Hackamore, Two Rein, Bridle: How the Vaqueros Made a Horse
The California vaqueros took years to finish a horse, moving it by stages from the hackamore to the spade bit. The stage in the middle gave this publication its name.
The Dorrance brothers and Ray Hunt did not come from nowhere. They grew up and worked inside a tradition of stock horsemanship that reached the Great Basin from California, and California from Mexico and Spain. Its riders were the vaqueros, and their way of making a horse is the root system under much of what this publication covers.
A tradition that took its time
The vaquero worked cattle on open range, on horseback, with a rawhide rope. He needed a horse that could be guided with one hand and the lightest of signals while the other hand handled the rope. The Californios, on ranchos where time and horses were both plentiful, made such horses slowly. A finished bridle horse took years.
The hackamore
A young horse was started in the hackamore: a braided rawhide noseband, the bosal, with a long hair rope, the mecate, tied to form the reins and a lead. It has no bit. It works on the nose and jaw, and it lets a horse learn to stop, turn and carry itself without anything in a mouth that is still changing teeth.
The two rein
When the horse was ready, it was not simply moved into a bit. It was put in the two rein. The horse wore a thin bosal, the bosalito, under a bridle, and the rider carried both sets of reins at once. At first almost everything was said through the hackamore reins the horse already understood, and the bit merely hung there to be carried. Over months the rider shifted, a little at a time, from one set of reins to the other.
It is a stage built entirely on the idea that the horse should never be surprised: the new thing is introduced beside the old thing and takes over only as it is understood.
Straight up in the bridle
The finished horse went straight up in the bridle, usually carrying a spade bit. The spade looks severe and in rough hands it is. In the tradition it was a signal bit, meant to be carried by a horse so well prepared that the rider's hand hardly moved. It was the reward at the end of the education, never the means of it.
The words they left
English kept the tradition's vocabulary and wore it smooth. Buckaroo is vaquero. Hackamore is jaquima. Lariat is la reata. The mecate became, in cowboy English, the McCarty. Many of the riders who use those words every day do not know they are speaking Spanish.
The tradition was written down in English in the twentieth century by horsemen who feared it would be lost, among them Ed Connell, whose Hackamore Reinsman appeared in 1952. It was carried north and east by the buckaroos of the Great Basin, the world the Dorrances were born into.
Why this publication is called The Two Rein
Because that middle stage is the best picture we know of how a craft is handed on. For a while the horse carries both. The old way is not thrown out when the new one arrives, and the new one is trusted only as fast as it is understood. That is how horsemanship has moved from one generation to the next, when it has moved well.
