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Home , Cowboy, Spur, Vaquero

Julia Frankenbach

Becoming : 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 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 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 , the others prepared the necessary branding iron, vaccinations, ear tags, and knives.1 Smart roped a 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 ,” 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: Life in Northern Nevada (Lincoln: University of 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 who lived and worked in Nevada between 1860 and

2

1930.2 These , many of whom were of Hispanic descent and spoke native Californio

Spanish, took large responsibility for performing the horseback labor for the 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 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 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 (Norman: University of Press, 2004); Ned Martin and Jody Martin, and 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 , painted in red and blue-black, cream, orange dun, and steel gray, emerge from a brown landscape. In fall, aspens on the mountain flanks flare yellow, setting off the serpentine tones of the juniper. In winter, the land’s sleeping energies burst from white powder in the plumage of a pheasant, russet and gold bordered in black. In a place of such uncontained vibrancies, what wisdom about land and people can come from a monochromatic view of the past? This land surprises.

“Vaqueros have a thousand names for the color of a horse,” writes vaquero Arnold

Rojas, “each shade or variation having a distinct and definite term.”6 This image—thousands of horses blending shade after shade into one another—is good for thinking through the dilemmas one faces in applying distinct and definite terms to people. Imagine this living spectrum moving over the hills. Now imagine that we take care to recognize not the distinctness of its hues but rather their conflation—the way gradations, once distinct, become confused as they move, merge, and play tricks on the eye. This gray becomes blue when placed next to black. That brown, when inflected with the red of blood bay, is actually yellow dun. The names we choose emerge out of the relativity of our perceptions. Things are not as they seem.

The demands of language complicate this exercise. I confront a photograph—the artifact of an unruly history of things borrowed—and wonder: how is one to write about shifting layers of identity when the very application of words threatens to equate naming with knowing? It is the word, in its authoritative power to separate and equate, that trips me here. To begin, the term vaquero, with its Spanish etymology and gendered ending vowel, implies an exclusively

6 Arnold R. Rojas, California Vaquero (Fresno: Academy Library Guild, 1954), 20. 6

Hispanic, male work force that misrepresents the true social makeup of the vaquero world.

Although most vaqueros who worked in California and Nevada between 1860 and 1930 were indeed male and of Hispanic descent, many who received training in the Californio vaquero tradition were Anglo American, African American, and Native American, and a few were women.7 Here, vaquero is not a category; it is a fluidity—a participation. It flows through the barriers between descriptors for ethnicity and gender. To be vaquero was to join in a rich cultural tradition of work that was always evolving. There are no racial, ethnic, or gendered prerequisites for vaquero identity. Indeed, to acknowledge only those dark-haired riders with ancestral ties to present-day as vaquero is to overlook the fluid way in which vaquero identity moved, inhabiting new territory and travelling from person to person across landscapes of labor, becoming something new with each exchange. In short, I write about vaquero identity as both a profession and a culture, both of which are tied to Hispanic ethnic heritage, but not exclusively so.

In the analysis that follows, I use the word vaquero as a noun and as an adjective, but I am most convinced of its value as the latter. The word’s power lies not in its potential as a category but in its ability to describe the experiences of diverse people in various western spaces.

This flexibility allows us to imagine what it would have meant to become vaquero. As we trace visual clues from Fleischhauer’s photograph, a buckaroo landscape returns to its vaquero origins and memories. In our retelling of Paradise Valley’s history, vaqueros, buckaroos, and everyone in between has left a mark. We might imagine them through time, tending cattle on horses of a thousand colors.8

7 Barbara Ditman, “Buckaroo Style,” Journal of the Shaw Historical Library 25 (2011): 62. 8 My fluid definition of “vaquero” does not necessarily reflect the sentiments of actual vaqueros, who may have considered the term inseparably bound to Hispanic identity. Because I write about vaquero identity as it gave rise to 7

- Vectors of Work and Memory -

In a nostalgic sketch, vaquero Arnold Rojas recalls a significant exchange that occurred during one of cattle baron Henry Miller’s inspection tours in the early twentieth century.

