Forty million years ago, horses first appeared in North America, but after migrating to Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, horses disappeared from this continent at least 10,000 ago. years. So, for millennia, Native Americans traveled and hunted on foot, relying on dogs as miniature beasts of burden.
When Christopher Columbus brought two dozen Andalusian horses on his second voyage to the New World in 1493, he could not have imagined how reintroducing the horse to North America would transform the lives of Native Americans, especially Plains Indians. buffalo hunters, for whom the fast and loyal horse was a marriage made in heaven.
How the horse first entered Native American culture
When Columbus and other Spanish explorers arrived in Hispaniola on horseback, the native Caribbean Taíno were terrified of what they saw as half-man, half-beast, says Herman Viola, curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution. “They had never seen a creature that human beings were riding on.”
As more and more native tribes encountered the horse, this initial fear gave way to awe of the speed and power of the animal. With the dog as their closest reference, the Indians gave this mythical new creature names such as “elk dog”, “heavenly dog” and “sacred dog”.
“The Spaniards quickly realized that the last thing they wanted was for the Indians to have horses, because that would put them on a level playing field,” says Viola, but that’s exactly what happened after the Pueblo uprising of 1680. After enduring a century of hard Spanish. As a rule, the otherwise peaceful Pueblo Indians violently drove the Spaniards from Santa Fe and captured their precious horses, which they then traded with neighboring tribes.
Horses quickly moved through trade routes to the Navajo, Ute, and Apache, then to the Kiowa and Comanche of the southern plains and the Shoshone of the western mountain. By 1700 the horses had reached the Nez Perce and Pied-Noir in the far northwest, and were heading east to the Lakota, Crow, and Cheyenne of the northern plains. When the horses arrived from the west, the first rifles were exchanged from the east. At the time of the French and Indian War in the 1760s, the armed and mounted Indian warrior was a formidable presence on the Great Plains.
Horses transformed the buffalo hunt
Print of a Buffalo Hunt, from a Painting by George Catlin, of a Plains Warrior on Horseback Hunting a Buffalo in the American West, c. 1920.
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Buffaloes are big, strong, and fast. Before horses came to the plains, native hunters pursued large herds on foot, but it was dangerous and difficult work with little chance of success. One technique involved jumping and chasing an animal towards a cliff or a fall called “buffalo jump”. Once injured, the buffalo was easier to kill.
“When horses were introduced, hunting patterns changed,” says Emil Her Many Horses, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. “A preferred hunting horse could be trained to ride directly into the herd of stumbling buffalo.
For the Plains Indians, the new-found speed and efficiency of horse hunting provided an abundance of high-quality meat, hides for teepees and clothing, and rawhide for shields and boxes. Using a towable wooden sled called a travois, horses could now transport entire villages and their belongings to follow the seasonal hunt.
“With the introduction of the horse, the tribes gained more wealth, in a sense,” says Her Many Horses. Not only did teepees get bigger, but it relieved some of the daily burden on women, giving them more time to create works of art and sacred objects, many of which were inspired by the horse.
The raid has become an honorable rite for the warriors of the plains
The competition among the Plains Indians for the best hunting and war horses turned old allies into rivals, Her Many Horses says. More and better horses meant you could expand your hunting grounds, bringing even more wealth to the tribe. Raiding and capturing enemy horses was a key tactic in intertribal warfare and was considered an “honorable” rite of passage for a young man trying to earn his place as a warrior.
The young men walked for miles to a rival camp, hunted for the most prized horses, and waited for nightfall to move. Sneaking into an Indian village without alerting his dog security system was only the first challenge.
“Some horse owners were so concerned about their precious animals that they would fall asleep with a rope tied to their wrist going under the tipi cover, so they could pull on it to make sure the horse was always safe there. low, ”says Viola.
If the daring horse kidnapper was stealthy and lucky enough to make it out of the village alive – many did not – the last act was to give the hard-earned horse to a widow or someone in need, thus completing their bravery by a display of generosity.
The short-lived “ horse nation ”
Horse warfare between Lakota and other Plains Indians and the American cavalry during the Battle of Little Bighorn, 1876.
GraphicaArtis / Getty Images
The iconic image of the war-painted Plains Indian chasing buffaloes – or American soldiers – on horseback, rifle raised at full gallop, belongs to a surprisingly short period in Native American history. The full flowering of the Indian Plains horse culture lasted for just over a century, roughly from the 1750s to the 1870s, when it ended with the Indian Wars and forced relocation to reservations.
In its heyday, the Plains Indian “Horse Nation” included the Comanche activists, who were “probably the best Plains Horse Indians,” says Viola, in addition to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota (Sioux), Crow, Gros Vent Nez Perce and more.
“There were about a dozen very large horse tribes going from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and they were the ones who faced all of these wagon trains and the ‘obvious density’,” says Viola. “Because they were such good horsemen, they were very effective in disrupting the westward expansion and that’s why the military had so many problems with them.
Ultimately, the only way the federal government could defeat the Indians was to hire some of the best Plains Indian horsemen to become the American cavalry. Her Many Horses says that after defeating the Plains Indians, the army sometimes butchered the Indians’ horses to stay on reserves and become farmers instead of reverting to the “old ways” of hunting and raid.
