Ancestors

In Greek myth the winged horse Pegasus was actually ridden by the hero Bellerophon rather than by Perseus, yet Shakespeare’s words neatly capture the striking combination of supernatural power and tractability that is the horse. This chapter picks up these themes by developing three topics: it describes the evolution of the modern horse, Equus caballus, identifies key features of its biology relevant to subsequent discussions, and reviews the history of human–horse interaction in the Old World, emphasizing the horse’s domestication and subsequent spread. Horses and their relatives, the wild asses and zebras, were once seen as an almost paradigmatic example of how evolution works, although more recent research has shown that their history is more complex and multi-branched than originally thought. Along with tapirs and rhinoceroses, they belong to the taxonomic order Perissodactyla, the odd-toed division of the ungulates or hoofed mammals. The superficial similarities that they share with even-toed antelopes, which belong to the order Artiodactyla, are thus largely the result of evolution converging on similar body plans. In fact, some genetic studies suggest that perissodactyls are closer to carnivores than to the artiodactyls. Like modern tapirs and rhinoceroses, the earliest horses were three-toed, but for the past 40 million years or so all have borne their weight on just the third toe, with ligaments, rather than a fleshy pad, for support. Subsequently, the central metapodial (the bones connecting the digits to the wrist or ankle) was considerably elongated to form a long, slender lower limb and the second and fourth digits were minimized, though still giving support when galloping and jumping. Beginning around 10 million years ago, in the late Miocene period, the remaining side toes were reduced to splints and the animal’s weight came to be carried entirely on a single enlarged hoof. The first perissodactyls were browsers, not grazers. Some 45–34 million years ago, however, temperatures fell at higher latitudes and climate became more seasonal: successful ungulates evolved new adaptations, including the first appearance of both ruminants (which ferment their food in a specialized foregut) and new kinds of ancestral horses such as Mesohippus and its successor Miohippus.

Introducing Horse Nations

Hidden by rocks near a waterhole in Australia’s desert interior an Aboriginal woman and her children catch their first sight of the shockingly large animal of which they have previously only heard: the newcomer’s kangaroo. Thousands of kilometres to the west and high in southern Africa’s mountains a shaman completes the painting of an animal that does not exist, horned at the front, bushy tail at the rear, a composite of two species, one long familiar, the other new. Across the Atlantic Ocean on the grasslands of Patagonia the burial of an Aónik’enk leader is in its final stages, four of his favourite possessions killed above the grave to ensure his swift passage to the afterlife. To the north in what Americans of European descent call New Mexico, Diné warriors chant the sacred songs that ensure their pursuers will not catch them and that they will return safely home. And on the wintry plains of what is not yet Alberta, Siksikáwa hunters charge into one of the last bison herds they will harvest before the snows bring this year’s hunting to an end. Two things unite these very different scenes. First, though we cannot be sure, the historical, ethnographic, and archaeological sources on which they are based allow for them all happening on precisely the same day, sometime in the 1860s. Second, all concern people’s relationship with one and the same animal—pindi nanto, karkan, kawoi, ∤íí’, ponokáómita·wa—the animal that English speakers know as ‘horse’. And that simple fact provides the basis for this book. For, before 1492, horses were confined to the Old World—Europe, Asia, and Africa north of the tropical rainforests and a line reaching east through South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia to the sea. They were wholly unknown in Australasia, the Americas, or southern Africa. As a result, the relationships implied by the vignettes I have just sketched, as well as those involving Indigenous populations in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, and New Zealand, evolved quickly. And they were still evolving when these societies were finally overwhelmed by European colonization.