According to Rojas, Miller met trail boss Antonio Maria Lopez’s herd and crew of vaqueros in

Mendota, California to conduct routine inspections. Upon inquiring if any of the group’s horses had developed sore backs, Miller learned that Lopez’s horse had suffered most. Miller picked up

Lopez’s from its spot on the ground and threw it into the camp fire, suggesting that Lopez borrow the youngest crewmember’s saddle in replacement. Three days later, upon arriving at a place called Canal Ranch, Lopez found waiting for him “a brand new, full flower stamped

Visalia saddle, a gift from Henry Miller. On the tapaderos9 was carved HH, the cattle king’s favorite brand.”10 The best to be had at the time, the gift saddle signaled the baron’s regard for his trail boss while subtly staking a claim to his future labor and loyalty. But more importantly, this story suggests the Visalia saddle’s renown among working vaqueros and their employers around the turn of the twentieth century.

Four decades earlier, in 1868, San Salvadoran saddle-maker Juan Martarel had opened a saddle shop in Visalia, California with his Sonoran business partner Ricardo Mattlé. At the time, the residents of Visalia had little reason to believe that their hamlet would soon become a prime retail destination for working vaqueros throughout California. Saddle shops were not a new phenomenon in Visalia. In fact, the town already boasted a well-established and regionally a new material-cultural tradition with non-Hispanic practitioners, I write about the mutability of identity in a way that real vaqueros may not have recognized or condoned. I do not try to speak for real vaqueros in this article. But neither do I wish to imply that their thoughts on self-identity are anything but extremely valuable and of ultimate relevance. As is, my research for this article is not yet sufficient to justify such an interpretive venture. 9 Tapaderos are long, coverings that hang from the (the wooden supports into which a rider inserts his or her feet), protecting a rider’s feet from abrasive brush and useful for slapping at inattentive horses and cattle. They are distinct markers of the vaquero riding tradition. See Hoy, “The Buckaroo,” 176; Marshall and Ahlborn, Buckaroos in Paradise, 15. 10 Rojas, California Vaquero, 117-18. 8 influential saddlery when Martarel and Mattlé arrived. But the craftsmen brought with them a newly designed saddle the comfort and practicality of which would quickly outpace its competition. Within five years of business, the newly eminent Visalia Stock Saddle had transformed the upstart cow town into a professional mecca for a deeply rooted group of

California wage workers.11

Deeply-rooted, they were. For nearly one hundred years, cattle-droving vaqueros had tended the San Joachin Valley’s growing herds in response to regional demands for and overseas demands for tallow and treated hides.12 In the late 1700s and early 1800s, vaqueros performed their highly specialized work for elite Hispanic landowners on extensive granted to them by the Spanish crown.13 As the valley underwent transitions from Spanish colonial to Mexican sovereignty in 1821 and finally to United States annexation in 1848, the men and women who tended its cattle on horseback performed work that reflected a continuing sense of Hispanic professional heritage. Equipment, in particular, distinguished native Californio vaqueros from the immigrant laborers among whom they increasingly worked in the second half of the nineteenth century.14 Of the many pieces of equipment vital to the vaquero’s craft, not one was as practically and personally significant as the saddle.

Martarel’s and Mattlé’s new saddle featured an elevated fork that pitched upward into an elongate saddle horn, improving the horn’s capacity to hold tools, such as rawhide riatas, securely. The cantle, or rearward curb of the saddle’s seat, became newly prominent as well, providing hind stability to a rider’s lower back and seat during sudden acceleration. Martarel and

11 Lee M. Rice and Glenn R. Vernam, They Saddled (Cambridge: Cornell Maritime Press, 1975), 53-55. 12 Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching : Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of Press, 1993), 167; Clara M. Love, “History of the Cattle Industry in the Southwest,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 19 (1916): 373. 13 Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers, 159. 14 Kniffen, “The Western Cattle Complex,” 184 9

Mattlé dressed this base with various leather accoutrements and added trademark rounded skirts and a single, centered cinch to wrap around the horse’s and secure the saddle.15 By the

1870s, hoof prints and wagon tracks led into the upstart cow town from all directions as vaqueros sought the comfortable and practical Visalia stock saddle that would become uniquely representative of Californio professional identity.

Figure 3. A prototype of a Visalia Stock Saddle from the 1890s. Notice the saddle’s elongate horn, elevated fork, rounded skirts, single cinch (it hides behind the ), and flower-stamped tapaderos. Image taken from Rice and Vernam, They Saddled the West, 54.

