North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion and Differentiation (Histories of the American Frontier)

This award-winning book offers an invaluable synthesis that is essential reading for anyone interested in the cattle-ranching traditions in North America. In this revisionist study, historical geographer Jordan reinterprets cattle ranching in the Old World and New, challenging the notion that western cattle culture derived principally from Texas. Jordan begins by looking at Old World stock-raising patterns of the British, Spanish, and North Africans and traces how these practices merged in the Caribbean and were brought into Mexico. He also shows how in the eighteenth and nineteenth century cattle-raising found its way to the Eastern Seaboard, the South and Midwest of the present United States, and into California.