Ep. 11: Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses

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Speaker 1: Simultaneous with the appearance of the United States in the advance of its frontier westward to the Mississippi River, and intriguing trade developed around vast herds of horses that had become wild in the West, an animal economy that outlasted the fur trade but collapsed in the nineteen twenties in the face of modernity. I’m Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot Com. Enjoy responsibly bringing home all the pretty horses. In the summer of eighteen thirty four, two years after his famous adventure painting the tribes of the Missouri River and Northern Plains, artists George Catlan got his first opportunity to portray the counterpoint world the southern Plains of what is now western Oklahoma. Fate and luck offered Catlan a singular chance to see firsthand the similarities and differences between these two regions of the early nineteenth century American West. On the Missouri, Catlan had traveled and lived with fur traders from the big companies, and had duly painted and mourned the great destruction then underway there on the southern prairies. However, the artists saw relatively little of the American economic engines that were destroying so many ecologies in the northern West. On these southern prairies, it was not fur bearers, but an altogether different animal that caught his atte traveling in the vicinity of the Wichita Mountains that summer of eighteen thirty four. This was how he described his impressions. The tract of country over which we passed is stocked not only with buffaloes, but with numerous bands of wild horses, many of which we saw every day Catlan went on. The wild horse of these regions is a small but very powerful animal, with an exceedingly prominent eye, sharp nose, high nostril, small feet, and delicate leg, and undoubtedly have sprung from a stock introduced by the Spaniards. No other denizen of the plains is so wild and so sagacious as the horse Catlan rode. So remarkably keen is their eye that they will generally run at the site when they are a mild, distant, and when in motion, will seldom stop short of three or four miles. Like many others, the artists was struck with the beauty of the horse in its wild state. Some were milk white, some jet black, others were sorrel and bay and cream color, and many were an iron gray, and others were pied, containing a variety of colors on the same animal. Their manes were profuse and hanging in the wildest confusion over their necks and faces, and their long tails swept the ground interestingly. At almost the same point in time, back in the horse country of Kentucky, John James Audubon, Catlan’s fellow painter, wrote that he’d become acquainted with a man who had just returned from the country in the neighborhood of the headwaters of the Arkansas River, where he’d obtained from the O Sages a recently captured four year old wild horse named Barrow. While the little horse was by no means handsome, as Ottoman said, and had cost only thirty five dollars in trade goods, Ottobon was intrigued enough to try him out. He proved a delight. He had a sweet gait that covered forty miles a day. He leapt over woodland logs as lightly as an elk, was cautious, but a quick study in new situations, and strong and fearless when coach to swim the Ohio River. He was steady when birds flushed, and Audobon shot them from the saddle to top. All he left a superb three hundred dollars horse in the dust. Audoban quickly bought barrel for fifty dollars silver, and, gloating over his discovery, concluded that the importation of horses of this kind from the Western prairies might improve our breeds generally. With an audition like barrows, one is tempted to say, no kidding. But what intrigues me most about Cantlon’s and Audobon’s wild horse epiphanies is that they seemed almost clueless about a phenomenon that had been underway in the West for almost two centuries. Simultaneous with the evolution of the fur trade in the northern West, the wild horse herds of the Great Plains had generated an economy of capture in trade that had transformed the native world. It had dominated much of the Western trade. In European settlements from Louisiana to California since the seventeen eighties, and wild horses from herbs like those Catlan saw had been driven up the Natchez Trace to markets in Kentucky and the South at least since seventeen ninety. That neither of these artists seemed aware of this speaks volumes about the underground character of the early horse trade in the West, which was never a corporate venture like the fur trade, but usually carried out by private, independent mustangers. That word an English garbling of the Spanish mestanio. The presence of wild horses in the West first drew the attention of most Americans with Louisiana purchase. By then, wild horses had been running free in the California valleys, in the deserts of the Southwest, and especially on the Great Plains for many decades, But as was true of so many aspects of the West, it was Thomas Jefferson, during the years when he was serving as Vice President in the Adams administration, who was the