SAND and SAGE - An Adventure About Horses

The Victors, a painting by Howard Terpning 

When I wrote SAND and SAGE, I had to imagine what it would have been like for the Plains Indians to first lay eyes on horses. To do this, I had to put myself in their shoes, I mean their moccasins. If I saw a horse for the very first time without any previous knowledge about horses, what would I think? Would I think it an elk? Or a 'big dog'? You can read SAND and SAGE to see how I handled the introduction of horses to at least one Indian tribe. In the meantime, here are some stories about horses coming to America. 

The Spaniards arrived on the southern plains of North America in the early 1500s and brought horses with them. Prior to that, there were no horses in North America! It was around 1531 when Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca roamed the plains of Texas and northern Mexico on horseback and it was around 1541 when another horse-riding explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, reached the great bend of the Arkansas River in central Kansas. Over the next century, the seed stock from these first Spanish horses grew and expanded geographically. 

So, how did the Plains Indians come to possess horses? The first few horses and mules may have been obtained from the Spaniards around 1600 by settlement Indians near Santa Fe, New Mexico who then traded horses to the various tribes in the area, including Ute, Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche. Horses gradually spread north onto the high plains of Wyoming and Montana. I am sure each tribe that came in contact with horses for the first time had a different impression. Please read on.  

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Most documented folklore from Plains Indians does not specify where and when they first obtained horses. Interviews by historians with tribe members in the early 1900s does not help much either. Many of the tribe members interviewed had a belief that horses had always been a part of their culture! Fortunately, for history's sake, there are a few documented accounts by Plains Indians that help to unravel the where and when of their first horse acquisitions.

According to Shimkin (reference available upon request), the first horses reached the Wind River and Big Horn Basins of Wyoming sometime between the years 1700 and 1740. It appears that the Shoshone Indians first obtained horses from their southern allies and relatives, the Utes and Comanche, and by the 1720s the Shoshone had become full-fledged, horse-mounted warriors. The Shoshones then traded some of their horses to the Crow and other northern plains Indian tribes and that's how horses spread (Secoy: reference available upon request). 

Decades later, the Plains Indians had become some of the greatest horse people the world has ever known. Horses changed the lives of the Plains Indians forever. Their entire lifestyles changed with horses. They could hunt bison on horseback and they could now move a greater amount of possessions from camp to camp. Previously, dogs were their only beasts of burden. READ SAND and SAGE for an adventure into the introduction of horses to the Plains Indians and how it changed their lives.   



Horse of a Different Color, a painting by Howard Terpning