Few of the Pueblos were ready to abandon their old gods. When the priests, most of whom had grown up during the Inquisition in Spain, discovered Indians still practicing native religions, their punishments were harsh. Whipping was common. The friar at the Hopi Pueblo three hundred miles to the west trampled a man to death with his horse. An inquiry by the Spanish Crown later found that he also opted for burning in turpentine as punishment for “idolaters and children.”1
On the day in 1680 when the runners arrived at Turquoise Pueblo, they were led from the bleached sunlight of the plaza into the cool shadows of an adobe room where the headmen of the community were gathered. The locals knew tensions were rising. A decade of drought had brought famine and instability. The priests and their new god had not provided the promised protection. And yet Pueblo men who had gone back to asking the old gods for help had been caught and whipped. The governor of New Mexico had ordered native religious masks, altars, and holy objects to be burned, and many of the local underground ceremonial rooms, called kivas, were destroyed. He had ordered four men to be hanged in the square in Santa Fe and another forty-three to be flogged for practicing “sorcery.”
Rather than bringing the Pueblos back into line, the assault on traditional ways acted as a wedge, each blow driving them farther from the Spanish. The runners spoke of this abuse, and the men of the village nodded. The runners told the men that all across the region, at villages much like theirs, elders in their kivas had decided it was time to rise up and drive the Spanish out. On the appointed day, they would kill the priests and burn the churches. The men of the village nodded. One of the runners held up a cord of yucca fiber punctuated with several knots. Other runners were delivering cords just like it to other pueblos across the region, he reported. Untie one knot each morning. On the morning the last knot is untied, attack.
If you refuse to join the attack, they said, then, when the Spanish are dead, we will come after you.
There were no wild horses in North America when the Spanish arrived. Three centuries later, when American settlers reached the West, horse numbers may have been in the millions. Mustangs on the Great Plains stretched from horizon to horizon. Whole areas of West Texas were marked on early maps with two words: wild horses. Explorers talked of uncountable herds that surged over the prairies in waves. It was one of the quickest, most widespread, and most successful introductions of a species in the history of the world. And it was done mostly through warfare.
There are many points where you could start telling the story of the mustang’s spread through the West—all of them centered on humans and conflict. You could start with the first horse to set hoof in North America with the Spanish conquistadors, or go back even farther to the Moorish invaders who brought tough, fleet little Barb horses to Spain. You could go back beyond that, too, to the Scythians and Mongols who spread the horse through raiding campaigns that ranged from China to Rome. The closely linked history of horses and war gives added meaning to the term invasive species.
But the day when the runners held up the yucca cords at Turquoise Pueblo and the locals agreed to rise up against the Spanish is perhaps the best place to start telling the story of the horse in North America. At that moment, horses were tightly controlled by the Spanish and were kept clustered around a few European settlements. They were like dandelion fluff still arranged tightly on a stem. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt was the great breath that sent them flying.
From that moment, the Spanish were never really in control of the West again, largely because they had lost control of horses. From the Huns to the Sioux, horses not only have almost always been associated with the spread of war, but they have also enabled the spread of war. The side that made best use of horses usually won. The native tribes used horses to dominate not only the Spanish in the West but also, for a time, the Americans.
No one incident was the source of all wild horses. Instead, uncounted thousands of battles, raids, and black-market trades put Spanish horses in the hands of native tribes. No doubt horses got free before the Pueblo Revolt and after. But after the revolt, the trend was clear. Horses kept getting loose, and loose horses kept breeding. And soon there were vast, uncountable seas of horses that made the whole landscape appear to move. These herds changed the history of the West.