South America II: The Southern Cone

Taking in the Andean cordillera, the Pampas grasslands of Argentina and Uruguay, the desert steppes of southern Patagonia, and the temperate lowlands of south-central Chile (Araucanía), this chapter explores the horse’s arrival and impact in South America’s Southern Cone. Convention divides the Cone along the spine of the mountains between Chile and Argentina. To their east it contrasts the Pampas in the north with Patagonia in the south. I follow most recent scholarship in stressing the historical connections that such boundaries obscure. Similarly, I emphasize not only the acquisition of horses, but also the significance of hunting, taking, and trading feral livestock and the adoption of elements of food production. Both developments formed part of the inclusion of ‘free’ Native Americans within broader international political and commercial systems. At the same time, the work of anthropologists and the comments of contemporary European observers make the Southern Cone one of the most richly documented regions of all for studying the emergence of Horse Nations post-1492. The Southern Cone is environmentally far more complex than a simple tripartite classification into Araucanía, Patagonia, and Pampas suggests. In the north the Pampas reach to the Paraná and Salado drainages, to the south as far as the Río Colorado and its tributaries. They extend east to include Uruguay and the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul and in the west reach the Andean foothills. A basic division follows the 500 mm isohyet: to its west the Dry Pampa is increasingly water-deficient, while to the east the Humid Pampa ultimately benefits from as much as 800 mm of rain a year (Plate 23). The Uruguayan Savannah forms a third ecological subdivision that includes areas with palms and some forest enclaves. Generally, the Pampas comprise a gently sloping plain covered by extensive grasslands, but drier-adapted shrub occurs in the west and a wedge of forest penetrates their centre from the north. The Sierra de Tandilia and Sierra de la Ventana south of Buenos Aires are rare areas of higher relief. Climate is temperate, but surface water is often scarce, stone for tool-making rare, game dispersed.

North America II: The Central and Northern Plains

The Central and Northern Plains are home to many of the peoples popularly considered quintessential Native Americans. First brought to the widespread attention of Europeans and Euro-Americans as the ‘noble savages’ of nineteenth-century romantic paintings and travel accounts, they were later stereotyped in dime novels and Hollywood movies as an inconvenient—and ultimately removed—barrier to white expansion and settlement. Only relatively recently has that image given way to the more rounded, if still over-romanticized, one seen in films like Dances with Wolves. However, the extrapolation of Plains equestrian groups as a generalization for all Native Americans is not the reason to focus on them here. rather, it is because of the great wealth of evidence—ethnographic, historical, and archaeological—that relates to the impacts on them of the horse. Those impacts affected village-based farming communities along the Missouri river and its tributaries as well as the mobile societies of the open grasslands. Using evidence from both, I look at how having horses affected the ways in which people hunted bison, moved themselves and their goods, and structured their use of the landscape, as well as at how changing patterns of warfare and trade influenced the broader organization of society. These topics also relate to several broader issues. One is the relationship between the horse and two other agents of change: the spread of firearms and the involvement of Native peoples in trading furs and bison robes to Europeans. Another concerns the different responses to the horse by those who used it to enhance a mobile hunting way of life and those who sought to integrate it within an economy and social system in which horticulture and permanent settlements were paramount. A third relates to the ecological constraints on people’s ability to keep horses on the Plains: what were they? What was done to mitigate them? And how did they affect the region’s history between the initial acquisition of horses in the early 1700s and the loss of independence that followed the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and culminated with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890?

North America I: The Southwest and the Southern Plains

Ruled from Mexico City for about a century longer than they have thus far been from Washington, New Mexico and Arizona lie in what English speakers generally term ‘the Southwest’. I follow that usage here, even though calling them the ‘Northwest’ (of first colonial New Spain and then an independent Mexico) would, for this chapter’s purposes, be more accurate, as well as emphasizing that the cultural area to which their Indigenous inhabitants belonged extended across modern Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa, and Sonora. Together with the Southern Plains, to which trade links intimately tied it before and after Spanish arrival, the Southwest constituted the cradle within which the first Horse Nations of North America took shape. I start by highlighting key aspects of the two regions’ ecologies and prehistories. Next, I look at the horse’s impact on the Southwest’s settled farming peoples, particularly the Pueblos, many of whom came under Spanish rule after 1598. Its take-up by their Athapaskan-speaking neighbours, the Apache and Navajo, gives us our first view of how more mobile societies understood and used the horse, including—in the Navajo case—the development of a distinctive pastoralist way of life. Attention then turns to the Comanche, another pivotal player in the horse’s expansion across western North America, for whom it altered not just how they secured food, but also their social organization and entire economy. Trade—especially trade in horses—was critical in this, and so I end by examining the horse’s arrival among some of the Comanches’ trade partners, the village communities of the eastern edge of the Southern Plains, an area to which Native farmers-with-horses from the American South moved, and were forced to move, in the early 1800s. The Southwest is one of the driest parts of North America (Plate 4). Its climate is also strongly seasonal, with cold winters and hot summers. Major drainages are few: the Colorado in the west and northwest, southern Arizona’s Gila, the Río Grande, which snakes south through New Mexico and then along the present Texas/Mexico border, and the rivers draining into the Gulf of California from Mexico’s rugged Sierra Madre Occidental.