From its selling point in Visalia, the new stock saddle rode through the California landscape with the vectors of vaquero work. As sturdy tools that often outlived their original owners, they remain scattered in the landscape of labor as trace markers of vaquero mobility over the western landscape. These markers take variable forms, as no one Visalia saddle was exactly

15 Rice and Vernam, They Saddled the West, 53-55. 10 like another. It is also likely that independent saddle makers borrowed select traits of the Visalia saddle to produce hybrid forms also used by working vaqueros. This structural variability is useful, for while it is usually impossible to ascertain from a photograph whether or not a saddle yields the insignia of the Visalia Stock Saddle Company, it is possible to identify structural similarities that point to equivalence with or descendance from the original Visalia blueprint. Just as there are no prescribed traits for vaquero identity, no such criteria exist for the vaquero’s saddle. In short, in tracing vaquero geography, one should not look for the Visalia saddle itself but for the physical qualities it embodied.

Where did the Visalia saddle travel? Arnold Rojas beautifully articulates one aspect of its mobility in an anecdote about vaquero-led cattle drives into Nevada: “Perfecto Cuen […], Miller wagon boss, told me he made drives into eastern Nevada […]. These migrations of cattle account for the slick Visalia saddle-trees […] one finds in use on Nevada and Oregon while other outfits around them will be using different types of equipment.”16 Here we have the kernel of the history that inhabits Fleischhauer’s photograph. Rojas tells of vaquero travel into Nevada and suggests a period of work that exerted a lasting material-cultural influence on the place. His two sentences are extraordinary in their rare written acknowledgement of this history by an actual vaquero. Oral histories collected by the Humboldt County Library in the 1990s allow us to track vaquero movements in paths that intersect even more precisely with the place in Fleischhauer’s photograph. Four interviews in particular trace the vaquero presence in concentric rings of influence—from the regional scale, to Humboldt County, to Paradise Valley itself, and, finally, to the Ninety-Six Ranch where Carl Fleischhauer took his photograph.

In a 1992 interview, Waltzy Elliott, born in 1905, reflected on his time spent buckarooing

16 Rojas, California Vaquero, 27. 11 near the Nevada border in southeastern Oregon for the cattle company Miller & Lux. He recalled that he began by driving teams of buckaroos in bed wagons from ranch to ranch at age twelve and remembers the cow boss as a highly accomplished vaquero: “You heard of Juan Redon? […]

Oh, he was one of the great cowboys of Miller & Lux days […]. […] it was said that he could throw a hundred foot rope, rawhide riata […]. Oh yeh, they were all, they were Mexican people.”17 In a similar interview in 1998, Domingo Aranguena spoke of the presence of Hispanic cowboys in Humboldt County during the late 1920s and early ‘30s. He remembers an exchange and then comments on the merit of the vaqueros as riders:

I remember one time I was out on the Owyhee Desert [about 30 miles northeast of Paradise Valley] and this Mexican was there, pretty famous nice guy, and I traded with him. I kind of liked the he had and he liked the one I had, so I traded him. He was a nice guy. [The Mexican riders] were good cowboys.18 In a 1994 interview, buckaroo Tom Pedroli, born forty miles south of Paradise Valley in 1913, spoke of his memories of Miller & Lux buckaroo crews in Paradise Valley in the mid-1920s. He remembers the horseman who had the best horses: “[…] there was a Mexican there by the name of Martinez, and he had a couple of nice black horses and he had an awful pretty white horse.

And I don’t know how I rated, but he let me ride this white horse one time out to help them, and

I was way up in the sky then.”19 Pedroli remembers vaqueros with whom he rode in terms of their excellently trained horses, an indicator of the strong horsemanship skills vaqueros brought with them into northern Nevada.

Finally, the words of Leslie Stewart, owner and grandson of the founder of the Ninety-

17 Waltzy Elliot, transcribed interview by Linda Dufurrena for Humboldt County Library Oral History Project (Winnemucca: Cooperative Libraries Automated Network, 1992), 12. 18 Domingo Aranguena and Kathleen Barinaga Aranguena, transcribed interview by Linda Dufurrena for the Humboldt County Library Oral History Project (Winnemucca: Cooperative Libraries Automated Network, 1998), 38. 19 Tom Pedroli, transcribed interview by Linda Dufurrena for the Humboldt County Library Oral History Project (Winnemucca: Cooperative Libraries Automated Network, 1994), 4. 12

Six Ranch, confirm the sustained presence of vaqueros on the very landscape we see in

Fleischhauer’s photograph. In a 1980 letter to Paradise Valley Folklife Project leader Howard W.