By the time American settlers began arriving in numbers nearly two hundred years after the revolt, the land west of the Mississippi River was covered with horses. One ranger passing through the area that is now Nueces County, Texas, in the 1840s said he “met with a drove of mustangs so large that it took us fully an hour to pass it, although they were traveling at a rapid rate in a direction nearly opposite to the one we were going. As far as the eye could extend on a dead level prairie, nothing was visible except a dense mass of horses, and the trampling of their hoofs sounded like the roar of the surf on a rocky coast.”2
Christopher Columbus brought no horses on his first voyage to the New World in 1492. They were difficult and expensive to care for on long sea voyages. But it must not have taken long to figure out that horses would be worth the trouble in the land across the Atlantic, because he brought fifteen stallions and five mares on his second voyage in 1493. What they were used for, and how long they lasted, is lost to history, but soon after arriving, he wrote to Queen Isabella that every ship from then on should carry brood mares. In voyages that followed, Columbus and other explorers brought both expertly bred war steeds and scabby, near-worthless nags. They also brought pigs, sheep, and chickens, which they bred on the island of Hispaniola and supplied to the conquistadors who had pushed farther west to the mainland. But it was the horses more than any other animal that the conquistadors credited with helping their small numbers conquer much of two continents.
The stories the Spanish told of subduing whole cultures with a small number of soldiers and horses are so stunning that they survive today. Pánfilo de Nárvaez, who conquered Cuba, fought off a surprise attack by several thousand warriors one night by jumping on his horse, galloping among them, and ringing bells. In Peru, Francisco Pizarro cantered in circles in front of the Inca royal court to show his power, then ran at full speed toward the emperor, stopping only feet away. In the battle that followed, charges of Spanish horses, with the conquistadors blasting their guns and ringing bells, sent the Incas running, allowing Pizarro to defeat an army of eighty thousand Incas with 106 men on foot and sixty-two in the saddle. Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519 with five hundred men and just sixteen horses. When his men came riding four abreast into the capital, Tenochtitlan, which was built on a great lake, canoes came paddling from every corner so people could gape at the monsters, who seemed to be half-human, half-deer, and able to come apart. The Spanish quickly realized the horse was their secret weapon, or, as Bernal Díaz, a soldier who fought with Cortés, later called them, “our fortress.” Within two years, Cortés had conquered the Aztec empire—the most powerful civilization in the New World.
A NAVAJO PETROGLYPH IN CANYON DE CHELLY IN ARIZONA RECORDS NATIVE AMERICAN CONTACT WITH SPANISH EXPLORERS ON HORSEBACK.
“Next to God we owed our victory to the horses,” wrote a chronicler of Francisco Coronado’s expedition. When the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico first saw the horses of Coronado’s expedition in 1540, they were so awestruck that they smeared sweat from the horses on their chests to transfer the power to themselves. The shock value of horses wore off, of course, but the strategic value of being stronger and faster on horseback than an enemy on foot was permanent. Such an advantage was not to be squandered. As the Spanish settled in what is now New Mexico, they were outnumbered by the natives. To retain control, they passed laws banning natives from owning horses or even learning to ride. Similar laws in the American South later kept slaves from riding horses for similar reasons.
But the value of horses for conquest depended in large part on the landscape. Where the land was wide, open, and dry, horses flew across the terrain, giving conquerors the powers of gods. Dense forests and steep mountai
ns took away those advantages. Where the land was thick and wet, horses literally bogged down and often became liabilities. Central America’s jungle civilizations took decades to pacify. There is a reason that ships, not horses, play an outsize role in the story of settling New England—horses could not get around in the thick forests.
In 1540, Hernando de Soto landed in Florida with 250 horses. As he fumbled his way through the South, almost all of his animals sank into marshes, disappeared into the woods, or were shot full of arrows by the locals. After two years of wandering fruitlessly, fewer than ten of the expedition’s horses remained and de Soto had died of fever on the banks of the Mississippi River. Eventually, the remaining members of his party built barges, loaded their few horses, and retreated down the Mississippi. These last survivors were grazing along a river one day when a local tribe launched a surprise attack. The Spanish scurried to their barges under a hail of arrows, unable to bring the horses.
