Laura Ingalls Wilder in her "Little House" series described how her Pa traded their horse team for oxen to complete their wagon journey west when she was a pioneer child -- they were slow but tougher on those rough trails without lush grazing. (She was not a fan, she loved the horses.) In "Farmer Boy" she describes how her future husband raised his first team of oxen from calves in rural New York, even carving the calf-sized wooden yoke for them to train in.
All that was a revelation to a suburban horse-crazy kid in the early 60s!