Marshall, Stewart recalled the important role played by vaqueros on the ranch:

Even in this area in the [1920s and ‘30s] a large percentage of the riders were Mexicans or California Mexicans, especially on the larger outfits. One of my early and fondest memories, is of the Circle A round-up crew annually coming up through our meadows on the way to the fall round-up. They had a Chuck Wagon drawn by six , a “Caviada” of many horses and 8 or more Mexican riders. They would generally stop here to get some eggs, potatoes, and other fresh garden produce that might be available and especially as much fresh homemade bread that my Mother might have for them.20 Thirteen years later, in a 1993 interview with the Humboldt County Oral History Program,

Stewart revealed that the employees his father hired on the Ninety-Six Ranch in the 1920s and

‘30s were Hispanic. He spoke respectfully about their influence on the region:

I’ve always felt for these old time boys, or those old hay men, some were kind of hopeless ne’er-do-wells, but they do deserve a lot of credit because those were the guys that put up the hay and they […] done the buckarooing and they never had any credit or consideration, but they did do a lot to develop this country.21 Stewart describes the shifting, seasonal nature of the labor:

The haying crew was pretty much transient labor. A few of the steady men were the off men and foremen. But they were pretty much transient and they were people that would come back year after year. You don’t have that type of help anymore […] [They were mostly from] California.22 Stewart elaborates further, offering details about individuals who stood out in his father’s work crews:

[…] you was always moving horses back and forth because some of them would get sick or get crippled or get sore shoulders and you’d have to take replacements to the various hay camps. So it was one man’s job to take care of the work horses in the haying season. I always helped him. Old Butch Wilson was the guy that done it for years and years […] he lived here a long time. He was a Mexican.23

20 Marshall and Ahlborn, Buckaroos in Paradise, 15. 21 Leslie J. Stewart, transcribed interview by Linda Dufurrena for the Humboldt County Library Oral History Project (Winnemucca: Cooperative Libraries Automated Network, 1993), 27. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 28. 13

The memories of Elliott, Aranguena, and Pedroli confirm that vaqueros performed a significant portion of the horseback labor essential to early cattle ranching in northern Nevada. Stewart’s words, more intimately connected to vaquero lifeways, confirm that vaquero labor lies at the heart of his home’s history.

These oral histories are invaluable resources for piecing together vaquero history in and near Humboldt County. But however precious, such historical resources are rare. They do not exist in sufficient distribution to allow for an historical reconstruction of vaquero mobility and influence across the intermountain West. It is at this impasse that we must return to the messiness of material memory. If we were not so lucky to have the historical resources of the

Humboldt County Library Oral History Project, how else might we have known that vaqueros were important to this area? The Visalia stock saddle, among other clues, suggests an answer to this question.

- Rawhide -

As the photographer’s camera clicked and snapped on the edge of his periphery, Myron

Smart twisted in his saddle to look over his shoulder. His right arm coursed with the memory of throwing the riata, which had looped and drawn tightly around the calf’s front leg. With his left clutching his horse’s and the spare length of riata, he had wound the rope’s working end once around his saddle horn and then wheeled his horse away from the calf. As the rope became taut, it tightened around the saddle horn and pulled the calf to its feet. Smart would have felt the friction of the rope in his right hand as it chafed around the saddle horn in answer to the calf’s weight. With his eyes locked on the calf behind his horse, he deftly pulled and fed the angry, chafing loop as it dragged the calf away from the herd. The saddle would have squeaked and groaned from the tension to its frame. When Fleischhauer’s shutter clicked, Smart’s eyes 14 were still trained on the calf, the living product that lies at the heart of this labor. In

Fleischhauer’s photograph, the calf hovers upside down, literally suspended in the grip of the buckaroos’ work.

Many relationships suggest themselves in this photograph. As we take time to absorb its lines, its tensions, its groupings, and its movements, rich symbolisms come to the surface.

