Frontier Cooking: Cowboys

The most colorful arrival on the far frontier was the cowboy, whose heyday lasted from the end of the Civil War until the mid-1880s but whose influence, even decades later, seemed near mythical. Hardworking trail hands, their main occupation was transporting cattle from the range to the slaughterhouses or tending the vast cattle herds that grazed the grasslands on ranches from Canada to the Rio Grande. Longhorns from Texas, descended from cattle brought to Mexico by Spaniards, proliferated, as did the mounted men who herded them.