first American to understand that horses had become a part of the natural history and economy of the West. In his conversations about the West, with his informants. In seventeen ninety eight, Jefferson began to hear stories about an intriguing individual known as the Mexican Traveler. The Traveler’s real name was Philip Nolan, and he was an American adventurer who Jefferson discovered had journeyed numerous times into the unknown Southwest, returning driving herds of captured and traded horses into Louisiana and then up the Natchezt Trace to the horse markets of Kentucky. Jefferson was fascinated. He wanted to know more. The image that emerges from his queries is of a shadowy character, a literate, athletic, and adventurous young man who was confident enough in his abilities to attempt things no one else had tried. The Mississippi scientist, Sir William Dunbar knew Nolan, and he told Jefferson he thought the young man lacked sufficient education and was flawed by eccentricities many and great, as Dunbar put it. Nevertheless, he added, Nolan was not destitute of romantic principles of honor, united to the highest personal courage. Other informant, a lawyer in New Orleans, told Jefferson that, in his opinion, Nolan was an extraordinary character, one whom nature seems to have formed for enterprises at which the rest of mankind are incapable. As early as seventeen ninety, Jefferson learned, when Nolan was barely twenty, he had embarked on a two year journey into the West, ultimately meeting and traveling with Wichitas and Comanches, and giving those tough appraisers of human nature a quite favorable early impression of Americans. On this trip, Nolan apparently journeyed all the way to New Mexico, meanwhile learning that the numerous Southern Plains tribes were dissatisfied with Spanish trade and hoped to replace their former trade partners the French, with a new source of guns and European goods. The Osages from farther east were enemies of these Western groups, and making every effort to block traders from Saint Louis from contacting the tribes of the Deep Plains. Nolan had in mind addressing that opening from a different direction. What really caused Jefferson’s attention, though, was that Nolan had not returned from the West with the usual Indian processed firs. It was horses he had brought back from these forays, some of them wild ones that he and his associates had captured. Nolan himself told his friends that he found the savage life less praising in practice than speculation. I could not indianfy my heart, he said. But he had gone on a second expedition into the Deep Plains in seventeen ninety four, and a third one in seventeen ninety six. He returned with two hundred and fifty horses in seventeen ninety six drove them to Frankfurt, Connecticut, and that had brought Nolan and his horses to the attention of important people who now invested in him. So, in seventeen ninety seven, packing seven thousand dollars worth of trade goods and with what he said were twelve good rifles and but one coward, he launched a fourth expedition. When he returned in seventeen ninety eight, he was driving a herd, some estimated at twenty five hundred animals, some of which brought one hundred and fifty dollars a piece in Kentucky. At this point in Nolan’s career, he found a letter awaiting him, requesting natural history information on Western horses at the only moment in the age of the world, it read when the horse might be studied in its wild state. Those words were from Vice President Thomas Jefferson, who wanted badly to have a conversation with Nolan about the West. So Jefferson wrote a follow up letter, telling Nolan he very much wanted to purchase one of those Western horses, which I am told are so remarkable for the singularity and beauty of their colors and forms. According to several informants, young Nolan and an inhabitant of the Western country, a master of the fascinating language of Indian hand signs, who was probably the same Joseph Talapoon who would go west with Anthony Glass, departed for Virginia in eighteen hundred with a fine paint stallion for Jefferson. Somehow, though neither Nolan nor the paint horse ever got to Monticello. I’m tempted to guess that somewhere along the way Nolan lost jefferson stallion on a bet or in a game of chance. So the West’s Mexican traveler stood up the man about to be elected the third president of the United States. Nolan was now in preparation for a fifth and his fate would have it final expedition to the Although he claimed that I have long been tired of wild horses, the money was just too good. This time he took two dozen men and a large quantity of goods, but by now Spanish officials had grown increasingly alarmed at Nolan’s trips. In the seventeen eighties, Spain had proclaimed wild horses and her territories government property, and had placed at tax on captured animals. That meant that any horses Nolan captured or traded for would be illegal contraband. Yet by December of eighteen hundred, the party was far out on the southern plains and what seems to have been Nolan’s favorite mustanging country, the Grand Prairie, southwest of today’s Fort Worth. There they built corrals and started capturing wild