Cowboy Gear: What You Should Know About Cattle Brands

The practice of branding cattle is ancient. It is, in fact, older that Jesus Christ himself. What we know of the earliest livestock brands comes from paintings in Egyptian tombs, which depict a cattle roundup and branding from as early as 2700 BC. There are also references to the practice of branding cattle in Roman literature and in the Bible, namely with Jacob the herdsman.

Fast forward to the early 16th century as cattle are introduced to the New World by Spanish explorers, and the tradition of cattle branding came with them. The first recorded cattle brand is of three Latin crosses, which represented the brand of Hernán Cortés, one of the greatest of the conquistador in southern Mexico in the 1500s. As cattle raising grew, the crown ordered the establishment of a stockmen’s organization called Mesta throughout what was then referred to as New Spain in modern-day Mexico, and included several U.S. states, notably California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado and Oklahoma.

Spaniards bring their branding practices to New Spain

In New Spain, each cattle owner was required to have a different brand, and each brand was required to be registered in what was undoubtedly the original brand book of the Americas. Kept first in Mexico City, it was later moved to the largest Spanish settlement in Texas, the Presidio San Antonio de Bexar. Early Spanish brands were generally more pictographs than the combination of symbols and letters we associate with modern cattle brands. Spaniards being notably passionate people, they chose their brands to represent their sentiments and passions in the most beautiful of ways.

An early brand registration granted by the provincial governor of California to a Californio and ranchero named Don Roberto Pardo of the Rancho los Alamitos in what is now modern day Southern California. Note the combination of pictogram and letters.

A cattle raiser, or ranchero, would compose his own brand. When his first son acquired cattle, a curlicue or pendant could be added to the father’s brand, and as other sons acquired their own cattle, additional curlicues, pendants or serifs may be added to what became the family’s brand. By the 1700s, as the Spanish were moving herds north into Coahuila y Tejas to support the missions they had established in the Rio Grande and San Antonio River…