OK, so here is a cool example of changing lifeways. I'm going to take the "Anglo" story in a county in North East NM here. The Spanish story is different and maybe even more interesting, I will do that later.

After the defeat of the Comanche, the first major era was the legendary trail drives up from Texas, the Goodnight Loving Trail.

This was followed by a brief era of open range ranching, before the barbed wire.

While legendary, this lasted less than a single lifetime.

Then came the railroad and the homestead era. The prairie was divided up into family farms, and large areas were broken to the plow.

Settlers streamed in from OK, Missouri, Arkansas, Germany, etc. Built red wooden barns, created a outright farming community like back east.

Then the weather changed and the farms started to fail. There were multiple severe droughts alternating with good years.

Farming started failing/consolidating in the 30's and farming went entirely extinct by the 70's.

This caused massive and accelerating population losses.

With the failure of the farms, the raison d'etre of the community decisively switched to fenced pasture cattle ranching, often on "go back land" that used to be farms. "Cowboy" is the cultural tone now.

But it is very hard now to maintain the community institutions from the farming days. Because the economically necessary population for ranching the land is 10x lower.

The villages have a lot of empty buildings, its sometimes hard to staff necessary positions, etc.