Easterners and Englishmen may rarely hear the word hackamore, but it is common among horsemen and cattlemen of the West.
No one ever accused the forty-niners in early contact with California Mexicans of a close ear for the Spanish words they adopted, but it is now generally accepted that hackamore was intended to represent the sound of the Spanish jaquima, a term in that language for the part of the harness of a horse that we call “halter” or, more exactly, “headstall.”
