1 Becoming Vaquero

Julia Frankenbach Becoming Vaquero: Material Memory and the Power of a Photograph in Reassembling Northern Nevada’s Vaquero Heritage - Introduction - When Carl Fleischhauer hit the shutter release button of his camera on an overcast April day in 1980, he captured much more than he or his colleagues realized. Fleischhauer, and any field attendants who were with him that day, stood on the packed ground of an open-air cow pen in Paradise Valley, a remote cattle ranching vale in northern Nevada. He and his colleagues were part of a team of ethnographers from the American Folklife Center who had arrived in the valley two years earlier to begin a four-year project to document the lives and cultural practices of working cowboys—or “buckaroos,” as the team learned to call local horsemen. That morning, eight buckaroos worked at cattle branding in front of Fleischhauer’s camera. The smell of wood smoke from the branding iron fire would have mingled with the olfactory blitz of burnt hair and trampled sagebrush. The buckaroos would have shouted their messages to one another over the din of bawling cattle. As Myron Smart, a Northern Paiute buckaroo, mounted his stocky bay horse, the others prepared the necessary branding iron, vaccinations, ear tags, and castration knives.1 Smart roped a calf by the front leg and dragged it from the sea of milling hooves. One imagines Fleischhauer’s view of the scene through the camera’s viewfinder, his finger poised on 1 Narrative details for this paragraph derive from my observations of Fleischhauer’s photograph, on which this article focuses. See: Carl Fleischhauer, "Roping, Ninety-Six Ranch,” photograph, April 1980, http://www.loc.gov/ item/ncr000506/ (accessed March 14, 2015). The caption accompanying the photograph names Myron Smart but does not identify him as Northern Paiute Indian. For reference to Smart’s ethnicity, see Howard W. Marshall and Richard E. Ahlborn, Buckaroos in Paradise: Cowboy Life in Northern Nevada (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 13. For details on cattle branding work in Paradise Valley during the early 1980s, see Leslie J. Stewart, “The Division of Labor at Branding,” recorded interview conducted by Howard W. Marshall and William A. Wilson, April 9, 1981, http://www.loc.gov/item/ncr002371/ (accessed March 13, 2015). 1 Figure 1. “Roping, Ninety-Six Ranch,” photograph by Carl Fleischhauer for Paradise Valley Folklife Project Collection, April 1980. the shutter release in tense anticipation of the right moment. What frame would best illustrate the brutal essence of this efficient, unflinching work? Buckaroo Homer Ely, dark and mustached, ran to the calf to bury his hands beneath it, heaving upward to flip it onto its back. In the aggressive intimacy of this moment, human and bovine caught in violent embrace, Fleischhauer’s shutter flashed open and closed. The resulting image has many stories to tell. The one I explore is only distantly related to buckaroo life in 1980. I investigate Fleischhauer’s photograph to illuminate the story of a shifting collective of horseback laborers from Hispanic California who lived and worked in Nevada between 1860 and 2 1930.2 These vaqueros, many of whom were of Hispanic descent and spoke native Californio Spanish, took large responsibility for performing the horseback labor for the open range cattle industry as it expanded eastward and northward from California in the last decades of the nineteenth century. During these years and into the twentieth century, vaqueros passed material traditions and work skills to the Anglo-American and Northern Paiute horsemen with whom they worked. Now gone from the desert landscape east of the Sierra Nevada range, the vaquero presence in northern Nevada lives on through the Hispanic-influenced horse gear, traditions, and work vernacular that characterize workscapes like this one. As Paradise Valley Folklife Project Figure 2. Diffusion of cattle ranching cultures from distinct points of origin in the western United States. This paper focuses on the diffusion of Hispanic California cattle ranching traditions into northern Nevada beginning around 1880. Also note related dispersions into southwestern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington. Image taken from Kniffen, “The Western Cattle Complex,” 182. leader Howard W. Marshall worded it in 1980, “[…] the buckaroo’s world is as it was when the 2 Vaqueros also lived and worked in California, eastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho, and eastern Washington during this time. I focus on their history in northern Nevada to keep my analysis specific to the photograph I analyze. See: Fred Kniffen, “The Western Cattle Complex: Notes on Differentiation and Diffusion” Western Folklore 12 (1953): 181-182; Jim Hoy, “The Buckaroo” in Vaquero, Cowboys, and Buckaroos, ed. Lawrence Clayton et al. