Yucatan Cowboy (Boys of Summer Book 2)

Jill Penrod

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The West also contains much of the Native American population in the U. The Western United States has a higher sex ratio more males than females than any other region in the United States. Because the tide of development had not yet reached most of the West when conservation became a national issue, agencies of the federal government own and manage vast areas of land.

Forest Service within the Agriculture Department. National parks are reserved for recreational activities such as fishing , camping , hiking , and boating , but other government lands also allow commercial activities like ranching , logging , and mining. In recent years, some local residents who earn their livelihoods on federal land have come into conflict with the land's managers, who are required to keep land use within environmentally acceptable limits.

The largest city in the region is Los Angeles , located on the West Coast.

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Along the Pacific Ocean coast lie the Coast Ranges , which, while not approaching the scale of the Rocky Mountains , are formidable nevertheless. They collect a large part of the airborne moisture moving in from the ocean. Beyond the valleys lie the country boys in Sierra Nevada in the south and the Cascade Range in the north. The Cascades are also volcanic. Helens , a volcano in the Cascades erupted explosively in These mountain ranges see heavy precipitation, capturing most of the moisture that remains after the Coast Ranges, and creating a rain shadow to the east forming vast stretches of arid land.

These dry areas encompass much of Nevada , Utah , and Arizona. The Mojave Desert and Sonoran Desert along with other deserts are found here.

Beyond the deserts lie the Rocky Mountains. In the north, they run almost immediately east of the Cascade Range , so that the desert region is only a few miles wide by the time one reaches the Canada—US border. The Rockies are hundreds of miles kilometers wide, and run uninterrupted from New Mexico to Alaska.

East of the Rocky Mountains is the Great Plains, the western portions for example, the eastern half of Colorado of which are generally considered to be part of the western United States. The West has several long rivers that empty into the Pacific Ocean , while the eastern rivers run into the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River forms the easternmost possible boundary for the West today. The Missouri River , a tributary of the Mississippi , flows from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains eastward across the Great Plains , a vast grassy plateau, before sloping gradually down to the forests and hence to the Mississippi.

The Colorado River is a major source of water in the Southwest and many dams, such as the Hoover Dam , form reservoirs along it. So much water is drawn for drinking water throughout the West and irrigation in California that in most years, water from the Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of California. Most of the public land held by the U.

Public lands account for 25 to 75 percent of the total land area in these states. As a generalization , the climate of the West can be described as semi-arid. Also, the climate of the West is quite unstable, as areas that are normally wet can be very dry for years and vice versa. The seasonal temperatures vary greatly throughout the West.

Low elevations on the West Coast have warm summers and mild winters with little to no snow. The desert southwest has very hot summers and mild winters.

While the mountains in the southwest receive generally large amounts of snow. The Inland Northwest has a continental climate of warm to hot summers and cold to bitter cold winters. Annual rainfall is greater in the eastern portions, gradually tapering off until reaching the Pacific Coast where it increases again. In fact, the greatest annual rainfall in the United States falls in the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest.

Drought is much more common in the West than the rest of the United States. The driest place recorded in the U. Violent thunderstorms occur east of the Rockies.

Tornadoes occur every spring on the southern plains, with the most common and most destructive centered on Tornado Alley , which covers eastern portions of the West, Texas to North Dakota , and all states in between and to the east. Agriculture varies depending on rainfall, irrigation, soil, elevation, and temperature extremes.

The arid regions generally support only livestock grazing, chiefly beef cattle. The wheat belt extends from Texas through The Dakotas , producing most of the wheat and soybeans in the U. Irrigation in the Southwest allows the growing of great quantities of fruits, nuts, and vegetables as well as grain, hay, and flowers. Texas is a major cattle and sheep raising area, as well as the nation's largest producer of cotton.

Washington is famous for its apples, and Idaho for its potatoes. California and Arizona are major producers of citrus crops, although growing metropolitan sprawl is absorbing much of this land. Local and state government officials started to understand, after several surveys made during the latter part of the 19th century, that only action by the federal government could provide water resources needed to support the development of the West [ citation needed ]. Starting in , Congress passed a series of acts authorizing the establishment of the United States Bureau of Reclamation to oversee water development projects in seventeen western states.

During the first half of the 20th century, dams and irrigation projects provided water for rapid agricultural growth throughout the West and brought prosperity for several states, where agriculture had previously only been subsistence level. The population growth, mostly in the Southwest states of New Mexico , Utah , Colorado , Arizona , and Nevada , has strained water and power resources, with water diverted from agricultural uses to major population centers, such as the Las Vegas Valley and Los Angeles.

