Some of the Spanish managed to escape to the safety of Santa Fe, driving ahead of them what horses and livestock they could gather. They barricaded themselves in the low, adobe buildings that made up the governor’s headquarters. Thousands of miles from reinforcements, all they could do was wait. On August 15, they spotted five hundred Pueblo warriors approaching, burning cornfields and houses as they came. At the lead was an Indian armed with a Spanish long gun, a sword, and a dagger. He was riding on a Spanish horse.
A battle raged over six days. The Indians cut off the Spanish water supply and tried to burn them out. The Spanish countered with a daring dawn raid that left hundreds of Indians dead. In the end, the Spanish governor, knowing that he had no hope of reinforcements, decided to retreat to El Paso. A thousand survivors limped southward, abandoning the region to the native tribes. The Spanish left three thousand horses around Santa Fe, and more scattered at every ranch. This was the true beginning of the horse in the West, the violent breath that scattered the seeds. It is one of those events so significant in regional history that scholars of the West have given the moment its own name. They call it “the great horse dispersal.”
For more than a decade, the Spanish did not return. When they finally formed an army and pushed up the Rio Grande to retake the territory, they were greeted at Santa Fe by Pueblo warriors on horseback. Their leader came riding out to defy the Spanish wearing a mother-of-pearl shell on his head like a crown, and riding what one witness called “a beautiful horse.”
The age of the Horse Nations had begun. It would last almost two hundred years and burn itself so deeply into the world’s imagination that it is still, more than a century later, almost impossible to imagine Indians without also imagining the horse. The horse made some tribes so powerful that for centuries they held at bay the three most powerful European empires—the Spanish, the French, and the English. The tribes who fell most heavily under the spell of horses—the Horse Nations—became the most successful and hardest to defeat: the Sioux, the Apache, the Crow, the Comanche, the Nez Perce, the Blackfoot. The tribes that didn’t adopt horses are largely forgotten by history.
The Spanish managed to hold Santa Fe after returning. They established colonies in Texas and along the coast of California, but they never really took control of the West, in large part because of horses. Instead, they fell into a repetitive cycle where they imported more horses to battle the horse raiders, only increasing their losses. The Apache and Ute, who lived closest to the Spanish, were probably the first tribes to learn to ride, with a few having horses even before the Pueblo Revolt. The Navajo were likely next. From there, scholars have mapped the spread of horses from the journals of explorers and the recollections of tribes. The trade spread like twin vines up both sides of the Rockies. To the east, on the Great Plains, the Apache gave horses to the Pawnee, the Pawnee to the Arapaho, the Arapaho to the Kiowa, the Kiowa to the Mandan. Horses stolen from the Spanish on the western side of the mountains went first to the Ute, then to the Shoshone around 1700, then to the Nez Perce around 1730, then to the Crow and Blackfoot around 1740, and finally to the Cree around 1750. In 1790, trappers spotted horses with Spanish brands in Canada. Though much of the spread came through raiding and warfare, peaceful trade and cultural exchange must also have been part of the deal. After all, stealing a horse is one thing, learning to care for it and ride is another.
Horses stolen from the Spanish could also be traded to the French, a few hundred miles to the east, for guns that could be used to steal more horses. Which could then be traded for guns. Like furs, mustangs fueled a rabid exchange in manufactured goods. Even tribes like the sedentary Mandan, who farmed river banks and did not rely on horses for nomadic hunting, prospered as middlemen in the market.
