The Horse: Its Return and the Horse Nations

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented fact = archaeological, archival, or published scholarship (Sources). Tradition — the people's own account = Indigenous oral history / tribal-nation teaching, labelled as such. Debated / Claim = disputed point, printed as a sourced range or disagreement. No ceremonial or restricted content is described. Scope note: the horse in North America — evolution, extinction, Spanish return, and adoption people by people, each practice named to its people.

1. An American Animal, Then an Absence

• Evolution here. Documented fact: the horse family evolved principally in North America over roughly 55 million years, from small multi-toed Eohippus of the Eocene, through three-toed Mesohippus, to single-toed Equus (c. 4–5 million years ago), which spread to other continents over the Bering land bridge (American Museum of Natural History horse-evolution literature; Hoganson, North Dakota Geological Survey, n.d.).
• Extinction. Documented fact, detail debated: horses lived alongside the first peoples of the Americas, then disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene. Syntheses place the last well-dated horses at roughly 10,000–11,000 years ago, youngest cited date 10,370 ± 350 years ago (McFadden, Florida Museum; Guthrie, 2006, Nature 441); Taylor et al. (2023) note imperfect dating. Debated / Claim: cause — climate change, human hunting, or both — is unresolved (Guthrie, 2003, 2006).
• The long absence. Documented fact: no accepted evidence places horses in the Americas between that extinction and 1493. Plains transport rested on the dog travois (Ewers, 1955; Wissler, 1914) — the foundation the horse enlarged (§5).

2. The Spanish Return, 1493–1598

• 1493. Documented fact: horses returned with Columbus's second voyage, imported from Spain to the West Indies (Denhardt, 1947, The Horse of the Americas).
• 1519. Documented fact: horses reached the mainland with Cortés, who by about 1525 had imported enough stock for a breeding nucleus in Mexico (Denhardt, 1947).
• 1540–42, Coronado. Documented fact: Coronado reached the Plains of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas with hundreds of horses — one documentary count gives 558, only two identified as mares (Flint, 2008). The Plains peoples he met, Querechos and Teyas (ancestral Apache groups in the Spanish accounts), travelled on foot with dog travois and had not seen horses (Castañeda, in Winship, 1896). Debated / Claim, now largely rejected: descent from horses lost by Coronado or de Soto is improbable — almost no mares, and surviving horses are accounted for (Denhardt, 1947; Roe, 1955).
• 1598, Oñate. Documented fact: self-sustaining breeding in the present southwestern U.S. begins with Juan de Oñate's colonisation of New Mexico in 1598, from whose stock the herds grew rapidly (Denhardt, 1947). Later southeastern herds are traced to western, not Florida, stock (Denhardt, 1947).

3. Under Spanish Rule; A Spread Earlier Than the Books Said

• Documented fact: Spanish policy forbade Indigenous ownership or riding in New Mexico, yet Pueblo labourers herded Spanish stock, and Apache and Navajo (Diné) people obtained horses by raid and trade through the 1600s (Roe, 1955; Hämäläinen, 2008). Horses moved by trade, raid, gift, capture and escape throughout.
• The 2023 revision. Documented fact: a study of 33 early specimens — DNA, radiocarbon, isotopes and skeletal evidence, with Lakota, Comanche and Pawnee collaborators among 80-plus authors — found Spanish-sourced horses integrated into Indigenous societies by the first half of the 17th century, with pre-1680 specimens from Blacks Fork, Wyoming; the Kaw River, Kansas; Paa'ko, New Mexico; and American Falls, Idaho (c. 1597–1657) (Taylor et al., 2023, Science 379: 1316–1323).
• Tradition — the people's own account: Comanche historian and co-author Jimmy Arterberry: "We have always known and said that we came across horses before we came across the Spanish" (quoted in Associated Press / National Science Foundation coverage of Taylor et al., 2023).

4. 1680: The Pueblo Revolt as the Great Dispersal

• Documented fact: on 10 August 1680 the Pueblos, coordinated under Po'pay (Popé), rose together, besieged Santa Fe and drove some 2,000 colonists to El Paso; about 400 Spaniards, including 21 friars, were killed in commonly cited counts, and Spain stayed out for twelve years, until 1692 (Kessell, 1979; Liebmann, 2012, Revolt).
• Documented fact: the retreating colonists left behind, and the Pueblos seized, large numbers of horses — the largest single release of Spanish stock, treated by older histories as the start of the spread (Roe, 1955; Denhardt, 1947). After Taylor et al. (2023): 1680 massively accelerated a dispersal already under way; it did not begin it.
• Aftermath. Documented fact: by the late 1600s Spanish and French records show horses among Apache, Navajo (Diné) and Ute peoples; by 1690, at the mouth of the Colorado River of Texas and in numbers among the Caddo of eastern Texas (Haines, 1938, American Anthropologist 40; Roe, 1955).

