Ranch packet

On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This article is ranch packet a type of land use and method of raising livestock.

For information on people who handle cattle on ranches, see Cowboy. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. View of the Grant-Kohrs Ranch near Deer Lodge, Montana. Ranches generally consist of large areas, but may be of nearly any size. In the western United States, many ranches are a combination of privately owned land supplemented by grazing leases on land under the control of the federal Bureau of Land Management or the United States Forest Service. Ranches that cater exclusively to tourists are called guest ranches or, colloquially, “dude ranches”.

Most working ranches do not cater to guests, though they may allow private hunters or outfitters onto their property to hunt native wildlife. The person who owns and manages the operation of a ranch is usually called a rancher, but the terms cattleman, stockgrower, or stockman are also sometimes used. If this individual in charge of overall management is an employee of the actual owner, the term foreman or ranch foreman is used. A rancher who primarily raises young stock sometimes is called a cow-calf operator or a cow-calf man.

The people who are employees of the rancher and involved in handling livestock are called a number of terms, including cowhand, ranch hand, and cowboy. People exclusively involved with handling horses are sometimes called wranglers. Ranching and the cowboy tradition originated in Spain, out of the necessity to handle large herds of grazing animals on dry land from horseback. When the Conquistadors came to the Americas in the 16th century, followed by settlers, they brought their cattle and cattle-raising techniques with them. Cattle ranching flourished in Spanish Florida during the 17th century.

The word “Rancho” in Mexico developed different definitions from what it originally meant in Spain. Mateo José de Arteaga defined “Ranchos” as “extensions of land where few people live with few assets and sheltering in huts. By the nineteenth century, the words Rancho and Estancia as used in Mexico had been consolidated to define a unit of land that made up a Hacienda or any rural area or the countryside in general. Domingo Revilla in 1844, in his text “Los Rancheros”, defined a Rancho or Estancia as “a unit of land which comprises a Hacienda, where cattle and horses are raised, and which is in the care of a Caporal who is the captain of the other cowboys. Thus the term Rancho in Mexican Spanish became a unit of land that makes up a hacienda where cattle is raised and where people live in farmhouses.

The people that live and work in those Ranchos managing cattle and horses are called Rancheros. The historic 101 Ranch in Oklahoma showing the ranchhouse, corrals, and out-buildings. As settlers from the United States moved west, they brought cattle breeds developed on the east coast and in Europe along with them, and adapted their management to the drier lands of the west by borrowing key elements of the Spanish vaquero culture. An 1898 photochrom of a round-up in or near the town of Cimarron, Colorado.