How did they catch cattle hundreds of years ago?

Answer 1

Individually, they used rawhide rope made so that it was stiff and not too supple that it was impossible to make a lasso out of. Such ropes are known as lariats or riattas, with the riatta being the longest of the two.

In a group, cattle were caught by men on horseback, and the odd woman as well. They were pushed together to form a herd and driven to the stockyards. In times when cattle needed to be branded, simply having a group formed was enough to keep them in one place. However cowboys and vaqueros of the Southwestern USA and Mexico used box canyons and desert scrub with rope surrounding it to act as a psychological barrier to the animals to contain a herd of cattle in. The northern cowboys made pens out of trees with rope attached to the trunk or logs lashed to the trees themselves, especially if there was a clearing big enough to hold a lot of cattle in, or formed pens by cutting down logs and building fences out in the open range to contain livestock in.