5. People to People, c. 1680–1770

Dates are first sightings or estimates; archaeology now runs earlier in several regions (Taylor et al., 2023).

• Shoshone, by c. 1700: horses via Ute trade; they became the great traders and raiders carrying horses to the Plateau and northern Plains (Haines, 1938; Secoy, 1953). Documented fact.
• Comanche (Numunuu), early 1700s: entering Spanish notice in New Mexico in 1706 already acquiring horses; by the 1730s they had displaced most Apache groups south of the Arkansas River, their trade fairs dispersing horses further (Hämäläinen, 2008). Documented fact.
• Central Plains, 1719–24: Du Tisné found 300 horses among the Wichita in 1719; Bourgmont could buy only seven, at a high price, from the Kaw in 1724 — present, but scarce and valuable (Haines, 1938). Documented fact.
• Plateau and Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), c. 1730s: horses via Shoshone trade; tribal teaching and the University of Idaho programme place arrival on the camas prairies in the 1730s (Shebala interviews, 2001–02, University of Idaho). See §7. Documented fact.
• Cheyenne / Lakota: the Cheyenne acquired horses in the early-to-mid 1700s — by trade, stray capture or combat; sources do not settle which — and are thought to have passed horse culture to Lakota bands, perhaps c. 1730 in one estimate (Moore, 1996). Lakota winter counts then record captures as headline events, e.g. 70 horses from the Crow in 1822. Documented fact, route debated.
• Crow (Apsáalooke): horses in the early 1700s from Plateau trade; among the largest per-capita wealths on the northern Plains (Hoxie, 1995). Documented fact.
• Blackfoot (Niitsitapi), c. 1730: Blackfoot accounts tell they first saw horses with raiding Shoshone ("Snake") enemies, acquiring their own by capture and trade c. 1730 via Shoshone, Kutenai and Crow intermediaries (Ewers, 1955). By 1787 David Thompson recorded mounted, gun-armed Blackfoot driving the Shoshone from their northern range — Secoy's (1953) horse-from-the-south meeting gun-from-the-northeast. Documented fact / Tradition.
• By c. 1770: the mounted bison world ran from Saskatchewan nearly to the Rio Grande, and horses had spread to Cayuse, Yakama, Palouse, Salish and other Plateau peoples (Haines, 1938; Roe, 1955). Documented fact.

6. Work, Gear, Training, Wealth and Play, c. 1770–1860

• Travois. Documented fact: the dog travois — poles lashed in an A, apex on the dog's shoulders — carried roughly 60–90 pounds (Henderson, 1994, Plains Anthropologist 39; Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, "Travois"). The horse travois, scaled up on a woman's saddle, carried several times the load, larger tipis, and children or ill adults on the load rack (Wissler, 1914).
• Names. Linguistic record: the horse was named from the dog it succeeded — Lakota šúŋkawakȟáŋ, "sacred / mysterious dog"; Blackfoot ponokáomitaa, "elk dog" (Ewers, 1955; NMAI, 2011).
• Gear. Documented fact: the everyday bridle was a rawhide thong around the lower jaw ("war bridle"), riding often bareback or on a stuffed hide pad. Frame saddles of wood or elkhorn in shrinking rawhide followed Spanish models but were Indigenous-built; women's saddles carried high Spanish-derived pommel and cantle; stirrups were rawhide-bound wood; parfleches and war-horse regalia were Indigenous manufactures (Wissler, 1914; Ewers, 1955; NMAI, 2011).
• Training — Blackfoot, as recorded. Documented fact: Ewers's informants described several first-riding methods: a held horse, war bridle slipped in, a third man mounting; "front-footing" (front feet roped, horse thrown, rider seated as it rose); front-footing with a hind leg drawn forward against kicking; and blindfolding until seated (Ewers, 1955). In the surcingle method a band around the belly enclosed the rider's knees; he rode daily until quiet — "it often took three days … before the horse was ready for the saddle" (Ewers, 1955). Travois horses progressed from dragging a weighted buffalo hide, to crossed poles, to the real travois (Ewers, 1955).
• Gentling alongside "breaking." Documented fact: the record also carries gradual handling and first rides in deep water or sand, where a horse could not buck effectively (Ewers, 1955; Roe, 1955; True West, 2009 — weakest link, flagged). Both exhausting rides and patient gentling are documented; neither single popular image holds.
• Specialists. Documented fact: the buffalo runner "could be trained to ride right into the stampeding buffalo herd" (Emil Her Many Horses, Oglala Lakota, NMAI, 2011); the war horse, picketed at its owner's tipi, answered a call and tolerated a rider swinging beneath its neck in battle (Ewers, 1955; Catlin, 1841). Blackfoot children rode from infancy (Ewers, 1955).
• Wealth and raiding. Documented fact: horses were the chief measure of wealth, bride-wealth and trade currency. One estimate averages c. 35 horses and mules per 19th-century Comanche and Kiowa family, six or seven sufficing for work — the surplus was the wealth (Wallace & Hoebel, 1952, in Hämäläinen, 2008). Blackfoot prestige rested as much on giving horses away as holding them (Ewers, 1955). Horse-taking — parties on foot cutting prized horses from beside enemy tipis at night, takings entered in winter counts, horses often given to the poor and elderly — was honoured, and symmetrically the horse nations' great vulnerability (Ewers, 1955; Grinnell, 1915).
• Racing and games. Documented fact: racing was a major sport and gambling venue at Plains and Plateau gatherings (Ewers, 1955). Modern Indian Relay — a bareback rider leaping between fresh horses held by his team — is presented as growing from those traditions, accounts differing by tribe (Old Elk, Crow, 2017). Tradition / Debated in detail.