“The horse is the most important article of their trade,” a French trader named Antoine Tabeau wrote after a visit to tribes on the upper Missouri River in 1803, when a good horse could fetch “a gun, a hundred charges of powder and balls, a knife and other trifles.”9
A tribe’s first encounter with the horse was often so momentous that the story lived for generations. A Piegan elder named Saukamaupee interviewed by a fur trader in the 1780s remembered first seeing a horse from the neighboring Snake tribe killed during a battle. “Numbers of us went to see him, and we all admired him. He put us in mind of a stag that had lost his horns, and we did not know what name to give him. But as he was a slave to Man, like the dog, which carried our things, he was named the Big Dog.” Later, they started calling horses “elk dogs.” Other tribes called them “holy dogs” or “sky dogs.”10
Before the horse, the Great Plains had been largely devoid of people. For centuries, a few tribes lived near rivers, where they farmed corn, squash, and beans and lived in earthen mound houses, but surviving in the sea of grass on foot was like surviving in the open ocean in a rowboat. There was no shelter from sun or wind and there were long stretches without water. Families dragged their meager possessions on the backs of dogs and women. Though game was abundant, sneaking within killing range with a handmade bow was tough. Buffalo could be driven off cliffs, but to do that you needed a cliff. You only need to drive across Nebraska to know this is no easy proposition. To live on the Great Plains was to live near starvation. Those who did live there, survived in part off of roots and roasted grasshoppers.
The horse turned the grass that had been an oppressive void into a near-limitless resource. With it, tribes could suddenly harness the power of the plains—a power mighty enough to sustain eighty million buffalo. Within a generation, whole societies were transformed. Small family bands came together into mobile towns of hundreds and sometimes thousands. Raiding and war, once rare, became frequent. The main prize was horses.
The Ute sometimes used raids on other tribes to capture women and children whom they could trade to the Spanish for more horses. When other children weren’t available for trade, they traded their own.11 The Apache and Kiowa gave up lives of farming to hunt and raid on horseback. The Osage, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, living in the forests on the eastern edge of the plains, were drawn westward with horses, leaving behind wood lodges in favor of new buffalo-skin tents called teepees. With horses replacing dogs as beasts of burden, the modest teepee soon doubled in diameter to fifteen feet.
The Indian pony was a true mustang—a free-born horse that came from Spanish stock. Before the name mustang became dominant, the Spanish also called these horses cimarrones—a word that comes from the Spanish word maroon—an escaped slave. The horses were small, with short legs and thick bodies. One explorer making his way into the northern plains in 1754 estimated they were “fine tractible [sic] animals, about 14 hands high; lively and clean made.” They were of every color, about seven hundred pounds, with large, round chests, heavy shoulders and hips.12
Americans coming west were often dismayed at the sorry state of Indian horses. They were scrawny, short-legged, sore-backed, crow-pecked, and often mercilessly abused by their owners. It is now often posited that the Spanish brought over finely bred horses that, through neglect, devolved into the mongrel nags of the Horse Nations. I’m not so sure. No doubt Coronado and Cortés, or the governors in Santa Fe, rode well-regarded horses. But most of the Spanish outposts along the Rio Grande were desperately poor, and most settlers there rode simple peasant horses if they rode at all. No doubt the small, crow-pecked nags the tribes had were not so different from the average Spanish stock.
The mustangs of the Horse Nations may not have been much to look at, but Americans writing home were constantly amazed at the ability of these sorry-looking beasts. Surveying the herds on the southern plains, the painter George Ruxton saw “only now and then noble animals of beautiful form.” But, he added, “It is unbelievable how much the Indians can accomplish with their horses, what burdens they are able to carry, and what great distances they can cover in short time.”13
After watching strings of Lakota warriors gallop past his fort in 1867, a cavalry colonel statione
d along the Missouri River in what is now North Dakota wrote, “The Indian pony without stopping can cover a distance of from sixty to eighty miles between sunrise and sunset, while most of our horses would be on their knees at the end of thirty or forty miles.”14
The horse in the hands of the Shoshone tribe was so powerful that it caused the tribe, which had been living in the high basins of Wyoming, to split. One group headed east onto the Great Plains and followed the buffalo southward, where they began ferocious raids against the Spanish and other tribes. The Ute began referring to these new raiders by a word meaning “foreigner” or “enemy,” and the Spanish began using the Ute word too. They were called the Comanche.
