Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy
Exhibition

In the early 1970s, Bill Wittliff visited a ranch in northern Mexico where the vaqueros still worked cattle in traditional ways. Wittliff photographed the vaqueros as they went about daily chores that had changed little since the first Mexican cowherders learned to work cattle from a horse's back. Wittliff captured a way of life that now exists only in memory and in the photographs included in this exhibition. This Humanities Texas traveling exhibition features photographs with bilingual narrative text that reveal the muscle, sweat, and drama that went into roping a calf in thick brush or breaking a wild horse in the saddle. For more information, contact the East Texas Oil Museum.

July 10–August 14, 2021
East Texas Oil Museum at Kilgore College
1301 S. Henderson Blvd
Kilgore, TX 75662

Map

Map of event location
Photograph by Bill Wittliff, 1971.