Where does the word “hackamore” come from and What does hackamore mean?

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.”