Some have supposed that de Soto’s horses, abandoned in 1542, were the first wild mustangs in the West. Mark Van Doren, a poet writing in New York City, in a prefatory note to a poem called “The Distant Runners,” posited that: “Six great horses of Spain, set free after his death by de Soto’s men, ran west and restored to America the wild race there lost some thousands of years ago.”3 But an account from de Soto’s expedition suggests those Barb horses never got the chance to run west. As the Spanish floated away from their attackers, a chronicler of the expedition said, they watched the natives “hurl arrows at the horses with great fiesta and rejoicing until all had fallen.”4
Even if de Soto’s horses had lived, it is not clear whether they would have spread. Horses were not as suited for the wet forests of the Southeast as they were for the West. They had evolved for arid grasslands. In order to flourish, in warfare or on their own, they needed dry, wide-open acreage. But once they got loose on the right ground, almost nothing could stop them.
The Spanish plan to keep horses from the natives in New Mexico began to unravel almost as soon as it was in place. The Spanish came to colonize the Rio Grande in 1598, led by Juan de Oñate, the wealthy son of Spanish silver-mine owners. His wagon train of settlers brought with them a few thousand sheep, goats, and cattle and 316 horses. These were not the first horses ever to set foot in the area, but they are the first that could plausibly lay claim to being the origins of wild horses in the West. Fifty years earlier, Francisco Coronado had come through the area with an army and fifteen hundred horses, and journals from the expedition mention a few lost horses, but Oñate’s settlers never reported seeing any horses among the natives or loose on the plains. Whatever happened to Coronado’s horses, they don’t appear to have reproduced.
Oñate’s expedition settled among the Pueblo Indians, who, like them, were farmers. Over the first few decades, the horses they brought multiplied, prompting a visitor in 1630 named Fray Alonso de Benavides to report, “Our herds have already propagated much there,” noting the land had no horses when the Spanish first arrived, but now had many “famous horses, particularly for military use.”5
The Spanish set up a feudal system of huge ranches with natives serving as peasants. In the end, the system they designed to give them every advantage led to their downfall. Each Spanish ranch owner was expected to pay tribute back to the Spanish government in Mexico, and in exchange he was allowed to treat the natives on his land as serfs, forcing them to pay tribute to him. Though the natives were not officially allowed to ride horses under this system, as ranch hands they learned how to care for and breed them. In 1621, the Spanish governor in New Mexico relaxed the law to allow Indian ranch workers to ride horses, as long as they had converted to Catholicism. Before long, the region had a growing population of poorly treated underlings who knew everything there was to know about Spain’s secret weapon.
These underlings also had plenty of chances to escape. The ranches of New Mexico were surrounded on all sides by nomadic tribes—the Navajo, the Apache, and the Ute, among others. Many of the Pueblos had longstanding trade ties to their nomadic neighbors. Some spoke the same languages, and they often intermarried. A Pueblo man fed up with life as a serf could light out for the mountains, and if he had been taught to care for horses, he had a ready means of escape. The runaways shared what they had learned with the nomadic tribes. By the 1640s, a few chiefs in the Navajo and Apache tribes had learned to ride.
Looking back through the centuries, there may be no way to fully appreciate what horses meant to the tribes, or how potent was the thrill of looking into a horse’s eyes, feeling its hot breath, and realizing its strength could be your strength, its speed your speed. A horse and rider could be inestimably more than the sum of their parts. For the tribes, it was everything. The distance and space in the West that had been once oppressive and impoverishing suddenly could become a source of power. Vast grasslands that had been deserts could be turned into muscle, speed, wealth, and weapons of war that, in the right hands, could turn bands of meager scroungers into a fighting force powerful enough to terrorize modern empires and keep both the Spanish and the American armies at bay.
Almost every tribe immediately yearned for horses, dreamed of them, sang of them, painted them on canyon walls, named moons in their annual calendar after them, and welcomed them into their cultures so completely that before long they were sure the horse had always been there. The Apache said the Creator made the horse, using lightning for its breath, rainbows for its hooves, the evening star for its eyes, crescent moons for its ears, and a whirlwind for its power and speed. The Navajo said that every day the sun god rode across the sky on a turquoise mustang with a joyous neigh.