Putting Horse Nations in Context

Set against the millennia in which people have herded or hunted horses, the few centuries on which this book concentrates were short-lived. Only 350 years, or 14 human generations, passed between the Araucanians and Chichimecs first acquiring horses and the world-wide closure of colonial frontiers at the close of the nineteenth century. Yet in that time many different equestrian adaptations emerged. This chapter looks for patterning within them and sets out some of the directions in which future studies of Horse Nations might progress. It also draws parallels with the historical experience of equestrian nomads in Eurasia and the ethnically mixed cattle frontiers of Latin America, asks how far an equestrian way of life turned those who committed to it into pastoralists, and enquires into the circumstances—ecological and political—that favoured, or discouraged, the adoption of horses. Recognizing their agency, as well as that of people, it tries to gauge the importance of horses relative to other factors in the histories of the societies that adopted them, before asking where those Horse Nations are now. Having looked at four continents, four centuries, and well over forty Indigenous groups, what stands out is surely the diversity of Native societies that made horses their own. Employed to hunt deer to make European trousers in eighteenth-century Mississippi, on the North American Plains horses led to a wholesale reorganization of how people used bows and arrows to kill bison. In Patagonia, by contrast, where guanaco and rhea were the main prey, they encouraged that same technology to disappear, replaced by a much older weapons system, the bolas, while in southern Africa eland came to be killed with metal spears, not poisoned arrows. The variety of ways in which people hunted from horseback offer just one illustration of an unsurprising fact: not all Horse Nations were alike. Much the same can be said of the details of the equipment people employed to ride, or the variations in how they transported household possessions, and even houses: the travois, for example, was unique to the Plains and to nearby groups influenced by their inhabitants.

South America I: Caribbean Deserts and Tropical Savannahs

These two quotations, dating to within almost a decade of each other, refer to very different parts of South America, the first the La Guajira Peninsula at its northern tip, the second the savannahs of the Gran Chaco at its very heart. The Wayúu, dwelling in the first, had no direct connection with the Mbayá of whom Dobrizhoffer wrote here (though he is more famous for his work on their cousins, the Abipones). Nevertheless, both regions shared aspects of their respective experiences of colonial intrusion and settlement: the frequent adoption not just of horses but also of other exotic species like cattle and sheep; Spanish use of missionaries to try and pacify their Indigenous inhabitants; and the fact that the latter could play off one European power, or Spanish province, against another, thereby maintaining their own freedom of action. Aiding the Native peoples in this was their geographically, politically, and economically marginal position with respect to the main foci of colonial power in the Andes and along the Atlantic. Spain began exploiting Venezuela’s pearl fisheries as early as 1508, even settling on the mainland from 1522, but the real impetus to conquest in South America came only with Francisco Pizarro’s invasion of the Inka Empire in 1533. The highlands of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia (the latter never part of Inka domains), the lowlands between them and the Pacific Ocean, the northern half of Chile, and the northwestern corner of Argentina all passed quickly—if not always easily—under Spanish control. So too did parts of Paraguay, settled by following rivers inland from the Atlantic. Portugal, on the other hand, secured for herself the coast of Brazil, eventually expanding her reach across virtually the entire Amazon Basin. Horses were as much a part of the conquistadores’ repertoire in South America as in Mexico. They sowed panic when Pizarro first confronted Inka troops at Cajamarca in 1533, but Native American surprise and fear did not last. Inka armies quickly devised tactics to neutralize the effects of horses on the battlefield in vain efforts to expel the invader.