bands, but in March of eighteen oh one, Indian scouts for a Spanish force sent out to arrest Nolan located them. When Nolan refused to surrender, the Spaniards attacked, killing Nolan and capturing more than a dozen of his men. At the age of thirty one the Mexican travelers pre Lewis and clark adventures in the West were over. Thomas Jefferson never got to understand what deep time science and history have now told us about the West’s wild horses. It’s a story that commences with an irony. Old worlders understood that their ancestors had brought the horse to the Americas, and that, after initial fear of it, indigenous peoples in both North and South America had adopted the animal into their lives, where it had revolutionized their cultures. Yet in the depths of time lay a surprising story. Horses are actually evolutionary natives of North America. Their ancestors had begun their into the modern horse on this continent fifty seven million years earlier, after a vast presence where horses were found from Alaska to Florida. The irony deepened profoundly by eight thousand years ago, horses so similar to the modern version that palaeontologists have difficulty telling them apart unaccountably when extinct throughout the Americas. Meanwhile, the horses that had migrated from America into Africa, Asia, and Europe survived to become domesticated by humans. Four to six thousand years ago. So the barb horses that danced and nickered beneath the Spaniards were ancient American horses, their zebra like legs and dorsal backstripes still intact. Now they had returned to their evolutionary homeland, except it was a homeland with many of their Pleistocene predators gone. This, this big history, is why horses were so successful in going wild in the West. By the sixteen fifties, the Southwest Native peoples were riding horses into the very landscapes that had shaped horses hoofs, teeth, and behavioral patterns for millions of years. When the Pueblo Indians sixteen eighty revolt liberated Spanish livestock in and around Santa Fe, horses and horse culture famously made their way decade by decade to tribes northward up the Rockies. But in the chaos, many animals also ran loose into the country. Meanwhile, in Texas, the Spanish Franciscans often turned surplus mission livestock out into the wild, so by seventeen fifteen, from Texas to New Mexico, the whole country featured wild horses. Rapidly replicating Pleistocene America. Three quarters of a century later, the same fine dominon was underway in California. By the time Americans were eyeing the West, across the region’s southern latitudes, wild horse herds had become enormous. A Spanish bishop in Texas road in eighteen oh five that everywhere he traveled there were great herds of horses and mares found close to the roads, and herds of four to six thousand by eighteen hundred. Residents of California’s missions and presidios, having had virtually no horses in the seventeen seventies, regarded escaped horses in the surrounding countryside as such threats to grass and water that they shot them on sight. On the Great Plains, wildhorses now struck observers as an iconic experience of the region. One traveler was stunned to see that, as he put it, the prairie near the horizon seemed to be moving with long undulations, like the way waves of an ocean. Then realized that the ocean waves were actually herds of mustangs blanketing the entire prairie. Another wrote that as far as the eye could extend, nothing over the dead level prairie was visible except the dense mass of horses, and the trampling of their hoofs sounded like the roar of the surf on a rocky coast. Wandering herds of wild horses are so numerous. Another wrote that the land is covered with paths, making it appear the most populated place in the world. In Pleisscene, America, horses had sometimes made up as much as twenty five percent of the biomass of grazing animals, and by the eighteen hundreds, the wild bands were heading in that direction. Writer J. Frank Doby once guessed that by eighteen hundred there were two million wild horses in the West, a million of them on the prairie south of the Arkansas River. On the Southern Plains, a million wild horses would have been about twelve percent of bison numbers. So from seed herds not just in New Mexico and Texas, but California, the Columbia Plateau, and Wyoming’s Red Desert, wild horses were spreading out all over the West. The Southern Plains herds drew Indian peoples from everywhere, bringing utes, Shoshonees, crows, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Lakotas, even Blackfeet, and most famously Comanches to the horse country below the Arkansas River, as with bison and beavers. Useful animals and such enormous numbers filled the human mind with thoughts of acquisition, wealth and power, with thoughts, in other words, of a potential economy. I’ve imagined this economy as a great horse funnel which took hundreds of thousands of horses from its flared in on the plains and then funneled them to trade markets like Saint Louis, Nakotish, Natchez, and New Orleans. The demand came from Americans on the homestead or frontier, who needed animal powered energy to push westward