Lore of the California Vaquero

ROJAS, Arnold R.

Lore of the California Vaquero.

FIRST EDITION. Fresno, California: Academy Library Guild, 1958.

8vo. 162 pp., frontispiece and photographic plates, illustrated throughout. Cloth boards with decorated endpapers, in the publisher's yellow-gold pictorial dust jacket designed by Beltrán; typography, lithography, and binding all credited to Central Valley firms on the copyright page. Dedicated to the range riders of Kern County. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket: boards clean and square, interior clean with no previous-owner marks; jacket with creasing to the upper front panel, scattered light surface and edge wear, the spine panel evenly toned.

This is Rojas's second book, following California Vaquero (1953); together they anchor his seven-book series documenting the Spanish-Mexican Californio horseman tradition that predated and shaped the broader American cowboy archetype. Rojas writes from inside that world: the bridle horse and the making of a finished rein, the bit and spur and the Spanish-derived language of the trade, the men he rode stirrup to stirrup with, and the lineage he traced back through Mexican California to the mounted traditions of the Old World.

SKU TO-2026-140