A Prodigal Return

It is one of the great ironies of history—equine and human—that the continent on which the horse was born was also the continent on which it died out. For after more than 40 million years, sometime between 12,000 and 7,600 years ago, the last truly wild horse in North America was no more. And yet, as it turned out, that animal’s last breath marked not an end, but only a hiatus, one that ended when Columbus—on his second trans-Atlantic voyage—brought horses to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. This chapter therefore looks at four interrelated questions: the initial arrival of people in the Americas over 13,000 years ago; the variety of horses that they encountered there; how far their interactions with those horses contributed to the latter’s extinction; and how the horse returned to North America following Columbus’s voyage. When, where, and how people first arrived in the Americas remain some of archaeology’s most hotly contested topics, but we do know that horses were there to welcome them. Before considering how these two different mammals—the bipedal newcomer and the quadrupedal native—interacted, we need to answer the questions with which this paragraph began. Almost certainly humans entered the Americas from Siberia: early settlers in the western Pacific reached no further east than the Solomon Islands, while arguments that eastern North America was reached from Europe by Upper Palaeolithic hunters moving by boat and across ice around the North Atlantic fly in the face of both technology and chronology. But if the ancestors of Native Americans did indeed arrive in the New World from Asia (something that all genetic analyses of both modern and ancient populations confirm), when and how did they do so? Until recently the archaeological consensus—especially among Anglophone scholars in North America—was that this occurred around 13,000 years ago and was effected by people taking advantage of the globally depressed sea levels of the Last Ice Age to cross the Bering Straits when they formed part of a much broader landmass, Beringia.

The Old World: Southern Africa and Australasia

So far we have seen how Indigenous societies in North and South America exploited the opportunities created by the horse’s reintroduction in the aftermath of Columbus’ voyage of 1492. But the Americas were not the only part of the world to which Europeans brought the horse. In southern Africa other members of the genus Equus, the plains and mountain zebras, were long established, but before European settlement the only animal ridden there—and then very little—was the ox. Australia, on the other hand, though rich in marsupials, had no purely terrestrial placental mammals except people and dogs. Finding a vacant ecological niche, horses and other animals introduced by Europeans quickly established themselves in the wild. Much the same holds for New Zealand, which had no mammals at all (save bats) until Polynesians settled it less than four hundred years before the first European visitor, Abel Tasman, in 1642. Southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand therefore all gave new, and different, opportunities to horses. How their Indigenous human populations interacted with the new arrival also varied. In southern Africa horses encountered some societies that had domestic livestock of their own, others who combined livestock with cereal cultivation, and yet others (those of greatest interest here) who were hunters and gatherers. In Australia, only the last of these variations was present, while in New Zealand, although most Māori did grow crops, dogs were the only domestic animals. The first Europeans to visit southern Africa were the Portuguese. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 they completed the circumnavigation of the continent’s southern tip ten years later to reach India. Portugal did not, however, establish settlements in what eventually became South Africa, preferring to sail round it to reach Mozambique. For over a century its disinterest was shared by the other Europeans who occasionally used Cape Town’s Table Bay or other spots along the coast to take on fresh water or trade for livestock from Indigenous Khoe herders.

North America III: West of the Rockies

This chapter looks at three more regions of North America: the Columbia Plateau and adjacent areas of the Pacific Northwest Coast; the Great Basin; and California. It also focuses on three main themes: the development of new identities as many groups adapted aspects of the lifestyle and customs of those on the Plains and more coherent tribal entities emerged; raiding for captives; and raiding for horses. A fourth topic, which casts these into relief, is why some groups rejected the horse, or chose to adopt it very late in their history. The Great Basin was the first of the three areas to receive the horse. It is an arid region of desert, salt lakes, and mountains where rainfall is unpredictable and low, but increases eastward (Plate 15). Except for the Colorado along its southern edge and the headwaters in the rockies of streams draining towards the Missouri, none of its rivers reach the sea. Fremont farmers had once made a living across Utah, but by the 1600s cultivation was restricted to a few groups in the south and west. Elsewhere, the Basin’s inhabitants depended entirely on hunting and gathering, though strategies like burning enhanced the productivity of wild plants and game. Very broadly, two subsistence patterns were followed: one emphasized fish and waterfowl around wetlands, the other a more mobile, broadly based foraging economy in deserts and mountains in which pine nuts (piñons), grass seeds, rabbits, and larger game were important. Except for the Washoe near Lake Tahoe in eastern California, all the region’s historic inhabitants spoke Numic languages. Major groups included Utes in the southeast, Shoshones in the north and centre, and Paiutes in the west and southwest. To the north of the Great Basin lies the Plateau, centred on the Columbia River and its tributaries, which collectively send their waters into the Pacific Ocean (Plate 16). Coniferous forest covers its northern and eastern parts (including several ranges running parallel to but west of the Rockies), but the drier, hilly country of Oregon and eastern Washington is more steppe-like, with sagebrush common and trees more localized.