7. The Nimiipuu, Selective Breeding and the Appaloosa

• Documented fact: the Nimiipuu of the Wallowa, Clearwater and Palouse country gelded inferior stallions, culled stock and bred for conformation, endurance, disposition and, in part of the herd, spotted coats, when most peoples bred largely unselected herds (Haines, 1938; Roe, 1955; Appaloosa Horse Club, n.d.). Lewis, at the Clearwater, 15 February 1806: their horses "appear to be of an excellent race: they are lofty, elegantly formed, active and durable" (Moulton, ed., Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition).
• The name. Documented fact: settlers' "a Palouse horse," after the Palouse River, slurred into "Appaloosa" (Appaloosa Horse Club, n.d.). The spotted share is Debated / Claim — a repeated estimate of c. ten percent, not a count.
• 1877. Documented fact: the non-treaty Nimiipuu fled Army pursuit over c. 1,100–1,500 miles (totals differ) toward Canada with, commonly cited, c. 2,000 horses, surrendering at the Bear Paw, c. 40 miles from the border, in October 1877 (Josephy, 1965; Nez Perce National Historical Park, NPS). The herd was confiscated, sold, in part shot and dispersed; the people were exiled; old-line breeding ended (Josephy, 1965).
• 1938. Documented fact: the Appaloosa Horse Club was chartered at Moscow, Idaho, in 1938 by non-Nimiipuu breeders; the breed became Idaho's state horse in 1975 (Appaloosa Horse Club, n.d.). The modern breed, admitting Thoroughbred, Quarter Horse and Arabian crosses, is a revival, not the unchanged 1806 herd.
• The tribe's return. Documented fact: the Tribe's Young Horsemen programme and Nez Perce Horse Registry — 1998 in the University of Idaho account, 1995 in some retellings (flagged) — cross Appaloosa mares with Akhal-Teke stallions to produce the Nez Perce Horse (Nimíipuu Sik'em), recovering the historic type rather than claiming to be it (Shebala interviews, 2001–02).

8. Horse Medicine, and the Destruction Era

• Horse medicine — published record only. Documented fact: scholarship records that Plains peoples saw human and animal health as closely related, preventive care overlapping in principle — feeding, rest, grooming, cottonwood bark as emergency winter forage, prized horses sheltered in severe weather (Lawrence, 1998; Ewers, 1955). Ewers documents castration of stallions not kept for breeding, and rawhide shoes for rocky ground (Ewers, 1955). Plant remedies and ceremonial curing are community-held, in print only in fragments; this entry records only that such traditions exist. Caution: the historical record is not proof of clinical effectiveness. No dosages, preparation quantities, treatment instructions or health claims are given; nothing here is medical or veterinary advice.
• Palo Duro Canyon, 28 September 1874. Documented fact: in the Red River War, Col. Mackenzie's 4th Cavalry surprised Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne winter camps in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, burned camp and supplies, and captured c. 1,400 horses, of which c. 1,000 — the best kept — were shot in Tule Canyon (Texas Historical Commission, Marker 5290, 1967; TSHA). Other accounts give 1,048–1,100+ killed (flagged). Without transport or food, the southern bands came into Fort Sill and Fort Reno within months (TSHA).
• A pattern. Documented fact: Army columns repeatedly killed captured herds, as after the Washita (1868), where Custer's command shot the captured Cheyenne pony herd in its own reports; reservation policy restricted horse-holding, and bison destruction removed the herds' foundation (Utley, 1967; 1973). The NMAI calls the height "brilliant but brief, lasting just over a century" (NMAI, 2011).