from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and beyond. As with the fur trade farther north, the Native people began as and remained major players in the trade, in good part because the horse trade was based on a pre existing native economy involving inner tribal exchange. From the start, horses were such revolutionary agents of cultural change for Native people that exchange of the animals became a central feature of Western Indian life. There were annual horse fairs in places like the Black Hills, and it fixed villages like those of the Mandani Dotsas on the Missouri and the Wichitas on the Red River. Even middleman groups emerged. The horse trade even contributed to the breakup of the Cheyennes into two geographic divisions, a northern one and a southern one that became a central player in distributing horses northward up the planes. The Comanches, another group drawn from the north to the southern plains because of horses, literally reconceived themselves in the context of horses and trade. They raided other tribes and Spanish ranches for both horses and children, training the latter as herders and an economy that became more pastoral by the decade. They marketed their animals northward to horse poor Northern Plains tribes, westward to the New Mexicans via trade fairs in places like Pacos Picres and Taos, and eventually eastward to the Americans to a significant agree. Then the native people created the Western horse trade, built their status systems around horse ownership, and used the horse trade to manipulate Euro Americans anxious for profits and alliances with them. There were downsides. As with groups like the Comanches and Lakotas, the horse trade produced territorial expansion. Entire cottonwood groves along rivers like the Arkansas also disappeared as tribes endeavored to get their herds through snowy winters, and because winters on the northern plains could be hard on horse survival, Raids for replenishment of tribal stock rippled from north to south every spring, as happened in the fur trade with the mountain Men. A point came when the Americans attempted a similar step. With millions of horses running free, they tried their hand at capture. Catching wild horses may have begun as a North African or Iberian technique. By the time Americans entered the horse economy, many different peoples seem to have mastered it. Nolan may have learned the art from the French and Spanish settlers of Louisiana towns like Bayou Pierre and Nacotish, but the best descriptions of trade volume mustanging strategies came from a third group involved in the horse trade, the Hispanic residents of Texas. In the first six years of Spain’s tax on captured wild horses. Texas horse catchers paid up on seventeen thousand captured wild horses, a great many of which appear to have ended up east of the Mississippi River, carrying American farmers and merchants, and supplying mounts for Southeastern Indians, like the Chickasaws and the Seminoles. As one San Antonio official put it, the number of mustangs and all these environs is so countless that if anyone were capable of taming them and caring for them, he could acquire a supply sufficient to furnish an army. But this multitude is causing us such grave damage that it is often necessary to shoot them. Catching wildhorses in volume became a kind of wilderness art form, with its own material culture, its own internal terminology. It differed from trapping by aiming at live animal capture, although making that happen was more difficult than you’d think. We know all this because of a French scientist named Jean Louis Brelandier, who in the eighteen twenties witnessed and described the process of volume wild horse capture. Once mustangers were among the herds and stallion bands. The first step was understanding the land escape to know how to cite what Burlandier called the corral. These are immense enclosures situated close to some pond, he wrote. They were built of planted posts with horizontals last to them with rawhide, and were large enough that, once inside, a herd could be swept into a circling milling confusion. The entrance, Berlandier wrote, is placed in such a way that it forms a long corridor, one consisting of brush wings fanning out a half mile or more from the capture pen itself, and usually oriented towards the south, so that prevailing southwesterly winds would envelop an approaching herd in its own dust cloud, blinding it. To start the action, mustangers divided themselves into three groups, each with different rolls. A group of well mounted riders, the Adventadores, had the task of startling the herd into flight and pushing it towards the funnel leading to the pin. The herd would find itself squeezed into a flight path by a second group of mustangers, the Questos, who were the most skilled riders and whose role consists of conducting that dreadful mass of living beings by riding full gallop along the flanks and gathering there in the midst of suffocating dust the partial herds, which sometimes unite at the sound of the terror of a large herd. Burlandier rode at the moment of truth as the wide eyed horses were sweeping at breakneck speed into the trap. A third group of mustangers, the inseradoris, were