One buffalo hunter recalled in his memoir that by the 1850s the Comanche “were boasting in all seriousness that the horse was created by the Good Spirit for the particular benefit of the Comanches, and that the Comanches had introduced it to the whites.”6
Maybe the tribes knew at first glimpse that the animals would change everything. Or maybe they just saw such beautiful animals and in their gut knew they had to have them. But this is sure: They did anything to get them. And some Spanish were willing to make secret deals for a price. In the 1650s, Alonso de Posada, a Franciscan missionary at the Pecos Pueblo on the edge of the Great Plains, saw Pueblos illegally trading Spanish horses to the Apache in exchange for buffalo robes. A number of the region’s governors also had been accused over the years of trading horses for Apache buffalo hides. The Apache, probably the first tribe to get horses, transformed from a group of humble nomads into a feared fighting force. Posada, one of the earliest chroniclers of the Southwest, complained that by the 1650s the Apache were “running off day and night the horse herds of the Spaniards and inflicting all the rest of the injuries which the force of their fierce arrogance imposes.”7
With their newfound skill in horse raiding, the Apaches didn’t just raid the Spanish. They raided other tribes. “There is a nation which they call the Apacha which possesses and is owner of all the plains of Cíbola,” Posada wrote. “The Indians of this nation are so arrogant, haughty and such boastful warriors that they are the common enemy of all nations who live below the northern region. They hold them as cowards. They have destroyed, ruined or driven most of them from their lands.”8
Native tribes’ history with the horse may not seem to have any connection to the species’ fossil past in North America, but I think it does. Over millions of years of hardships on the ever-growing grasslands of North America, horses developed both toughness and a willingness to cooperate in bands that made them exceptionally suited to the needs of man. The adaptation of their gut to be able to subsist on poor-quality feed in dry grasslands and their legs to walk long miles between water as well as have bursts of speed to avoid predators became natural assets for long campaigns of war and exploration where long miles were expected and good feed was rarely found. The social structure that horses developed also became a critical asset. Bands operated through complex social interactions. Horses formed rel
ationships, took cues from dominant animals, helped one another watch for danger, and learned to be submissive. Animals with this innate sense of social order easily integrate with humans. Other animals were domesticated—sheep, pigs, goats, even reindeer—but few became working companion animals like the horse because they lacked the social smarts and stamina created by the horse’s long and complex coevolution with grass.
Horse stealing became a positive-feedback loop. The more horses that the Apache, Ute, and Navajo stole, the more they were able to steal. The more they relied on raiding, the more they needed to raid. The Spanish started calling the Apache los farones—the pharaohs—because they were like the swift Egyptian cavalry of Exodus. The raids grew so constant that, by 1676, the Spanish in New Mexico had few horses left. The governor was forced to send a message to Mexico asking for a thousand horses and fifty saddles to replace those stolen by the natives.
The raiding caused uncertainty and shortages in the Spanish settlements. The Spanish often took it out on the Pueblos. And, by 1680, the Pueblos had had enough.
In the summer of 1680, men in kivas all along the Rio Grande untied the knots on their yucca cords, counting down the days until revolt. At dawn on August 10, they untied the final knot. That morning, men blocked the roads leading to the capital in Santa Fe and seized the Spanish horses that could have spread the alarm. The natives then turned on those Spaniards who were the closest to them and the most hated—the priests. At Santo Domingo Pueblo, three friars were cut down in their mission convent. Their bodies were dragged to the church and heaped before the altar. At Acoma Pueblo, friars were stoned to death. At Sandia Pueblo, Indians tore the doors off the church and hacked the limbs off a statue of St. Francis standing above the altar. They tossed chalices and religious statues in a bucket of manure, whipped the crucifix until it was nearly bare of paint, and, as if to make sure their point wasn’t missed, someone took a crap on the main alter. At Jemez Pueblo, attackers rode the priest through the village like a horse, whipping him. Then a young warrior stabbed him through the heart.
Wild Horse Country Page 7