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Plains make up much of the eastern portion of the West, underlain with sedimentary rock from the Upper Paleozoic , Mesozoic , and Cenozoic eras. The Rocky Mountains expose igneous and metamorphic rock both from the Precambrian and from the Phanerozoic eon. The Inter-mountain States and Pacific Northwest have huge expanses of volcanic rock from the Cenozoic era. Salt flats and salt lakes reveal a time when the great inland seas covered much of what is now the West. The Pacific states are the most geologically active areas in the United States.

Earthquakes cause damage every few to several years in California. While the Pacific states are the most volcanically active areas, extinct volcanoes and lava flows are found throughout most of the West. The Western United States has been populated by Native Americans since at least 11, years ago, when the first Paleo-Indians arrived. Pre-Columbian trade routes to kingdoms and empires such as the Mound Builders existed in places such as Yellowstone National Park since around AD.

Major settlement of the western territories developed rapidly in the s, largely through the Oregon Trail and the California Gold Rush of California experienced such a rapid growth in a few short months that it was admitted to statehood in without the normal transitory phase of becoming an official territory. One of the largest migrations in American history occurred in the s as the Latter Day Saints left the Midwest to build a theocracy in Utah. Both Omaha, Nebraska and St. Louis, Missouri laid claim to the title, "Gateway to the West" during this period.

Louis built itself upon the vast fur trade in the West before its settlement. The s were marked by political battles over the expansion of slavery into the western territories, issues leading to the Civil War. The history of the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has acquired a cultural mythos in the literature and cinema of the United States.

The image of the cowboy , the homesteader , and westward expansion took real events and transmuted them into a myth of the west which has shaped much of American popular culture since the late 19th century. Writers as diverse as Bret Harte and Zane Grey celebrated or derided cowboy culture, while artists such as Frederic Remington created western art as a method of recording the expansion into the west. The American cinema , in particular, created the genre of the western movie , which, in many cases, use the West as a metaphor for the virtue of self-reliance and an American ethos.

The contrast between the romanticism of culture about the West and the actuality of the history of the westward expansion has been a theme of late 20th and early 21st century scholarship about the West. Cowboy culture has become embedded in the American experience as a common cultural touchstone, and modern forms as diverse as country and western music have celebrated the sense of isolation and independence of spirit inspired by the frontiersmen on virgin land.

The advent of the automobile enabled the average American to tour the West.

Western United States

Western businessmen promoted Route 66 as a means to bring tourism and industry to the West. In the s, representatives from all the western states built the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center to showcase western culture and greet travelers from the East. During the latter half of the 20th century, several transcontinental interstate highways crossed the West bringing more trade and tourists from the East.

Oil boom towns in Texas and Oklahoma rivaled the old mining camps for their rawness and wealth. The Dust Bowl forced children of the original homesteaders even further west. The movies became America's chief entertainment source featuring western fiction, later the community of Hollywood in Los Angeles became the headquarters of the mass media such as radio and television production. California has emerged as the most populous state and one of the top 10 economies in the world. Four more metropolitan areas of San Bernardino - Riverside , San Diego , Denver , Phoenix , and Seattle have over a million residents, while the three fastest growing metro areas were the Salt Lake City metropolitan area , the Las Vegas metropolitan area ; and the Portland metropolitan area.

Although there has been segregation , along with accusations of racial profiling and police brutality towards minorities due to issues such as illegal immigration and a racial shift i. White flight and now black flight in neighborhood demographics, sometimes leading to racially based riots i. The state of Utah has a Mormon majority estimated at In remote areas there are settlements of Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians.

Facing both the Pacific Ocean and the Mexican border, the West has been shaped by a variety of ethnic groups. Hawaii is the only state in the union in which Asian Americans outnumber white American residents.

Asians from many countries have settled in California and other coastal states in several waves of immigration since the 19th century, contributing to the Gold Rush , the building of the transcontinental railroad, agriculture, and more recently, high technology. The border states— California , Arizona , New Mexico , and Texas —and other southwestern states such as Colorado , Utah , and Nevada all have large Hispanic populations, and the many Spanish place names attest to their history as former Spanish and Mexican territories. Mexican-Americans have also had a growing population in Northwestern states of Oregon and Washington , as well as the southern states of Texas and Oklahoma.

Alaska —the northernmost state in the Union—is a vast land of few people, many of them native, and of great stretches of wilderness, protected in national parks and wildlife refuges. Hawaii's location makes it a major gateway between the United States and Asia , as well as a center for tourism. In the Pacific Coast states, the wide areas filled with small towns, farms, and forests are supplemented by a few big port cities which have evolved into world centers for the media and technology industries.

