Lewis, Archibald R. and McGann, Thomas F. Editors. The New World Looks at its History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963.

Bishko, Charles Julian. "The Castilian as Plainsman: The Medieval Ranching Frontier in La mancha and Extremadura." pages 47-69 of The New World Looks at its History.

In this fascinating article we learn how the Spaniards had already acquired ranching experience through centuries of livestock raising and cattle drives to hither and yon, centuries before coming to the New World. As the Spaniards continued the Reconquista, they drove south into periodically arid and hostile lands, such as that of the Guadiana Basin, where they had to confront militant Islamic raiders, as the author tells us on page 50:

"For both Moors and Castilians, the endless warfare itself was a typically plains affair, normally characterized by incessant raids and hit-and-run attacks (algaras, correduras) which sought to surprise the enemy, devastate and pillage his towns and farms, and then swiftly withdraw across the intervening plains with captured humans, livestock, and other booty."

By pages 64-65 he concludes:

"We are often told how in the New World the Spaniard succeeded only where he could conquer and explolit Indian agrarian societies, and critics lament his supposed failure to fill American plains regions from Texas to Argentina with farms and bustling urban communities. But it should be remembered that the development of a plains country through ranching was a Castilian frontier experience, as rule over great subject masses was not; that pastoralism has its own legitimate claims to respect in the early civilization of many regions and the permanent economy of some; and that where, from the sixteenth century on, the New World frontier of the Americas has fostered the rise of pastoral societies, they have been -- with all their own many original contributions -- deeply indebted to the way of life and institutional patterns of an Iberian plains background in which the Guadiana Basin was a central and integral element."