9. Continuance: Mustangs and Tribal Programmes Today

• Mustangs. Documented fact: free-roaming herds of Spanish, ranch and cavalry descent (from mesteño) were driven down by commercial capture until the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 (Public Law 92-195) protected them on federal lands under the BLM and Forest Service, as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West" (16 U.S.C. §§ 1331–1340). Numbers and management today are Debated / Claim; no position is taken here. Tribal herds are tribally managed, outside the Act (Colorado State University Extension, 2024).
• Tribal programmes. Documented fact: the Nimiipuu Young Horsemen teach youth c. 13–21 horsemanship (§7); Crow Fair, recorded by the Smithsonian as typically involving over 2,000 horses, centres on parades and giveaways of horses as honour; the Lakota Oomaka Tokatakiya (Future Generations Ride), a two-week, c. 300-mile ride, grew from healing rides honouring those killed at Wounded Knee (NMAI, 2011). Indian Relay runs under governing associations across the northern Plains and Plateau (Old Elk, 2017).
• Tradition — the people's own account: "For some Native peoples, the horse still is an essential part of daily life… The Horse Nation continues to inspire" (Emil Her Many Horses, Oglala Lakota, in NMAI, 2011). Several peoples name the horse a nation in its own right — the Horse Nation.

Sources

• Appaloosa Horse Club (n.d.). Breed history; "About Us."
• Catlin, George (1841). Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians.
• Colorado State University Extension (2024). "The History of Wild Horses & Burros in Colorado and the American West."
• Denhardt, Robert M. (1947). The Horse of the Americas. University of Oklahoma Press.
• Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (n.d.). "Travois." University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
• Ewers, John C. (1955). The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture. Smithsonian, BAE Bulletin 159.
• Flint, Richard (2008). Coronado expedition documentary edition.
• Grinnell, George Bird (1915). Blackfoot Lodge Tales.
• Guthrie, R. Dale (2003). Nature 426; (2006). Nature 441: 207–209.
• Haines, Francis (1938). "The Northward Spread of Horses among the Plains Indians." American Anthropologist 40: 429–437.
• Hämäläinen, Pekka (2008). The Comanche Empire. Yale University Press.
• Henderson, Norman (1994). Plains Anthropologist 39: 145–159.
• Hoganson, John W. (n.d.). Fossil-horse interpretation, North Dakota Geological Survey.
• Hoxie, Frederick E. (1995). Parading Through History. Cambridge University Press.
• Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. (1965). The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Yale University Press.
• Kessell, John L. (1979). Kiva, Cross, and Crown. National Park Service.
• Lawrence, Elizabeth Atwood (1998). Agriculture and Human Values 15(2): 133–138.
• Lewis, Meriwether (1806). Journal, 15 Feb. 1806, in Moulton, ed., Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
• Liebmann, Matthew (2012). Revolt. University of Arizona Press.
• Moore, John H. (1996). The Cheyenne. Blackwell.
• National Museum of the American Indian (2011). A Song for the Horse Nation (curator Emil Her Many Horses, Oglala Lakota).
• Nez Perce Horse Registry / Shebala, Rudy (interviews 2001–02). University of Idaho, Nimiipuu L3. cdil.lib.uidaho.edu.
• Old Elk, Hunter (Crow) (2017). "Indian Relay." Buffalo Bill Center of the West.
• Roe, Frank Gilbert (1955). The Indian and the Horse. University of Oklahoma Press.
• Secoy, Frank Raymond (1953). Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains. AES Monograph 21.
• Taylor, William Timothy, et al. (2023). "Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies." Science 379: 1316–1323.
• Texas Historical Commission (1967). Marker 5290, "The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon"; TSHA, Handbook of Texas.
• Utley, Robert M. (1967). Frontiersmen in Blue; (1973). Frontier Regulars.
• Wallace, Ernest & Hoebel, E. Adamson (1952). The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains. University of Oklahoma Press.
• Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act (1971). Public Law 92-195; 16 U.S.C. §§ 1331–1340.
• Winship, George Parker, ed. (1896). The Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542. BAE.
• Wissler, Clark (1914). North American Indians of the Plains. American Museum of Natural History.

Flagged claims / weakest-sourced points: (1) Extinction date/cause — c. 10,000–11,000 years ago, imperfectly dated; cause unresolved. (2) Oñate head-counts in popular literature rest on secondary summaries, not asserted; 1598 is solid (Denhardt, 1947). (3) Cheyenne-to-Lakota "c. 1730" is a single estimate; route debated. (4) Deep-water first rides — crispest statement found is secondary (True West, 2009); §6 leans on Ewers (1955). (5) Nimiipuu spotted share (c. 10%) is an estimate, not a count. (6) 1877 mileage 1,100–1,500 range; "c. 2,000 horses" commonly cited, not verified. (7) Palo Duro: marker c. 1,000 killed of c. 1,400 captured; others 1,048–1,100+. (8) Registry year: 1998 (Univ. of Idaho) vs. 1995 in some retellings.