Ranching Communities

History and Origins

No exact amount of land delineates whether a property is a ranch. Spanish land-grant ranches, many spread over millions of acres, once covered much of the land between southern Argentina and southern Colorado. Ranches of more than a million acres still exist in Australia and South America. In places where acreages were immense, entire towns were established within the boundaries of a single ranch. More typically, communities serve several ranches. By contrast, hobby ranches require only a few acres, but such ranches emphasize a lifestyle and do not necessarily belong to a self-supporting ranching community.

In the United States, Oceania, Asia, and Africa, European settlers introduced the most frequently raised ranch animals: cattle, sheep, and horses. In South America they began to ranch indigenous species, llamas and alpacas. Ranches that raise deer, bison, ostrich, emu, and other exotic species have proliferated in recent years.

The Influence of Colonization on Community Formation

The types and structures of contemporary ranch communities began to emerge during early stages of colonization in the Americas. Rancheros or estancias, from which ranch derives, were literally the houses of agricultural land owners. The earliest communities, haciendas, were manorial operations where peasants worked domain lands under the jefe's supervision. They predated the development of large herds by other European immigrants in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Ranch came to mean the entire property and livestock. Collectively the herding equivalent of a plantation economy, ranches relied on essentially free land and inexpensive labor. Unlike plantations, where the most productive land was owned by the wealthy, in ranch country the least productive land, albeit great expanses of it, was owned by the elite. Close, long-term, face-to-face interaction typical among the people who traditionally lived in ranch communities often persists in the present.

While sharing many technologies, ranches in each region also developed unique community characteristics. The elitism of the seventeenth-century Spanish nobility was extended into Central and South America. Eighteenth-century American individualism was carried to western North America. The democratic elitism of the nineteenth-century landed British aristocracy and English commerce was imprinted on Australia. Although these patterns of dominance established the prevailing patterns of frontier communities, ethnic and racial minorities, indigenous peoples, and women played valuable roles. Land was plotted and assigned ownership, usually to an elite, and with minimal concerns about equitable treatment of either indigenous inhabitants or other potential owners. Conflicts concerning equitable distribution of these properties have persisted to the present. Reyes Tijarina led an uprising in northern New Mexico to try to reclaim Spanish Land Grant properties as late as the 1970s. Native American claims for land and water rights in the West are currently in Federal and State courts. Legal conflicts between landowners and users claiming rights to public access for hiking and fishing are common throughout the West.

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