Horses evolved in North America before spreading westward into Asia. By the late Pleistocene, however, they were extinct in the Americas. So, when the Spanish transported horses to the “New World” in the early sixteen century, it was a sort of homecoming after ten millennia.
Before the horse’s return, Indigenous peoples in North America traveled by foot, with assistance from their only domesticated animal, the dog. Able to carry four times as much as a dog and travel twice as far in a day, the horse was initially seen as a kind of sacred or magic dog. It radically transformed transportation, hunting, trading, and warfare. This was especially the case in the equine-friendly habitat of the central and southern Great Plains. In some cases, it took only a generation or two for pedestrian peoples to become extraordinarily skilled equestrians.
On the prairie—from the French word for meadow—horses thrived. The equestrian Apaches, Comanches, and Lakotas, to take three major examples, would rule successive inland empires from the mid-seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries from the backs of horses.
“At its height the effective sphere of influence of the equestrian Plains Indians extended from norther Mexico into central Canada and from the Continental Divide to the Deep South,” writes historian Pekka Hämämläinen. But the revolutionary transformation brought on by horses ultimately had “decidedly mixed” outcomes. Horses “did bring new possibilities, prosperity, and power to Plains Indians, but they also brought destabilization, dispossession, and destruction.”
The “horse frontier” galloped ahead of the colonizers. Jumanos and Apaches “built the first distinctive horse cultures of the Plains” as early as the 1650s. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish sent surges of horses further inland into the grasslands where Spanish horse, decedents of Barbs, a “hardy and heat-resilient North African” breed, thrived.
Horses made “nomadism infinitely more agreeable, especially for women, who were relieved of carrying belongings when moving camp,” Hämämläinen writes. Horses also extended the range for hunting, especially bison, raiding, and waging war.
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But for all the benefits, horses also “disrupted subsistence economies, wrecked grassland and bison ecologies, created new social inequalities, unhinged gender relations, undermined traditional political hierarchies, and intensified resource competition and warfare.” Hämämläinen, who has also written in depth on the Comanche, the Lakota, and the greater Indigenous continent, argues that the “horse era” began with high expectations but “soon collapsed into a series of unsolvable economic, social, political, and ecological contradictions.”
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One of these contradictions was the necessity of keeping large numbers of horses for the trade economy while also demanding large numbers of bison for the subsistence economy. The overpopulation of horses triggered “a steep decline in bison numbers.” By the 1850s, dwindling bison herds south of the Platt River were resulting in periodic famines and violent rivalries over the dwindling resource. (Further north, cold winters made horse culture chancier—while deadly “horse wars” left societies bereft of males because so many of the men had been killed.) Meanwhile, European diseases added insult to injury. By the 1860s, as an example, the Comanche population had dropped to a quarter of its 1820s high. The horse helped compromised Indigenous power even before tribes had their first confrontations with the US Army.
Like a killer app, the horse at first seemed to offer huge advantages and immediate benefits. The costs were realized after the fact. Just as new technologies can disrupt and destabilize societies, so too did the horse.
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