No tribe was transformed by the horse like the Comanche. What had been a hard-luck band surviving on small game, roots, and berries in humble brush lean-tos changed within the course of a few generations into the emperors of the southern plains, running an area stretching from the Rockies to Louisiana and from the Platte River in Nebraska down into Mexico.
AN ENGRAVING IN A BOOK PUBLISHED IN 1873 SHOWS HOW THE COMANCHE, ONCE HUMBLE HUNTER-GATHERERS, WERE TRANSFORMED BY HORSES.
“They compare their number to that of the stars. They are so skilled in horsemanship that they have no equal, so daring that they never ask for or grant truces,” according to Athanase de Mézières, a French explorer who worked as a Spanish Indian liaison in the 1770s.15
The Comanche were not noted for being tall or good looking, or having much in the way of culture or arts, but man, could they ride. Most tribes used horses to cover ground but fought on foot. The Comanche learned to be a cavalry force. They trained by chasing down buffalo. Boys started riding at four and by adulthood were expected to be able to sweep a fallen man up off the ground at a gallop, wield a fourteen-foot lance among galloping bison, and shoot twenty arrows in the time a soldier could unholster his rifle.
George Catlin, who himself relied on a tamed mustang named Charlie to carry his painting supplies, camped with the Comanche in 1834, making several sketches of young men riding horses. “On their feet they are one of the most unattractive and slovenly looking races of Indians I have ever seen,” he later wrote. “But the moment they mount their horses, they seem at once metamorphosed.”16
Astride a horse, they seemed to gain superhuman abilities, he observed:
Amongst their feats of riding, there is one that has astonished me more than anything of the kind I have ever seen, or expect to see, in my life:—a stratagem of war, learned and practiced by every young man in the tribe; by which he is able to drop his body upon the side of his horse at the instant he is passing, effectually screened from his enemies’ weapons as he lays in a horizontal position behind the body of his horse, with his heel hanging over the horse’s back; by which he has the power of throwing himself up again, and changing to the other side of the horse if necessary. In this wonderful condition, he will hang whilst his horse is at fullest speed, carrying with him his bow and his shield, and also his long lance of fourteen feet in length, all or either of which he will wield upon his enemy as he passes; rising and throwing his arrows over the horse’s back, or with equal ease and equal success under the horse’s neck.17
The Comanche were such expert riders that even the other Horse Nations referred to them as “the horse people.” They raided the Spanish mercilessly, in both New Mexico and Texas, sometimes taking as many as fifteen hundred horses at a time. Traveling light, they could strike from a hundred miles away, appear before anyone knew they were there, and disappear just as quickly. Though the plains were their empire, they struck as far as five hundred miles into Mexico and raided the coastal towns of Texas. In a typical raid in San Antonio observed by a French visitor in 1876, the Comanche made off with four hundred horses. Spanish troops pursued for “100 leagues,” only to have the Comanche ambush them and steal 150 more horses.
The only reason the Comanche allowed the Spanish to exist in the region, they liked to boast, was to raise more horses for them. The tribe had the power to toy with the Europeans in a way rarely seen among native groups. In 1813, thousands of Comanche warriors appeared in San Antonio demanding gifts. When the governor refused, the tribe destroyed every ranch on the San Antonio River and took all the area’s horses along the San Antonio River. Peace only came to the area a few years later, when there were no more horses to steal. Then the Comanche began selling horses back to the Spanish.
When the tribe was finally subdued, decades later, it was in large part because the US Cavalry captured, and immediately slaughtered, thousands of its horses.
