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Reviews
Trappings of the Great Basin Buckaroo
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By C.J. Hadley
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University of Nevada Press, Reno, 2003. Photographs. 216 pages. $29.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Robert Boyd
High Desert Museum, Bend, Oregon
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| C.J. Hadley's Trappings of the Great Basin Buckaroo is an engaging and important overview of the lives and work of a group of artisans who create the gear that defines the culture and customs of contemporary buckaroos. Buckaroo is the term used for cowboys in the high desert, which stretches from the eastern slope of California's Sierra Nevada, across the basin and range country of northern Nevada, and into the rimrock and sagebrush landscape of southeastern Oregon and Idaho's Owyhee country. The term evolved from vaquero, the name given to Hispanic horsemen in early California. Between 1769 and 1848, vaqueros developed special gear and customs for training horses and working cattle. These vaqueros carried their ways to the Great Basin when they came north with the trail drives of Anglo American stockmen in the late 1860s and 1870s. They were role models for the next generation, who anglicized the term vaquero into buckaroo by the early twentieth century. |
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Across two centuries, vaqueros and buckaroos made their gear from materials at hand: rawhide and leather, coin silver, horsehair, and wool. Their silver-inlaid spade bits and spurs, twisted horsehair mecates, rawhide bosals and reatas, and other finely crafted pieces of gear were the distinctive and practical tools of their calling. |
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C.J. Hadley has chosen carefully the people whose stories she tells. The twenty-one crafts-people profiled in Trappings of the Great Basin Buckaroo represent some of the region's best artisans. Each has a story of how he or she came to be a master at producing finely crafted and beautiful gear. |
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Frankie Dougal learned to twist horsehair mecates, used as reins in training colts with a hackamore, from her mother, Clara Drummond Whitby. Clara learned the skill from a vaquero named Jesus who worked in Idaho's Owyhee River country, where the Drummonds had a remote ranch. Frankie's daughter Helen Hammond grew up buckarooing, as did most girls on family ranches, and has continued the family tradition of working with horsehair. |
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Scott Brown came to buckaroo country via Kansas and a stint as a saddle-maker in Texas. Hearing tales of the Great Basin's buckaroo country, he came to work at Cappriolas in Elko, Nevada. Not content to make saddles for a life he had never lived, Brown buckarooed for several ranches in northeastern Nevada before returning to saddle-making full time. |
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Hadley offers a well-balanced blend of photographs of beautiful and functional gear and of the artisans at home and at work, selections of verse from the buckaroos' world, and profiles of the artisans. Aside from describing their work, many of these craftspeople explain their deep personal attachment to the landscape and their rangeland way of life. Most of the Great Basin is a piece of the twenty-first-century West far beyond the interstates and fast-growing urban centers of Bend, Boise, or Reno. It is a working environment where being a top hand on horseback still matters. A buckaroo's gear is a statement that he or she values traditions of training and using horses that began before the United States was a nation. |
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Trappings of the Great Basin Buckaroo has the potential for finding a place on a diverse array of bookshelves. It validates what rangeland families and communities already know, that buckaroo culture is an important part of their identity and sets them apart from Great Plains cowboys and southwestern cowpunchers. Museum staff, archeologists, and anthropologists will find Trappings a valuable reference for its descriptions of the gear and how it is used. Others, from urban dwellers to environmental advocates, might gain some new perspectives through the voices of these men and women still working at making a life out on the Great Basin's sagebrush ocean. |
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