent at the end of the last Ice Age The Boss of the Plains was the first cowboy designed some 11,000 years ago. Cattle, however, specifically for cowboys by John B. .

The cowboy and his reliable, hard-working horse are as much a staple of the cattle industry today as they were 150 years ago.

PHOTO (ABOVE): ISTOCK/JOHNRANDALLALVES • PHOTO (BOSS OF THE PLAINS HAT): WIKIMEDIA/GOLDTRADER CONNECT TO THE HORSE INDUSTRY www.HORSEJournals.com 75 Most cowboys dress in the traditional practical gear, as determined by the season and the weather. Hat, long-sleeve shirt, , waterproof coat or slicker, chaps and boots — each item of clothing serves a practical purpose. PHOTO: ISTOCK/SIMONKR PHOTO:

Cowboys branding cattle at America, first in the Virgin Islands and, in 1519, they were MacLeod, Alberta, 1900-1910. reintroduced on the continent in modern-day Mexico from where they radiated through the Great Plains after escape from their owners or by pilfering,” write Drs. Jay Kirkpatrick and Patricia Fazio, both with The Science and Conservation Center, ZooMontana. Along with the horses came cattle that were a mix of both Indian and European lineages. Managing the cattle goes back to the mid-1500s when the Spanish in Mexico established the very first . Landowners put indigenous peoples on trained horses to manage the stock and taught them how to handle the wild cattle on open rangeland. Cattle continued to be imported into the North American colonies by colonizing European countries and they also entered the southern US from the Spanish possessions in the West Indies and Mexico, then were dispersed by intercolonial trade. By the early 1700s, cattle ranching had radiated north into what would be Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico as well as southward into Argentina. The earliest cattle in Canada were imported for the northern trading posts. While the original plan was to breed them and give trading posts an agricultural backyard, the efforts largely failed and the cattle were slaughtered and consumed. But as the west opened up in the early to mid-1800s with

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