Lasso

A lasso or lazo, also called reata or la reata in Mexico, and in the United States riata or lariat, is a loop of rope designed as a restraint to be thrown around a target and tightened when pulled. It is a well-known tool of the Mexican and South American cowboys, which was then adopted from the Mexicans by the cowboys of the United States. The word is also a verb; to lasso is to throw the loop of rope around something.

Etymology

The word lasso seems to have begun to be used as an English word in the early nineteenth century. It may have originated from the Castilian word lazo, which is first attested in the thirteenth century in the sense 'noose, snare', and derives in turn from classical Latin laqueus.
The rope or lasso used to restrain cattle is also called Reata or La Reata in Mexico, which was Anglicized to “Lariat” or “Riata” in the United States. In Mexico reata is basically used as a synonym for rope, a colloquialism, specifically the one used for capturing cattle and other livestock. But in its original Castilian Spanish definition, reata means a group of horses, mules or donkeys tied together to go in a straight line or the leading mule of three that draw a cart and, in nautical settings, a rope for binding masts and spars.
Other names are used in various countries where the Lasso is used. In Argentina, Chile and Venezuela is simply called “El Lazo” or “El Lazo Criollo”. In Colombia the equipment is called “Rejo”, in Costa Rica “Coyunda”, in Ecuador “Beta”, and Peru “Guasca”. Meanwhile in Colombia, the term Reata or Riata means: hardened, firm, rigid, severe; it also refers to a belt for pants.

