A lasso or lazo ( or ), also called reata or la reata in Mexico, and in the United States riata or lariat (from Mexican Spanish lasso for roping cattle), 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 ('noose, snare, trap, bond, tie').
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 (in Spain) 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 (woolding). 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” (the native lasso). 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 (vaqueros) 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” (dehocker); it was also known as a ”lanza de media luna” (crescent-moon blade lance) or simply "luna" (moon). 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 (the forearm or gaskin) while the other end was made into a noose fastened to a pole, Ocaña writes: […]he carries in his hand the end of the rope made into a lasso tied around a long pole, and when he reaches the colt, he places the rope over its head and when the horse chasing the colt feels when the other one is captured, stops and holds with his legs and pulls back as if it were a person. 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 (embossed leather covering), without tapaderas (stirrup coverings) on the stirrups, and was overloaded with ornaments. Their reata or lazo was called peal (unlike the reata of the Charros), 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 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 (approx. 1.5 meters), 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:
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