The saga of the “Great Buffalo Hunt,” with its picturesque commercial “hide men” and its ecological ramifications for one of the hemisphere’s most iconic animals, has long held a niche in the narrative of the American West. For a handful of years after the Civil War, these mostly Anglo market hunters reaved the Plains until the precipitous crash of the bison population put them and their lifestyle out of business.

 But long before these market hunters launched their enterprises upon the prairies, another group of Euro-Americans had successfully institutionalized buffalo hunting for subsistence and commerce on the Southern Plains. Known as Ciboleros, these Hispanic hunters developed effective hunting strategies based around communal hunts that came to be a vital part of the annual cycle of frontier life from northern Mexico to today’s Colorado.

 By adapting Spanish equestrian and military traditions to the hunting of buffalo, they developed a successful long-term strategy for harvesting meat and hides that lasted nearly two centuries. It was they who first introduced the Plains Indians to equestrian buffalo hunting. Eschewing firearms, they often slew their quarry with lances on heart-pounding corridas atop horses specially bred to the chase. Like Medieval cavalcades, their annual caravans launched themselves onto the Southern Plains every autumn, bound for the vast hunting grounds of the Llano Estacado, a landscape of legendary extremes and awash with millions of buffalo.