charged with closing the gate, sometimes dashing in to open it for an instant to allow stallions in older horses to escape. The scenes that followed had such an emotional load that Messioneiro’s had a special vocabulary for them. It was a jargon rife with the language of death. Some horses died from sentimiento are broken heartedness over capture. Others from DSpace show nervous rage. Another term of art was adiando stinking. It referred to a capture corral ruined for use from the effect of having been too often jammed with panicked and dying animals. Burlandier ended his story this way. When these animals find themselves enclosed, the first to enter fruitlessly search for exits, and those in the rear trample over the first. It is rare that in one of these chases. A large part of the horses thus trapped do not kill one another in their efforts to escape. It has happened that the Messing Arrows have trapped at one swoop more than one thousand horses, of which not a fifth remained. What made these Southern planes horse trade expeditions shadowy and northern planes for activities well known, was actually a simple difference. The horse trade featured live, not dead animals, so horses became their own transportation to markets. There was no need for corporate investment in freight wagons, steamboats, or shipping. That also meant a meager historical trail in an economy for which so few day by day accounts exist. Eighteen o eight eighteen oh nine, Trader Anthony Glasses Journal, conveying a story I told in a prior podcast episode, provides one of the best looks at the otherwise little known Western horse trade. Glasses Journal allows us to recreate a history in our heads where one had barely been imaginable before. It took a full decade after Spain in the US finally agreed on the Red and Arkansas Rivers as the official boundary between the two North American powers before another American horse trader would leave us an account rivaling Glasses. In those years, scores very likely hundreds of unknown and undocumented American horse traders traversed the plains, running wild horses, trading for animals from the Indians, and probably encouraging such a general theft of horses across the West that one observer estimated that ten thousand were stolen from Spanish ranches almost every year. Murky accounts exist for a few of these traders. The Osages plundered Alexander McFarlane and John Lemons’s Mustaging party in eighteen twelve. August Pierre Chateau, Jules Demon and Joseph Philibert of Saint Louis opened up a significant horse trade with the Comanches and Rappa Hose between eighteen fifteen and eighteen seventeen, and Cafias Ham and David Burnett became modestly famous horse traders in the same years, as did Jacob Fowler, who left us a journal written in phonics along with Hugh Glynn. Then came Thomas James of Saint Louis, whose book Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans left us a nicely close grained look at the Mustanger’s west, James set a pattern to come. He was both a mountain man and a mustanger. He had first gone west by ascending the Missouri to the Three Forks in eighteen oh nine and eighteen ten, and he didn’t make his first trip onto the southern plains until eighteen twenty one, riding out from Fort Smith in president Oklahoma, before being confronted by Comanches under Spanish orders not to allow Americans to approach Santa Fe. Eyeing those splendid Comanche horse herds, Thomas James got a sense of the possibilities. Invited to trade for horses the next summer, James did so. The result was a three year expedition from eighteen twenty two to eighteen twenty four that was financed with fifty five hundred dollars in goods. Ascending the Canadian River, James’s party of twenty three finally met the Wichitas under their headman Alsare, and the trading commenced. James quickly bought seventeen that he knew would fetch one hundred dollars apiece back in the settlements. Eventually, the Wichitas introduced him to the command achies a band under Big Star, and James got a taste of a little twist the Comanches put on horse trading. They were perfectly willing to trade their best horses, since they had every intention of stealing them back. Despite the frustrations, the life of a Western horse trader held a real allure. James was smitten. I began to be reconciled to a savage life and enamored with the simplicity of nature. Here there were no debts, no sheriffs, no marshals, no hypocrisy or false friendships. Once he had assembled a drove of three hundred and twenty three high quality animals, James departed for the settlements, but not before Olsiree made a present of his own fine war horse, Chakoba, and urged James to return the next year to the headwaters of the Red, where the Wichitas grazed sick steam thousand fine ponies. That would have been the horse trader’s promise of the golden fleece. But James never returned. Pushing his herd eastward, he lost all but seventy one to stampedes and what must have been a biblical attack of horseflies. More attrition followed as he penetrated the woodlands. If James can be believed, when he finally reached Saint Louis for his troubles, he had just five horses left. That was precisely the