Your Worldbuilding Needs More Cows

Over my Spring Break, I went to Texas, and one of the places that I visited was the Fort Worth cattle Stockyards. It made me start thinking more about the cattle industry--of prime importance to the settlement of the American West, and something that I completely skipped over in my Wild West themed hexcrawl. So today, I want to write about three different modes that the cattle/beef industry has historically taken that would be appropriate for a late medieval/Renaissance/early modern setting that many fantasy games are set in.

This is meant to just be a history article to inspire your worldbuilding, though I think a "cattle drive" mini-campaign could be a really cool framing narrative for an exploratory, western genre game.

Mountain Transhumanance

Transhumanance is a fancy word meaning semi-migratory or semi-nomadic. Because our modern world is so settled and urban, we often don't think about the fact that there have been a lot of more migratory ways of life for a lot of human history. It is an underrepresented part of worldbuilding that I'm currently trying to fix in my own home-game world.

In the mountains--particularly in the Alps, is the example I'm working with--this sort of seasonal migrations are up and down the mountains. During the summer months, people would steer their mountain herds up the mountains to high pastures. When the winter snows start coming, they'll return to lower altitudes where there is still grass free of snow in order to let their cattle keep grazing. During these winter pastures, cows might also be killed and sold to the permanent residents of these lower valleys.

Cattle are not the only animals that follow this sort of seasonal migration. Sheep and goats can also survive at higher altitudes and would join the migrating herds.

I've seen this done well once in fictional worldbuilding, by the fantastic Ursula LeGuin. In A Wizard of Earthsea, this seasonal pattern is repeated on the mountainous island of Gont in the first section of Ged's story.

You can use this to enhance a sense of time passing in your game. Towns in the valleys might double in size during the winter months, with cheese and beef more plentiful and a number of fairs and markets, as cattle herders descend the mountain slopes. Plus, it creates more environmental hazards for a party, as their journey might get extended to reach some alpine pastureland instead of just making it to the town. The party might be hired on to guard against alpine threats, like goblins (of which there are many mountain varieties) or kobolds, on the trek up or down the mountains—a twist on the idea of guarding against cattle rustlers.

Plus, it provides room for cultural clashes between the folk who live in the valleys, settled and agricultural, and the mountainous herders. Do the valley folk see the herders as odd or primitive, even as the herds provide an important winter resource for the valleys?

In my world, this is one way I’m trying to add in transhumanance into my setting: my dwarves have always tended to be mountain dwellers, but I’ve been adding nuance between dwarven subcultures by creating distinctions between the herders and the valley-dwellers. The valley folk are my “typical" dwarves: miners and weaponsmiths and crafters. They look down on their semi-nomadic brethren (also dwarves), while also welcoming them seasonally into their towns for access to the cattle herds. But they see the herders as backwards, not embracing their divinely-blessed artisanal crafting heritage. When the herds of cattle do come to town in the winter, at first there are fairs and celebrations, but as the cold winter months drag on, there is a growing tension simmering between the two groups. These long winters are prime opportunities for mysteries, as a sole missing cow pilfered by a mountain creature could threaten to inflame tempers to the point that the party is the last chance at avoiding a bloody civil war in town.

Haciendas and Vaqueros

Our second style of cattle cultivation is the mode that would eventually lead to our image of the western "cowboy"--the Mexican vaquero. Ideal for when land is plentiful but controlled by private owners, like nobility, this style of raising cattle involves sprawling territories. This might be called a ranch (the Texas term), a hacienda (in Mexico), or a plantation (American south), but regardless of the term it is a sprawling private estate.

When you have that much territory, you can dedicate a big swath to a slow moving herd. Unlike a small European farm where a freeholder might have a couple of cows to sustain themselves, a hacienda in a less agriculturally productive, fertile territory needs to let the cattle roam to eat enough calories. If all that land belongs to one person, a rich landowner, as was the case in Mexico, then you can have a huge herd and hire someone to keep the cows moving and under your control.

Like the mode of transhumanance, there's a part of the hacienda where your cows will graze, rotating around to feed on the grass as it grows, under the watchful eye of the vaquero overseeing them. The vaquero stays with the herd, moving regularly. When it comes time to turn the cattle into meat, this vaquero would then steer the herd's migration towards a central part of the hacienda where butchering could take place.

