Pastores

(Library of Congress)

(Encyclopedia of the Great Plains) The pastores are a little-known Hispanic sheepherding group whose homeland was the grasslands of north-central New Mexico (Quechero, or Mescalero Plains). Established there by at least the early nineteenth century, the pastores practiced a transhumance lifestyle with their flocks.
... Economically, the pastores were part of either the partido system of herd management or a family business that owned and managed the flock. The New Mexico partido system, adapted from that of Spain, was a means of lending capital at interest that allowed a sheepherder to build up his own flock, thereby moving to the family business system.
... Despite risks, pastores began their incursion into the upper Canadian River valley of eastern New Mexico by 1849 and the Canadian River valley of the Texas Panhandle in the 1860s. In the middle 1870s, with the removal of the Native peoples and near extermination of the bison herds on which they depended, the vast grasslands of the Texas Panhandle and Southern High Plains became open territory. Continued