Vaqueros were herding cattle on the Mexican plains nearly five hundred years ago. Often they rode barefoot. They wore what clothes they had at hand. In the eyes of their Spanish masters, they were nothing more than poor Indian laborers on horseback. But they were the first of their kind, and they invented the cowboy trade as we know it today.

The native cowboys were called vaqueros (from the Spanish word for cow) and developed roping skills, using braided rawhide reatas (the root word for lariat). Starting in 1769, a chain of 21 Franciscan missions eventually stretched from San Diego to San Francisco, marking the beginning of California’s livestock industry.