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Arnold R. Rojas, The Vaquero (Charlotte: McNally and Loftin, 1964), 26. 3 first Anglo and California Mexican vaqueros moved and worked cattle for the large family ranchers […].”3 The cultural lineage running from Hispanic California to Anglo American Nevada is clear. Although Marshall, a regional specialist, is aware of this cultural genealogy, no scholarly history fully acknowledges the importance of vaqueros to western American history.4 This article, which probes the complicated and contested origins of material culture, is a first step toward such acknowledgment. Fleischhauer’s photograph, though devoid of any actual vaqueros, contains strands of visual evidence that betray a legacy of vaquero expertise, woven like horsehair motifs into the cultural fabric of the image. Though subtle, these clues abound. Together, they suggest that we visualize the 1980 northern Nevada landscape of work in ways that return it to its vaquero beginnings. In Fleischhauer’s photograph, we are inside the histories of seasonal, commutative vaquero livelihoods, spatially fixed white American dwelling, and rich contacts between the two. Visually, we are in the presence of this encounter, its material exchanges, and their cultural aftermaths. I seek these aftermaths, probing for connections between a lively photograph and inert historical memory of a vanished group of workers. I approach this task with careful attention to how my method of perceiving and organizing visual evidence might imply distinctness and certainty where neither, in fact, exists. I have chosen not to divide this analysis into the seemingly self-evident categories of gear, technique, and language, because I strive to encourage thought that blurs these distinctions. 3 Marshall and Ahlborn, Buckaroos in Paradise, xii. 4 For the most thorough historical work on California vaquero life and work to date, see: the several books of Arnold R. Rojas, the only Hispanic vaquero who published a written record of his life and memories; Nora Ethel Ramirez, “The Vaquero and Ranching in the Southwestern United States, 1600-1970” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1978); Lawrence Clayton, Jim Hoy, and Gerald Underwood, eds., Vaqueros, Cowboys, and Buckaroos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Robert N. Smead, Vocabulario Vaquero/Cowboy Talk: A Dictionary of Spanish Terms from the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Ned Martin and Jody Martin, Bit and Spur Makers in the Vaquero Tradition: A Historical Perspective (Nicasio: Hawk Hill Press, 1997). 4 Instead, I begin with an elemental motif—rawhide—before claims to this material transform it into implements that “belong” to one group or another. From this starting point, we may better recognize the processes by which the raw materials of cattle ranching become implements that, in turn, come to represent culture. In addition, by beginning with rawhide, we may ask: how does technique become gear—and gear, language—as different material traditions absorb into one another? How does language work to transform once-borrowed practices into owned ones? And how can this elucidate the processes by which buckaroos embraced and later erased the Hispanic world that preceded them? As is, Fleischhauer’s photograph explicitly tells the buckaroo story of the 1970s and ‘80s while only hinting at the deeper vaquero story. But the buckaroo story cannot be isolated from its Californio vaquero lineage.5 This lineage carries directly into the cow pen of 1980 Paradise Valley, where riders are called “buckaroos,” an etymological derivative of “vaquero,” and where Spanish vocabulary folds generously into the local work vernacular. This buckaroo world is a relatively recent development in northern Nevada. Its cultural roots extend westward and embed deeply into the nineteenth century. As we emplace buckaroo life within the material-cultural history that formed it, these roots will emerge clarified and meaningfully connected to the people and the place we encounter in Fleischhauer’s photograph. As the 1980 Nevada landscape becomes vaquero again, I argue for the importance of visual records in revitalizing this and other missing pieces of western American memory. - Words and Colors: The Meaning(s) of “Vaquero” - 5 For materials on the Spanish etymological origins of the word buckaroo, see F.G. Cassidy, “Another Look at ‘Buckaroo,’” American Speech 53 (1978): 49-51; Smead, Vocabulario Vaquero/Cowboy Talk. 5 Despite many human silences in Paradise Valley, the land’s colors speak. In spring, sagebrush scatters a hundred yellows, golds, and silver-greens across the range. In summer, the bright bodies of horses, painted in red and blue-black, cream,

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