All a cowboy needs in order to get a job are his bed and saddle, a pair of spurs, a pair of leggings, a good pair of boots, a good hat, a good brush jacket, a warm jacket, gloves, bridles, various bits and hackamores for different horses in his string saddle blanket and slicker, beside all the clothing he periodically gets torn off his back and bun. His outfit, if it is complete and satisfies him, only costs about a thousand dollars and takes him as few as ten years to accumulate. His outfit is perishable and expendable in his work of assuming life and death responsibility over hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cattle, and he never looks well dressed and he never has any money except for his other most vital essentials, whiskey and cigarettes.

A remuda is the herd of horses being used by the cowboys on an outfit. A horse takes on his identity as a flesh and blood unit of an outfit when he begins the work of men and becomes a member of a remuda. The ideal remuda is composed of geldings only. Studs and mares fulminate trouble in a remuda because of the demands of their state as procreators in which their efficiency and trustworthiness to man can be stopped by natural forces such as phases of the moon. For geldings, the bachelor horses, man has arranged a life of work. Geldings have been altered to respond placidly to a society of horses doing man’s work. In Spanish, remuda also means a change of horses, a relay, a relief, The Mexican saying is ‘el caballo revolcado es caballo remudado” – a horse that has a good place to roll is a relieved and rested horse.

In the time of our great-grandfathers, an outfit was a group of men who packed the gear to husband a herd of cattle to market. An outfit made cattle livestock. An outfit rode into a county horseback, set a price on cattle, either bought the cattle or contracted to drive them to market, defended the stock on the trail, gave it value when it arrived where people could buy it, and sold it for its certain value. Later, the ranches became known as outfits. A ranch is an outfit because it is equipped to husband the bovine from birth to market. A cowboy’s gear became known as an outfit and is its smallest entity. In some countries a manchild might be called a “little outfit” by his father, who was also born to an outfit. He is an outfit too because he was born with all the equipment and potential for the husbandry of cattle. He is born a cowboy and it is an irrefutable fact that cowboys are born and not made.