Chronicles: Wild horses changed the Great Plains
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Started by metmike - Nov. 1, 2020, 3:38 p.m.

Fascinating history!


https://www.lubbockonline.com/caprock-chronicles/news/2017-10-20/chronicles-wild-horses-changed-great-plains


Wild horses, usually called mustangs in the early days, produced on our region of the High Plains far-reaching changes that experts in natural and environmental history continue to evaluate.

The progeny of modern horses came with Spanish explorers, colonizers and ranchers beginning especially in the 16th century. Over time, they spread south through Central and South America and north through Mexico and into what became the American Southwest.

In the upper Rio Grande country of New Mexico, Spaniards with Pueblo labor grazed and used thousands of horses. Indians learned to ride them.

Then, in 1680 and afterward with the Pueblo Revolt, when Native Americans threw off Spanish rule and drove the Europeans temporarily out of New Mexico, horses spread.

Utes, Apaches and, after 1700, Comanches took horses, raised them, bred them and distributed them across the Great Plains and elsewhere. Horses came out of Texas, and eventually they spread from east of the Mississippi River.

Over time, mustangs multiplied in number. In important ways, they transformed, if tnot revolutionizeD, life for Plains Indians, many of whom became “horse Indians.” In our area, they were Comanches, Kiowas, Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos.

Horses made Plains Indians highly mobile. They changed the ways in which the Native Americans hunted bison. They became a measure of wealth.

Mustangs impacted the Great Plains in other ways. Horses, for example, competed with bison for forage. They needed to “winter” in the same canyons as bison. The first horses from Europe, as well as the earliest cattle and sheep, carried strange diseases to which bison had no immunity.

Southern Plains Indians, especially the Comanches and Kiowas, controlled large herds of mustangs. Some successful leaders might own 100 or more head.

Comanches and Kiowas, it has been written, refused to ride north to the “Grand Council” of peace between Plains Indians and government representatives at Horse Creek near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in 1851 because they were afraid northern tribesmen would steal their horses.

Travelers reported thousands of mustangs in Texas. As early as 1766, Juan Brebel reported that “from the Rio Azul (Blue River) upwards, on both sides of the Red River, there were innumerable quantities of wild horses.”

In 1805, Marin de Porras wrote of “the great herds and droves of wild horses and mares that are called mustangs here. They are found in herds of four to six thousand head.”

In 1840, George Bonnell said of horses in West Texas: “In these prairies it is not uncommon to see from fifteen hundred to two thousand wild horses in a drove.”

The same year, Francis Moore, Jr., wrote “Immense droves of mustangs ... are found in the western prairies.” He also he saw wild horses “moving in dense columns four or five miles long, and the horses are eight or ten abreast.”

The “tremendous tramping sound made by these large herds of mustangs,” Moore said, “is often heard (for) several miles, and resembles the sound of distant thunder.”

In 1856, Jack Burrows complained that mustangs stampeded droves of saddle horses he and his partners were driving from Mexico to Missouri. The mustangs, he wrote, “will come charging four or five hundred in a gang, and then the saddle horses have to suffer.”

Twenty years later ,there were still plenty of mustangs on the southern Great Plains. In 1877, bison hunters Johnny Cook and Sam Carr rode up on a herd in northern Martin County west of Sulphur Springs Creek and northwest of modern Big Spring.

The two men “had ascended a rise in the plain,” remembered Cook, when they saw “scattered over many thousands of acres of land ... bands of wild horses.” The animals, wrote Cook, “were ranging in unmolested freedom and in perfect quiet.”

The bison hunters, awed by the incredible scene, watched the horses for hours. “As evening came on,” Cook concluded, “young colts came running and frisking around in reckless abandon in their wild unfettered freedom.”

In 1900, mustangs remained in numbers large enough on the High Plains that Isham Tubbs, one of the principal founders of Lubbock, and his sons to augment their income “hunted,” or rounded up, the magnificent animals to sell them at markets.

The impact of wild horses on bison and other grazers on the southern plains must have been enormous — although perhaps hard to measure. Bison, as one example, grazed an area down hard, but they did not return to it again until it was, relative to other areas, the most luscious.

In competition with horses the ancient pattern broke down, and native grasses suffered as countless thousands of horses spread across bison grazing ground.

James Malin, a Kansas historian, in his remarkable study of the North American grasslands, writes about the impact, concluding: “In the long run the whole biological equilibrium was affected by the introduction of the horse factor.”

    


Comments
By GunterK - Nov. 1, 2020, 8:20 p.m.
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Great post!

I knew the basic story of the horse on this continent, but I didn't know there were so many of them.

By metmike - Nov. 1, 2020, 11:57 p.m.
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Thanks Gunter!