and other imported diseases were a pathogenic firestorm that often made the conquest of the Americas easier for grasping colonists, not all invaders were so uniformly horrific for all Indians. In this regard, the horse was to some degree the counterpart of smallpox and other Eurasian diseases. The horse was a European import that revolutionized life for many Indians. There were few if any horses in Indian hands prior to the seventeenth century, when Indians took horses from the Spanish and converted them to their own use. In many places, the horse made Indians much more difficult to conquer. It allowed many Indians to move out on the Great Plains to hunt buffalo as a primary means of subsistence, a way of life that was much less alluring before horses converted sunlight and grass to speed and mobility. The ways that horses conveyed power and strength to Indians are suggested in the following account. Thomas James spent three years in the far Southwest in the early nineteenth century, at a time when Spain’s empire included a vast part of what would one day become most of the American Southwest. (In 1821, Spain had actually ceded this region to the newly independent republic of Mexico.) James’s encounter with Ute Indians, who had adapted the horse for their own hunting, raiding, and trading economy, suggests how tenuous Spanish control over this region actually was, and how Ute success with horse breeding and horse rearing contributed to a powerful sense of autonomy from the Spanish empire.
After reading this account, it becomes clear that invading biota do not always displace indigenous peoples, but rather become key to indigenous economy, politics, and identity.
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(Excerpt from Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans, 1846 edn. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1962.)
… In the latter part of February [1822] I received a deputation of 50 Indians from the Utah tribe on the west side of the mountains. They came riding into the city, and paraded on the public square, all well mounted on the most elegant horses I had ever seen. The animals were of a very superior breed, with their slender tapering legs and short, fine hair, like our best blooded racers. They were of almost every color, some spotted and striped as if painted for ornament. The Indians alighted at the Council House and sent a request for me to visit them. On arriving I found them all awaiting me in the Council House, with a company of Spanish officers and gentlemen led hither by curiosity. On entering I was greeted by the Chief and his companions, who shook hands with me. The Chief, whose name was Lechat, was a young man of about 30 and of a right Princely port and bearing. He told me in the Spanish language, which he spoke fluently, that he had come expressly to see me and have a talk with me. “You are Americans, we are told, and you have come from your country afar off to trade with the Spaniards. We want your trade. Come to our country with your goods. Come and trade with the Utahs. We have horses, mules, and sheep, more than we want. We heard that you wanted beaver skins. The beavers in our country are eating up our corn. All our rivers are full of them. Their dams back up the water in the rivers all along their course from the mountains to the Big water. Come over among us and you shall have as many beaver skins as you want.” Turning round and pointing to the Spaniards, in [a] most contemptuous manner and with a scornful look he said, “What can you get from these? They have nothing to trade with you. They have nothing but a few poor horses and mules, a little puncha, and a little tola (tobacco and corn meal porridge) not fit for any body to use. They are poor – too poor for you to trade with. Come among the Utahs if you wish to trade with profit. Look at our horses here. Have the Spaniards any such horses? No, they are too poor. Such as these we have in our country by the thousand, and also cattle, sheep, and mules. These Spaniards,” said he, turning and pointing his finger at them in a style of contempt which John Randolph would have envied, “what are they? What have they? They won’t even give us two loads of powder and lead for a beaver skin, and for a good reason they have not as much as they want themselves. They have nothing that you want. We have every thing that they have, and many things that they have not.” Here a Spaniard cried out: “You have no money.” Like a true stump orator the Utah replied, “and you have very little. You are depicca.” In other words you are poor miserable devils and we are the true capitalists of the country. With this and much more of the same purport, he concluded his harangue, which was delivered in the most independent and lordly manner possible. He looked like a King upbraiding his subjects for being poor, when they might be rich, and his whole conduct seemed to me like bearding a wild beast in his den. The “talk” being had, Lechat produced the calama or pipe, and we smoked together in the manner of the Indians. I sent to my store and procured six plugs of tobacco and some handkerchiefs, which I presented to him and his company, telling them when they smoked the tobacco with their Chiefs to remember the Americans, and treat all who visited their country from mine as they would their own brothers. The council now broke up and the Chief, reiterating his invitations to me to visit his country, mounted his noble steed, and with his company rode out of the city, singing and displaying the handkerchiefs I had presented them, from the ends of their lances as standards. They departed without the least show of respect for the Spaniards, but rather with a strong demonstration on the part of Lechat of contempt for them…
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John C. Ewers, “Horse Breeding”
The adoption of horses by Indians required large cultural changes. As they turned this new organism to their own use, they also changed their cultures and their ways of interacting with nature. A common misconception is that horses “ran wild” for the most part, and that some of these might have been caught and tamed by Indians, who otherwise had no horses unless they stole them from their enemies. Although some Indians did specialize in catching wild horses, and horse theft was a common way of gaining new animals, breeding horses from Indian herds was also widespread. In fact, the propagation of the horse throughout the Americas came about in part because Indians developed ways of breeding and rearing horses. In Montana, horses could not survive the winters without Indian caretakers to feed them and provide minimal shelter. In the 1950s, anthropologist John C. Ewers investigated traditions of horsecraft among the Blackfoot Indians of the northern Great Plains. Many of the men he interviewed were Piegan, a sub-tribe of the once-powerful Blackfoot Confederacy. Some of them had known the great horse trainers, horse catchers, and horse doctors of the 1850s–70s. What steps did Blackfoot horsemen take to differentiate their horses from their neighbors’ animals? How did they control horse breeding to maintain the best horse lines in their possession?
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(Reprinted from The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1955.)
Important Role of Horse Breeding
So much emphasis has been given in the literature to the more exciting topic of horse raiding as a source of Plains Indian wealth in horses that the subject of breeding horses has been neglected. In reality animals bred from their own herds comprised a goodly proportion of the horses owned by the Blackfoot in nineteenth-century buffalo days. If the increase of the Indians’ herds through breeding was not as great as that achieved by modern stockmen, we must remember that their herds were periodically reduced by destructive winter storms, diseases, animal predators, and other causes, as well as by theft on the part of enemy raiders. Had it not been for the breeding of their own herds, Blackfoot horse population surely would have shown a steady decrease during nineteenth-century buffalo days.
Blackfoot men differed markedly in the attention they gave to horse breeding and in the success they achieved in building up their herds thereby. It is noteworthy that those Piegan who were named by my informants as owners of the largest herds were also remembered as men who were especially successful in breeding horses. Stingy, the blind man, could not participate in horse raids, but he became one of the wealthiest Piegan horse owners through his skill in raising horses. Many Horses and Many-White-Horses were mentioned frequently in informants’ discussions of breeding practices. The Blackfoot believed that those men who were very successful in raising horses possessed a secret power that insured their success in that enterprise.
Blackfoot efforts in breeding generally were directed toward producing one or more of three qualities in colts. These were (1) a certain color, (2) large size, and (3) swiftness of foot. Although many of their methods hardly can be considered scientific, they