Smart’s riata bisects the image. The riata is a vector—a taut visual link between cow and human, between the product of industry and the human labor that develops it. The energies between them radiate along a length of rawhide—a material that simultaneously derives from and creates the relationship. In horizontal space, the rope is a barrier, dividing the milling herd of cows from the

Washington, D.C. photographer. It reinforces the separation between living animals that experience fear and concern, and the urban consumer who unemotionally ingests their meat as food. 24 The image also invokes the endurance of horseback traditions in the face of mechanization of ranch labor, as Smart’s horse pulls the line taut while walking squarely between the tire imprints of an automobile. In the far distance, a beacon of poplar trees breaks the line of the horizon. In Paradise Valley, early ranchers planted Lomardy poplars in rows to serve as windbreaks for the main homestead and to signify the location of the main house and barns to other faraway ranches.25 In a visual sense, then, the ranch headquarters presides over this scene of work. It is both distant and central, a graphical testament to the independent but still-subordinate relationship of the buckaroos to their employer.

The focus of the work is clear. All eyes in the photograph—human and bovine—fix on the soon-to-be-branded calf. Even as Smart manages tousled lengths of horsehair and

24 This separation is made all the more poignant and ironic by our Washington, D.C. photographer’s last name. “Fleischhauer” is a German surname that translates to “meat cutter.” It implies descendance from a family of butchers. 25 Howard W. Marshall, Paradise Valley, Nevada: The People and Buildings of an American Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 37. 15 rawhide riata, all pulling and chafing and shifting in his hands, his eyes ignore his handiwork. He focuses not on the method but on the method’s end. Though complicated and confusing to the untrained eye, the method is executed in an efficient and understated manner. It occurs quietly, in the periphery of Smart’s vision. Following these body-language cues, the photographer makes the calf the focus of his photograph, consigning Smart’s hand movements to the far right side of the photograph and cropping the horse’s head and neck from the frame. But if we redirect attention to Smart’s handicraft, important historical clues make their way to the surface. Buried in Smart’s muscle memory is a roping method that betrays a deeper kind of memory: Paradise

Valley’s latent material-cultural memory of vaquero labor and expertise.

Six months before he took his photograph of the Ninety-Six Ranch, Carl Fleischhauer filmed the ranch’s owner, Leslie Stewart, in an interview about roping technique. “In this country,” explained Stewart, “we use a loose rope and dally the rope around the horn. You always wanna take your turns from the bottom of the horn towards the top of the horn, and you wanna keep your fingers out of the turns. You see a good roper, he never looks down, he always looks out watchin’ what’s goin’ on out there—not what’s goin’ on on his saddle horn.”26 The method that Stewart describes—dallying the rope around the horn—stands in stark contrast to that of the Anglo-Texan cowboy culture of the and some parts of the Southwest. In the professional cowboy tradition as it evolved in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the correct roping method involves either tying the rope “hard and fast” to the saddle horn once an animal had been snared or working with a rope that is permanently attached to the horn.27 This method evolved in response to the Texan horseperson’s use of ropes made from maguey or hemp

26 Margaret Purser and Carl Fleischhauer, “Holding a Calf with a Dally,” 16-mm film of Theodore Brown dallying his rope with Leslie Stewart narrating, October 16, 1979, http://www.loc.gov/item/ncr002381/ (accessed April 14, 2015). 27 Hoy, “The Buckaroo,” 177-178. 16 fiber, readily available materials that, when made into rope, could withstand the sudden jolts of large animals hitting their ends.28 The hard-and-fast method developed as a less technically involved way of roping that required simply lassoing an animal and then keeping clear of it. As the Texan saying goes, “That means that whatever you catch is yours, and you're its.”29 The hard-and-fast tradition continued to make sense after the cowboy’s adoption of extra-strong nylon ropes in the mid-twentieth century.30

The dallying method, on the other hand, developed in early nineteenth-century southern

California in the hands of vaqueros who made their riatas from rawhide. Because rawhide is likely to snap when subjected to jerking tension, vaqueros did not tie their ropes but instead looped them so they could slide around the saddle horn and yield in response to the lurching protests of large animals. The method was known as dale vuelta, or “give it a turn.”31 Vaqueros in Paradise Valley during the early twentieth century shared the dale vuelta method with their fellow horsemen of Anglo and Native descent. As the vaquero presence began to wane in the

1930s, the vaquero’s dale method became the buckaroo’s dally method.32

Returning to our photograph, the loop of rawhide around Myron Smart’s saddle horn suggests a legacy of vaquero expertise33 in Paradise Valley. The image of Smart’s dale vuelta/dallying is a rich visual site for thinking through the mutability of professional horseback