The origins of the vaquero tradition come from Spain , beginning with the hacienda system of medieval Spain. This style of cattle ranching spread throughout much of the Iberian peninsula and later, was imported to the Americas. Both regions possessed a dry climate with sparse grass, and thus large herds of cattle required vast amounts of land in order to obtain sufficient forage. The need to cover distances greater than a person on foot could manage gave rise to the development of the horseback-mounted vaquero.

Various aspects of the Spanish equestrian tradition can be traced back to Arabic rule in Spain , including Moorish elements such as the use of Oriental-type horses , the jineta riding style characterized by a shorter stirrup , solid-treed saddle and use of spurs , [12] the heavy noseband or hackamore , [13] Arabic: During the 16th century, the Conquistadors and other Spanish settlers brought their cattle-raising traditions as well as both horses and domesticated cattle to the Americas , starting with their arrival in what today is Mexico and Florida.

In turn, the land and people of the Americas also saw dramatic changes due to Spanish influence. The arrival of horses in the Americas was particularly significant, as equines had been extinct there since the end of the prehistoric ice age. However, horses quickly multiplied in America and became crucial to the success of the Spanish and later settlers from other nations. The earliest horses were originally of Andalusian , Barb and Arabian ancestry, [16] but a number of uniquely American horse breeds developed in North and South America through selective breeding and by natural selection of animals that escaped to the wild and became feral.

The Mustang and other colonial horse breeds are now called "wild", but in reality are feral horses —descendants of domesticated animals. Most vaqueros were men of mestizo and Native American origin while most of the hacendados ranch owners were ethnically Spanish. As English -speaking traders and settlers expanded westward , English and Spanish traditions, language and culture merged to some degree. Before the Mexican—American War in , New England merchants who traveled by ship to California encountered both hacendados and vaqueros , trading manufactured goods for the hides and tallow produced from vast cattle ranches.

American traders along what later became known as the Santa Fe Trail had similar contacts with vaquero life. Starting with these early encounters, the lifestyle and language of the vaquero began a transformation which merged with English cultural traditions and produced what became known in American culture as the "cowboy".

They caught the horses that roamed the Great Plains and the San Joaquin Valley of California, and later in the Great Basin , from the 18th century to the early 20th century. Distinct regional traditions arose in the United States, particularly in Texas and California, distinguished by local culture, geography and historical patterns of settlement.

The "buckaroo" or "California" tradition, most closely resemblied that of the original vaquero, while the "Texas" tradition melded some Spanish technique with methods from the eastern states, creating separate and unique styles indigenous to the region. The Spanish or Mexican vaquero who worked with young, untrained horses, arrived in the s and flourished in California and bordering territories during the Spanish Colonial period.

The California vaquero or buckaroo, unlike the Texas cowboy, was considered a highly skilled worker, who usually stayed on the same ranch where he was born or had grown up. He generally married and raised a family. Thus, a horse- and livestock-handling culture remained in California and the Pacific Northwest that retained a stronger direct Spanish influence than that of Texas. Cowboys of this tradition were dubbed buckaroos by English-speaking settlers.

The words buckaroo and vaquero are still used on occasion in the Great Basin , parts of California and, less often, in the Pacific Northwest. Elsewhere, the term "cowboy" is more common. The Texas tradition arose from a combination of cultural influences, as well as the need to adapt to the geography and climate of west Texas and, later, the need to conduct long cattle drives to get animals to market.

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In the early s, the Spanish Crown, and later, independent Mexico , offered empresario grants in what would later be Texas to non-citizens, such as settlers from the United States. In , Stephen F. Following Texas independence in , even more Americans immigrated into the empresario ranching areas of Texas. Here the settlers were strongly influenced by the Mexican vaquero culture, borrowing vocabulary and attire from their counterparts, but also retaining some of the livestock-handling traditions and culture of the Eastern United States and Great Britain.

Following the American Civil War , vaquero culture diffused eastward and northward, combining with the cow herding traditions of the eastern United States that evolved as settlers moved west.

Other influences developed out of Texas as cattle trails were created to meet up with the railroad lines of Kansas and Nebraska , in addition to expanding ranching opportunities in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Front , east of the Continental Divide. The Hawaiian cowboy, the paniolo , is also a direct descendant of the vaquero of California and Mexico. Paniolo, like cowboys on the mainland of North America, learned their skills from Mexican vaqueros.

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