In my world, this is common in the large feudal estates of my human empire (which I’ve talked about a few times: most recently, I believe, in my exploration of the cycle of empires). These magnates have plenty of land, and it is an arid savannah there, meaning that agriculture can be iffy in terms of productive potential. I went back and forth on whether this empire should have this “hacienda" mode or our next, more open mode of cattle herding, but ultimately figured that the entrenched culture of feudalism made this more enclosed system likely. Huge swaths of feudal landholdings are converted to private ranges for cattle grazing—sparsely inhabited by humans, except for vaqueros. These cattle will be driven to the cities that have sprung up as the centers of power for the elite, simultaneously helping the landlords (who technically own the cattle) and posing a distinct power base—if a feudal lord proves particularly malicious, the vaqueros are a natural, well-trained group of riders with their own networks that could prove a fertile recruiting ground for rebellion.

The main event happening in my empire right now is the abolition of the corrupt Church and the hunting down of priests of the old gods by pro-wizard forces. I imagine that the vaqueros never were particularly loyal to the old Church, which emphasized staying in one place and working for your community—something that would likely be anathma to the individualist ethos we associate with cowboys that spend most of their days surrounded only by cows. On the other hand, the new order is most supportive of the developing urban bourgeoisie and their new sensibilities: “city slickers” to the rural vaqueros. This provides a fertile area for conflict by proxy between the two factions, as vaqueros fall solidly into neither camp.

In your world, this mode of the hacienda/estate and vaquero can be good for any territory with sprawling landlords and relatively poor agricultural output. A lord might then want to convert their land from farming to grazing for cows to bring in bigger profits. Like the transhumanance of the mountains, this mode also creates a distinct subculture, but this tends to be a more individualistic subculture, heavily reliant on horses, than is true for our mountain communities.

The Range

So where does our image of the western "Cowboy" come from? In huge swaths of the American West, land was considered open. No people had enclosed it as private property. It wasn't fertile enough for major agriculture. But it was enough for cows to graze.

So cattle would be turned loose into this open range, supervised by a cowboy--often a Mexican vaquero, or later, someone taught the techniques of the vaqueros. But now, instead of roaming in a circle around a hacienda's territory, the cowboy would move the cattle around this open, common range. They might mingle with a herd belonging to another owner or another cowboy, and brands marked on the cows would tell who owned which cow.

When it came time to sell the cows for meat, they would then be driven en masse by the cowboys to a central location, like the vaqueros did on the hacienda. These outposts, to the cowboys, were usually the end points of a train line, since the demand for meat was in the East. You'd steer the herd to one of these towns, the cattle would be purchased by a new owner who would ship them east and take the profit of the East's higher prices.

This needs two things: wide, open lands that are not enclosed (as the enclosure of the plains in the 1900s will turn the cattle industry to be more like the hacienda model), and some way of getting cattle to market, such as through a train line terminus.

This model, despite being the inspiration I got on my vacation, does not really fit in my world. There’s no railroads, which means that drives would need to take place too deep into the interior to really make sense. There’s a critical technological element to the development of the open range, and it doesn’t exist in my world.

But it could in yours! Hub-based teleportation circles or other magic modes of transport could easily replace the “mundane” railroad terminus. Having this opens up the huge realm of part of the western genre, which I talked about in one of my very first posts on the blog (though I was lacking the cattle industry as one of those ingredients) – the conflict and alliance between cowboy and industry is a huge part of “the Western” narrative, the changes that happen as the open range slowly gets enclosed, and the stories of cattle drives and cowboys. You can’t have cowboys without cows.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this week’s post! Share in the comments how cows and cattle show up in your games and worldbuilding projects! Do they fit with any of these models, or do they exist in some fourth form?

If you enjoyed this sort of historically-inspired worldbuilding, please consider checking out my recent worldbuilding guide product on DriveThruRPG, which is a bunch of prompts and worksheets for building thematically important beverages in your world. Subscribers to the blog can get 50% off, but the standard price is only a dollar.