28 Kniffen, “The Western Cattle Complex,” 185; Janeen Wilder, “Reins, Riggings, and Reatas: The Outfit of the Buckaroo,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104 (2003): 384. 29 Brett Topping, “The Great Dally Debate,” Folklife Center News 6 (1983): 16. 30 Lawrence Clayton, “Cowboys and Buckaroos: Two Faces of the Same Figure,” West Texas Historical Association Yearbook 64 (1988): 111. 31 Howard W. Marshall, “Chinks, Dallies, Sougan, and Grass Beef: A Cow Camp Lexicon,” Quarterly 13 (1981): 66. 32 Ibid.; Topping, “The Great Dally Debate,” 16. 33 I borrow the phrase “legacy of expertise” from Ibid., 60; Howard W. Marshall, “Vaqueros,” in “Buckaroo: Views of a Western Way of Life,” online essay introducing Paradise Valley Folklife Project Collection, 1978-1982 (AFC 1991/021), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/collections/ranching-culture-in- northern-nevada-from-1945-to-1982/articles-and-essays/buckaroo-views-of-a-western-way-of-life/vaqueros/ (accessed April 16, 2015). 17 identities in the intermountain West. As it traveled through space, a professional technique absorbed into new regions and assumed new practitioners. Embracing dale vuelta, Anglo and

Native horsepersons transformed a borrowed practice into an owned one by participating in the linguistic conversion of dale to dally. This linguistic conversion reveals one way in which the self-distinction of the buckaroo world required erasure of the vaquero world that preceded and gave rise to it.

Professional techniques require professional gear. When Juan Martarel and Ricardo

Mattlé created the Visalia stock saddle in the 1860s, they understood the importance of crafting a rig that would maximize the vaquero’s ability to practice dale vuelta with efficiency and ease. As a result, one of their changes involved elongating the saddle horn to make plenty of room for turns of the riata.34 As we know, they also added an elevated “fork.” This word describes the front part of the saddle that supports the horn, “forking” down and around the horse’s shoulders.

The Visalia saddle’s elevated fork pushed the horn up closer to the vaquero’s hands so that practicing dale vuelta became easier. In keeping with the Californio vaquero material tradition that was already in place, Martarel and Mattlé added rounded skirts and a single, centered cinch to wrap around the horse’s girth and secure the saddle. The single cinch, in particular, is a telltale sign of the vaquero riding tradition, for it offers an easy contrast with the double-cinched saddle of the Great Plains cowboy who features in most Hollywood Western films. The two cinches of the Great Plains saddle typically dropped from opposite ends to firmly anchor the entire saddle to the horse. This unique rigging developed in tandem with the Plains cowboy’s hard-and-fast roping style. The back cinch helped considerably in keeping the saddle from slipping when a roped animal hit the end of the line.35 The smoother dale vuelta method of Alta California did not

34 Wilder, “Reins, Riggings, and Reatas,” 382. 35 Ibid. 18 require a second cinch in this way, and so Martarel and Mattlé complied with tradition in incorporating a single, centered cinch.

Martarel and Mattlé also incorporated the vaquero’s trademark tapaderos, or leather coverings that drape over the stirrups into which a rider inserts his or her feet. Often two feet or longer, tapaderos protected the rider’s feet from abrasive brush and snow and could also be used to swat at unruly cattle.36 In a 1978 interview with Howard Marshall and Linda Gastañaga in which he explained his favorite saddle, Leslie Stewart referred to his stirrups, complete with tapaderos, as “Visalia stirrups.”37 Though tapaderos existed on many that predated the

Visalia brand, Stewart’s comment reveals the way the Visalia brand absorbed and came to represent all elements of vaquero saddlery. Stewart was quick to emphasize the tapaderos’ most

36Clayton, “Cowboys and Buckaroos,” 111; Hoy, “The Buckaroo,” 176; Marshall and Ahlborn, Buckaroos in Paradise, 15; Daniel F. Rubin de la Borbolla, “Origins of Mexican Horsemanship and Saddlery,” in Man Made Mobile: Early Saddles of Western , ed. Richard E. Ahlborn (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), 35. 37 Howard W. Marshall and Linda Gastañaga, "Stirrups and Taps,” ¾-inch video recording of Richard Ahlborn interviewing Leslie Stewart, July 25, 1978, http://www.loc.gov/item/ncr002401/ (accessed April 14, 2015). 19