History

Cattle roping from horseback originated in Hispanic America between the late 16th and early 17th centuries, although the precise origin is unknown, and developed throughout the next 200 years. Before the development of roping, the original tool of the early cowherds of the Americas was the desjarretadera, a lance with a crescent moon shaped blade at one of its ends used to incapacitate cattle by cutting their hocks or hamstrings. Known in English as a “hocking knife”, “desjarretadera” comes from the Spanish prefix “des-“ meaning “to remove”, and “jarrete” meaning “hock” ; it was also known as a ”lanza de media luna” or simply "luna".
A vaquero on horseback, carrying the desjarretadera, would gallop at full speed behind a wild bull and, positioning himself slightly to one side, would hit the back, the hock, of one of its legs, slicing through the flesh and cutting the nerves, thus, incapacitating the bull. The vaquero would then dismount and finish the bull off by stabbing it at the base of its neck, and would then skin it and remove the tallow, leaving the rest to rot. This activity was done in the early stages of cattle ranching in the Americas when the only thing valuable were the hides and tallow. The desjarretadera would later on be used as a weapon used primarily by militias.
The oldest mention of anything close to “roping from horseback” in the Americas was not about cattle but about wild horses. In Friar Diego de Ocaña’s travels through the province of Paraguay in 1601, he wrote about the great quantities of wild horses that inhabited the area and how the natives would capture them on horseback, bareback, by a rudimentary roping method utilizing a rope of which one end was tied behind the horse’s brazuelos while the other end was made into a noose fastened to a pole, Ocaña writes: Neither Ocaña nor other writers before or after him ever mentioned this method being used to rope cattle in that region. The method sounds similar to the Mongolian method of capturing horses using the “uurga” with the exception that the rope was fastened to the horse’s body. If this method was independently developed here or brought from the outside is unknown since there is no evidence whatsoever of its existence in Spain before the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas.
A similar method was also used by the Jarocho of “Tierra-Caliente” Veracruz. Jarocho were vaqueros of the Veracruz region of mulato and African descent. Their saddle did not have a horn since a garrocha was their primary tool when working with cattle but rather a heavy, crude saddle, with long corazas, without tapaderas on the stirrups, and was overloaded with ornaments. Their reata or lazo was called peal, and was tied to their horse's tail, and was made of twisted, not braided, rawhide, dried in the sun and softened with tallow.
The first documented evidence of cattle roping from horseback would not appear until 1643, in the book —Exercicios de la Gineta— a book about jineta horsemanship by Gregorio de Tapia y Salcedo a Caballero of the Order of Santiago. In it he describes how two Black slaves from the Americas performed an extraordinary feat in a bullring in Madrid during a bullfight. They entered on horseback each carrying in his hand a pole of 13 palmos, that had one end of a rope made into a noose tied around it while the other end was fastened to their horse’s tail. As the bull was let out, the Black horsemen approached it and one placed the noose around the bull’s horns. He goes on to say that even though they sometimes failed at “roping” the bull they kept trying until they succeeded. Salcedo says that this peculiar feat caused great sensation among the people and the Royal Court indicating it was completely unknown in Spain, and continues on to say:
The precise origin of these two Black slaves who performed this extraordinary feat is unknown as Salcedo never went into detail just stating they were from the Americas. As such, we can never exactly pinpoint where such a method originated and we can also never know how wide spread it was.
Andrew Sluyter, a social scientist and professor at the Louisiana State University, argues that roping cattle from horseback originated in Mexico. He asserts that certain ranching laws enacted by the Mexican Mesta, the government association regulating ranching, targeted Black, Mulatto Indian and Mestizo vaqueros disproportionately with harsher punishments for violating them, including corporal punishment. Due to the indiscriminate killing of female cattle and, as a result, the subsequent decline of the herds, the great set of laws passed by the Mesta in January 1574 included a law that ordered that no Blacks, Mulattos, Mestizos or Indians who are or had been employed as vaqueros were allowed to own or keep desjarretaderas and garrochas, under penalty of 20 gold pesos, a 10 month salary or more for the average vaquero. For those that were unable to pay, the punishment was at least 100 lashes in public. Black and mulatto slaves fared worst since they received no salary, so the automatic punishment was lashing. According to Sluyter, black and mulatto vaqueros developed roping from horseback as an alternative way for capturing cattle, circumventing the law.
Sluyter also argues that the invention of the saddle-horn also points to Mexico as the origin of roping from horseback. According to him, the saddle with a horn for roping was the invention of these Black and Mulatto vaqueros, whose African elite ancestors knew about horns on saddles, not for roping or even herding cattle, but for hanging bags. The West African saddles, says Sluyter, look strikingly similar to the saddles developed in Mexico. The fact that there is no evidence whatsoever of the existence of horned saddles in Spain nor in any other European country, points to an African-Mexican origin. Another possible clue is that many Mexican herdsmen in the 18th century would fastened their lasso on their horses' tails, as those Black horsemen in Madrid did, a method that would continue into the 19th century in Veracruz by the Jarochos, the vaqueros of that region, who were mostly of Black descent. Although the Llaneros of Venezuela also use this method, and continue to do so, they never developed the intricate form of roping that Mexican herdsmen did.
By the 18th century, roping from horseback for the purpose of herding and capturing cattle was widely spread throughout Hispanic-America, from the Pampas in South America to the northern frontier of New Spain. The cumbersome pole once used was discarded, they were now roping more dexterously by throwing the lasso. Nonetheless, it was still very rudimentary as the herdsmen were roping in conjunction with garrochas and desjarretaderas which were still being used to drive and incapacitate cattle, respectively. One vaquero would lasso and hold a bull while another one with a desjarretadera would perform the necessary tasks. Jesuit priest Rafael Landivar vividly described in epic verse how bull hunts were performed in the Province of Mexico in 1782, stating that vaqueros would armed themselves with different weapons, some with garrochas, others with desjarretaderas and most with lassos fastened to their horses’ tails.
Also, a great deal of the roping was done on foot, including in Mexico where most of the well known roping techniques, like team roping hadn’t been invented yet. If a bull had to be captured and laid down, one vaquero had to first rope it, either by the horns or head, while another one, on foot, had to grab its tail and pull it down. Ignaz Pfefferkorn, a Jesuit missionary who visited Sonora in the 1760’s explained how the capturing and slaughtering of cattle was done at the time with roping, garrochas and tailing:
From the rudimentary roping of the 18th century, various distinct roping styles would emerge: Charro, Gaucho, Huaso, Llanero, Chagra and Montubio and Qorilazo.

Charro: a more intricate or “refined” form of roping that implements and executes distinct loops in different situations, either for work or for simple showmanship, and it’s supported by the use of the saddle-horn to which the lasso is secured. For this reason all roping can be done on horseback.
Gaucho: a straightforward yet effective form of roping that emphasizes speed over everything else, with no concern for the well-being of the animal. Due to the lack of a saddle-horn, the lasso is secured on the cinch underneath the saddle. This provides less stability and for this reason a large amount of the roping has to be done on foot.
Huaso: similar to Gaucho roping, simple yet effective, limited by the lack of a saddle-horn.
Llanero: an extremely simple and tedious form of roping, very slow, described by Scottish writer and journalist Cunninghame Graham as “not lassoing but fishing” with the rope.They’re also limited by the fact that their lassos are fastened to their horses’ tails, even though their saddles had, historically, horns but were just ornamental.
Chagra: Similar to both Gaucho and Huaso roping as they implement the same methods, even though they have saddle-horns they do a great deal of their roping on foot as they never developed and don’t use the methods used in Mexico for roping the legs such as piales and manganas from horseback.
Qorilazo: Similar to the Chagra, they have saddle-horns but do a lot of their roping from horseback in conjunction with roping on foot.