Horses became more than just transportation; they were status and wealth, the currency of the plains that could be banked in the endless blonde grass. Young riders customized their horses like hotrods. The Cheyenne decorated them with buffalo or elk horns and red trade cloth. Sioux painted them with red ochre and slit their nostrils to make them breathe more freely. The Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne all had more than fifteen thousand horses each—about six horses per person. An “industrious” Comanche might own three hundred horses. As with all other kinds of wealth, some men amassed more than seems reasonable. One Crow chief claimed to have ridden off with five thousand Comanche horses in a single raid. A Blackfoot named Middle Sitter amassed more than five hundred and changed his name to Many Horses. A rich Ute chief was said to have more than eight hundred. When he died, his forty best horses were shot so they could accompany him in the afterlife.18
The constant raiding and breeding and trading spread horses across the West far more rapidly than they likely would have spread on their own. They were everywhere, and if they weren’t, men tried hard to get them there. Once the Horse Nations were established, wild horses were inevitable. In a land with no fences, horses were free to wander off and go wild. Horses were also set loose by constant raiding. When the governor of New Mexico launched a surprise attack on the Comanche at the base of what is now Pikes Peak in 1779, he drove off two thousand horses that escaped onto the plains. The Comanche later counterattacked and drove off two thousand Spanish horses.
Loose horses spread like tumbleweed through any terrain that was dry and open. They ranged from eastern Texas to California and up into Canada. According to early accounts, twenty thousand lived in the San Joaquin Valley, four thousand lived among the tribes on the Columbia River, and twenty thousand lived on the Snake River. On the grasses of south Texas, wild horse herds grew especially thick. In 1777, a missionary, on his way to San Antonio from Mexico City, noted that the wild horses “are so abundant that their trails make the country, utterly uninhabited by people, look as if it were the most populated in the world. All the grass on the vast ranges has been consumed by them, especially around the waterings.”19 The area became known as “The Mustang Desert.”
An American named Jacob Fowler traveled up the Arkansas River in 1821, abandoning a number of worn-out horses along the way. Near what is now Pueblo, Colorado, he was charged at full speed by a band of mounted Kiowa who flourished their bows and lances. After a brief parlay, the Kiowa invited him to their camp. The Arkansas River there, with its broad, grassy valleys and thick stands of cottonwoods, was a favorite wintering ground for the Horse Nations. There he discovered bands of Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Snake teepees with “about 20,000 horses.” The Comanche there boasted they had just stolen twenty-eight horses from a band of Crow they encountered. Later, a few of the men in Fowler’s expedition encountered these Crow, who said they had stolen two hundred horses from another tribe. As the Crow were explaining their raid to the hunters, some Arapaho attacked, riding off with a hundred of the horses. In the confusion, the Americans ran, leaving their nine horses loose on the plains. In the week the great camp was assembled, about five hundred horses were stolen, or perhaps went loose. No one seemed to know which.20
Tribes that owned thousands of horses often turned out worn-out mounts, planning to collect them later, but they never did. Storms and droughts scattered animals. There was also diseas
e. In 1837, smallpox nearly wiped out whole tribes, leaving herds to wander away.
But really, what made the spread of the horse in the West inevitable was the horse itself. In a very real sense, it was coming home to a place that its genes not only remembered but also had spent millions of years learning to master. Everything the horse needed to thrive immediately was already there when it stepped off the boat.
The first American to record seeing a wild horse was Captain Zebulon Pike. After being captured by the Spanish on an expedition in what is now Colorado, he was taken to Mexico City and, upon being released, started the long overland journey back to the United States in 1807. In Texas, he made several notes about wild horses, including one in which he saw “immense numbers of crossroads made by wild horses.” He was the first American to write the word mustang. On June 17, 1807, while riding through Texas, he wrote: “Passed through several herds of mustangs or wild horses.”21
But Pike was not the first—or the last—to comment on the vast number of mustangs. As a young lieutenant, Ulysses S. Grant rode a recently broken mustang through what is now southern Texas on his way to fight the Mexican army in 1846. Between the Nueces and the Rio Grande Rivers, he later wrote, his Army unit spotted “an immense herd”:
The country was a rolling prairie, and, from the higher ground, the vision was obstructed only by the earth’s curvature. As far as the eye could reach to our right, the herd extended. To the left, it extended equally. There was no estimating the number of animals in it; I have no idea that they could all have been corralled in the State of Rhode Island, or Delaware, at one time. If they had been, they would have been so thick that the pasturage would have given out the first day.22
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