Figure 4. On the left: a prototype of a Visalia Stock Saddle from the 1890s. On the right: prototype of a contemporaneous Great Plains Saddle. Notice the Visalia’s elongate horn, elevated fork, rounded skirts, single cinch (hiding behind the stirrup leathers), and flower-stamped tapaderos. Images taken from Rice and Vernam, They Saddled the West, 54, 124.

important function: “[…] another advantage of havin’ tapaderos is that if your horse should fall with you or buck you off or something, your foot’s not so apt to go through the stirrup and you don’t get hung up in the stirrup. I think probably that’s the greatest thing a cowboy worries about—if he does worry—is his foot gettin’ hung in the stirrup […], that old horse starts runnin’ off with you and you’re dragging […]. More than one guy didn’t survive that ride.”38

Because Smart was sitting in his saddle when Fleischhauer photographed him, his body obscures a good deal of its structure in the image. This makes a full comparison with the Visalia

38 Ibid. 20 blueprint a little tricky. A second photograph helps. Figure 5 features another of Fleischhauer’s photographs from branding day in April 1980. It pictures a dismounted Smart as he poses beside his horse and saddle. We can see, by placing this image beside the Visalia blueprint, that Smart’s saddle is a near replica of the Visalia stock saddle of the late nineteenth century. From the tapaderos and the rounded skirts, to the single cinch gently securing a frame that uniquely accommodates dale vuelta, the two rigs are nearly identical. Nearly one hundred years of history separate them, yet their relation is clear, suggesting the durability of material memory through decades of cultural erasure. Smart’s saddle is no longer just a piece of equipment effective for buckaroo work in 1980. It is much more than this: a clear descendent of the vaquero tradition and a material marker of vaquero influence in this workscape. In Fleischhauer’s photograph, this

Figure 5. On the left: “Branding Costume,” photograph by Carl Fleischhauer for Paradise Valley Folklife Project Collection, April 1980. This image of a dismounted Myron Smart provides a perfect view of his saddle, which very closely resembles the Visalia stock saddle (pictured on the right) produced in the late nineteenth century (right-hand image taken from Rice and Vernam, They Saddled the West, 54).

history of influence takes center stage in the material form of a saddle, literally the fulcrum of the 21 photograph’s tension. It is the horn around which the demands of the cattle industry turn. It is its glue, binding human to horse, and horse to cow. Paradise Valley’s vaquero past makes these relationships possible in the buckaroo present. More and more, this buckaroo moment in 1980 deepens in time and space as its features become vaquero.

Although Smart’s dally method tells us a great deal about vaquero material culture, the rawhide riata itself has even more to reveal. Its length, in particular, is significant. The rope’s trajectory, angled away from the photographer, produces a shortening effect that makes it difficult to guess its exact length. However, if we think about the riata in terms of coils, we can more effectively compare it to others in western North America. Smart holds four large loops of the riata in his left hand. A fifth open coil connects to the saddle horn. From here, the riata shoots backward in a stretched length that we may estimate would curl into another six to eight loose coils. This brings us to an estimate of eleven to thirteen coils. On branding day, when the work was over, Smart would have coiled his riata into even tighter loops than we see in the photograph. When placed over the saddle horn for storage, the coiled riata would have barely brushed past the lower skirt of his saddle. It follows that, when properly coiled, Smart’s riata likely curled into fifteen to twenty tight loops.

It did not take the Texas horseperson as much time to coil his or her rope for storage, for

Great Plains ropes are distinctly shorter than the buckaroo riatas used in California and Nevada.

The images in Figure 6 help to clarify this visually. The left-hand image shows a typical Great

Plains cowboy riata—or lariat, as ropes are called in that region of the West.39 The lariat is visibly short, forming only six coils. In contrast, the buckaroo saddle in the right-hand image sports a riata that forms about fifteen coils. This difference is a result of the fact that Great Plains

39 The Euro-American term “lariat” derives from the vaquero phrase “la riata.” See Smead, Vocabulario Vaquero/Cowboy Talk, 111-12. 22 ropes are usually thirty to thirty-five feet in length, while buckaroo ropes are at least sixty feet long, sometimes more than seventy feet in length.40 In a 1983 transcribed conversation for the

