Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 48 W I L D W ES T W O R DS W I L D W ES T W O R DS with CHRYSTI THE WORDSMITH RODEO AND OTHER SPANISH LEGACIES DEPARTMENT HERITAGE HERITAGE HERITAGE ough rodeo and its typical style of horseman- ship is unique to western North America, many of its customs reflect an Old World Spanish heritage. e traditional cowboy skills of bronc and bull rid- ing, calf roping, and steer wrestling can be traced to the Spaniards who brought their horses and cattle to the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Spanish culture expanded throughout Mexico and into the American Southwest, its customs of horse and cattle management were adopted and adapted by indigenous people and settlers of all stripes. Spanish, the language of horsemanship and its accoutre- ments, accompanied the expansion. e term RODEO comes from the Spanish verb rodear, "go around, surround." Before rodeo was a public demonstration of cowboy skills, as it is today, it signified a time and place for the impound- ment — the "surrounding" — of cattle. In 1830, British adventurer to Venezuela Richard L. Vowell recorded this observation in his journal: In Autumn, the rodeo takes place... is word literally signifies, the surrounding, and im- plies the operation of collecting and driving together all the cattle of the estancia for the purpose of taking account of them, and branding such as have not yet received the proprietor's mark. e season of driving the cattle into the rodeo gradually became the English round-up, when cattle are surrounded to be branded, separated, and doctored. Novelist omas M. Reid, traveling through Mexico in 1847, noted this of a Southwestern cattle outfit: "At this time of year the cowmen have what is called the round up, when the calves are branded and the fat beasts selected." By the 1880s, cowboys in the frontier towns of Pecos, Texas and Peyson, Arizona, were roping cattle and riding broncs for bragging rights. ese early contests of equestrian skill, held publicly, were the precursors of the modern North American rodeo. e American participants adopted the Spanish name for it by at least 1884. Spanish has left its linguistic footprints across the American West. e untamed horses ridden in rodeo contests are BRONCS. e word derives from a Spanish adjective bronco, "rough, rude." is, in turn comes from a noun meaning "a knot in wood," a thing requiring planing to render it smooth, just as a bronc is tamed and ridden into compliance. e small, tough, rangy mustangs, mixed-breed descendants of the original Spanish horses, got their Anglicized name from meste- ngo, "animal that strays." A halter with reins and a noseband instead of a bit is a hackamore, the English version of the Spanish jaquima ("headstall"). Chaparral, the name for dense thickets of evergreen shrubs, is a loan word from the Spanish chaparro, a species of oak native to Spain. e cowboy's armor against the thorny American plant was originally chaparreras, "protection from chaparral." Chaps still protect Western riders from rough vegetation, barbed wire, and fence scrapes. Rodeo Girls: "Say Hello" linedance www.distinctlymontana.com/rodeo162 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL

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