It was on Spanish ranches in north-eastern Mexico that the skills employed later by the Great Plains cowboy first evolved. There too were developed the cowboy’s distinctive costume and equipment: the broad sombrero, the shaggy leather chaparejos or “chaps,” the high-heeled boots, the spurs, the high-horned forty-pound saddle and the lariat or lasso. But the cowboy’s humor, traditions and folk music were authentically American. Cowboys were a varied breed, including adventurous teenagers, Union and Confederate veterans, Irish immigrants and many blacks. Their duties consisted of driving cattle to pasture and water, branding them at roundups, riding the range to protect them from rustlers and wild animals, and escorting them during the long drive. These tasks required expert horsemanship and skill with the lasso and six-shooter. In dime novels cowboy life seemed romantic, but in reality it was full of hardship, monotony and danger. For low wages the cowboy had to spend long hours in the saddle with only a hard bed in a communal bunk-house to rest in at night. During the long drive, lasting as much as two months, he traveled in a continuous cloud of dust, trying to control hundreds of fractious animals. Little wonder that at journey’s end cowboys often went on the spree, squandering half a year’s wages on the doubtful pleasures of the cattle towns.

On January 24, 1848, a few days before the signing of the peace treaty whereby Mexico ceded California to the U.S, gold was discovered on the Sacramento Valley estate of the Swiss-born frontiersman, John Augustus Sutter. Despite his attempts to keep it secret, the news leaked out and from all over California men flocked to the diggings. By September the news had reached the East and the whole country succumbed to golf fever. Clerks deserted their desks, soldiers their regiments, husbands their families. Within a year some 80,000 “Forty Niners” had poured into California from all over the world, most of them intent on sudden wealth. Many traveled overland by covered wagon, following the trails across the Plains and mountains, at least 5,000 dying from cholera, starvation, exhaustion and Indian attack. Thousands of others chartered vessels around Cape Horn, a voyage of 18,000 miles occupying four to eight months. Still others sought a short cut to the Pacific through the sweltering jungles of the Panama isthmus. It was one of the largest mass migrations in history which, in two years, transformed the sleepy seaside settlement of San Francisco (1847 population approximately 600) into a major seaport and the financial and cultural center of West (1850 population approximately 25,000).