American Folklife Center’s quarterly publication American Folklife News, Leslie Stewart elaborated the purpose of the buckaroo’s long riata: “Now, when I say you have a fifty-five or sixty foot rope, this don't mean you can throw out there sixty feet and catch anything. This means you can throw about as far as these fellows [the cowboys] do, but you've got all this extra rope to take your dallies on.”41 In other words, buckaroos require longer riatas in order to perform dale

Figure 6. Two riatas for comparison. The left-hand image shows a Great Plains cowboy riata (image taken from Clayton, “The Cowboy,” 122), while the right-hand image shows a Great Basin buckaroo riata (image taken from Hoy, “The Buckaroo,” 171). Note that the buckaroo’s riata is significantly longer. vuelta effectively. Dale vuelta inhabits the buckaroo’s material world in multiple ways. If we had not found a photograph of Smart’s roping technique, we might still have gathered from a picture

40 Clayton, “The Cowboy,” 95; Underwood, “The Vaquero,” 45. 41 Topping, “The Great Dally Debate,” 16. 23 of his long riata that he was a dally roper—steward of the vaquero’s tool and method and modifier of his language.

Stewart’s phrase for the buckaroo’s riata—“dally rope”—perfectly encapsulates the taut, intertwined relationships here between equipment, methodology, and language. The buckaroos’ adopted “dally” method required specific equipment: a Visalia-type saddle that could accommodate the dallies of a riata, and a riata the exceptional length of which, in turn, could distinguish it as a “dally rope.” Vaquero methodology and gear absorbed into Paradise Valley as new Euro-American land owners, lacking cattle-herding traditions of their own, readily learned and retained the techniques of their seasonal vaquero employees.42 As practices and materials changed hands, words evolved. Through a loopy history of material-cultural borrowing and renaming, the early nineteenth-century Spanish term dale vuelta gave rise to the late twentieth- century term dally rope. This and other linguistic changes helped to transform once-borrowed methods and objects into owned ones. This transformation was a central part of the process by which the vaquero landscape of seasonal work became the buckaroo’s landscape of proprietorship and permanent dwelling. By becoming buckaroo, Euro- and Native American horsepeople simultaneously embraced and erased the vaquero world that preceded them. In

Fleischhauer’s photograph, we encounter material stories that enliven this history. Together, they braid into a larger story—a multiethnic saga in which categories of origin and ownership become inscrutable, entangled as they are in rawhide and the quicksand nature of identity in the North

American West.

- Smoke Rising from Saddle Horns: Last Connections -

On September 27, 1997, Mexican vaquero José “Pepe” Díaz Sánchez spoke with

42 Kniffen, “The Western Cattle Complex,” 184; Wilder, “Reins, Riggings, and Reatas,” 371-72. 24 ranching historian Lawrence Clayton about his memories growing up on a ranch in ,

Mexico. Born in 1919, Sánchez recalled the visceral details of vaquero life in the early twentieth century. “Often,” writes Lawrence, “[Sánchez] has seen the smoke rise from around the saddle horn as the rope plays out with the charging animal on the other end. In fact most of the saddles in [Sánchez’s] tack room showed signs of the heat generated by the friction of these ropes around the base of the saddle horn.”43 Smoke rising from the saddle horn is a good image for remembering the connections drawn in this article. Smoke emanates from the fervent interactions between a rawhide rope, a leather saddle, and a frictional method for engaging the two. As it rose on an overcast April day in 1980, it would have cast the same smell into the northern Nevada air that existed in similar pens in southern California 150 years earlier. It would have mingled with the smoke of the branding iron as it scorched living cowhide.

Leslie Stewart’s words remain with us. “Even in this area in the early days,” he wrote in

1980, “a large percentage of the riders were Mexicans or California Mexicans.”44 Preserved by the Humboldt County Library, Stewart’s memories confirm for us that the material cultural clues in Fleischhauer’s photograph followed on the heels of an actual, documented vaquero presence.

But however valuable as sources of affirmation, similar oral histories do not exist in sufficient distribution to fully allow for historical reconstruction of vaquero mobility. This is where we must turn to material memory. If we did not have access to the historical resources of the

Humboldt County Library, how else might we have known that vaqueros were important to

Paradise Valley? Dally roping, rawhide riatas, and the Visalia stock saddle sit like beacons at the far end of this question.

43 Underwood, “The Vaquero,” 45. 44 Marshall and Ahlborn, Buckaroos in Paradise, 15. 25

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