number he had started with three years earlier. As the wild horse herds spread farther north and west, the trade expanded geographically and in volume. The markets evolved too. Overland immigrants plying the trails across the plains needed a constant supply of fresh horses, and during the War with Mexico in the late eighteen forties, the US Army of the West needed remounts for its cavalry, so between eighteen twenty two and eighteen fifty the horse trade shifted to a new phase. In eighteen thirty four, the Trade and Intercourse Act for the Indian Country made horses a legal trade item in the West. The trading firm of Bent, Saint Vrain and Company got its license that same year and built Bent’s Fort on the north side of the Arkansas River the next year. That trade took a leap forward in eighteen forty when the Cheyennes made peace with the Comanches, and kiwas so much so that the horse and mule trade became the key to Bentz Fort’s success. The Colorado traders benefited from wildcought and Indian horses from off the surrounding prairies, but they also reaped profits from the large number of horses that former mountain men, seeking new animal resources. With beaver now entirely trapped out, drove eastward from California. Mountain man Old Bill Williams claimed that the greatest coup of his long career in the West was stealing four thousand horses from California ranches and driving them to Bentce Forward. Jim Beckworth, long adopted into the Crow tribe, arrived at Pueblo in eighteen forty six with one thousand horses from California, trading almost all of them to Stephen Carney’s Army of the West. Former beaver trappers Solomon Sublette and Joseph Walker came with ten drovers and five hundred California horses at about the same time. With beaver gone and the buffalo slaughter not yet under way, for Western outdoorsmen, the horse trade was now pretty much the story. So the trade kept shifting ever northward because of the Oregon Trail By the eighteen fifties, Fort Laramie had become the epicenter of the trade, but especially in the years after the Civil War, as the slaughter of bison took away the wild herds competition for grass and water, wild horses underwent a population explosion on the northern plains, filling the Red Desert of Wyoming and the badlands of Montana and the Dakotas with wild bands. Like almost all the rest of the West, wild animals except in the most parched deserts, the vast horseherds did not survive long into the twentieth century. Ranchers paid their cowboys to shoot wild horses on site, then bait the carcasses with poison to kill wolves and coyotes. It was a strange kind of murder to shoot an animal exactly like the one you were riding, but it was doubly efficient for ranchers who dreamed of a world without wild horses or wolves. Enough horses were still out there that during the Great War World War One, Miles City furnished Allied buyers, thirty two thousand of them. That helped the British and French hold off the Germans till the Yanks arrived. Then modernity hit, and with it a story that tied past and future. One of the markers of the modern world in the Roaring twenties was the remarkable growth in household pets. The wild horse trade finally acquired a corporate player when Kettel Ration, the first of the national pet food companies, began to put up plants in the Midwest. Some of the sangers building capture corrals in the badlands of eastern Montana evidently were unaware that the horses they were selling to buyers in fancy at the railroad stations were going to pet food slaughterhouses. One of them, a young man named Frank Litz, learned the truth around a campfire one night. We’re up on. Litz bought one hundred and fifty sticks of dynamite and a train ticket to Illinois with the intent of performing eco terrorism on a dog food plant. There. Guards caught him before he could set off his charges. But I like to imagine that a wild horse somewhere nickered when that story circulated in the West.

00:37:55
Speaker 2: Dan.

00:37:55
Speaker 3: When we talk about wildlife in North America, a lot of the debates fall around what animals belong where and what animals should be where That’s how I yeah, I mean, well, I think just generally speaking, you’re talking about wolves in the West, you’re talking about invasive species. You’re talking, you know, like what animals should properly be in a certain place, And obviously that depends on your chronological framework, right, and so here I think horses are one of these species that when people look at them on the landscape today, they say, these things shouldn’t be there, they don’t belong. But you obviously take a different approach to that.

00:38:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I take the deep time approach. And so you know what one has to so to be sure, old whirl horses brought here by Spaniards, the Brits, the French. They had gone through several thousand and four to six thousand years of domestication and alterations in their confirmation and so forth and size and everything. So they had certainly been bred to some different you know, conformations than classic American horses. But the horse is one of those animals, like the wolf, like the camel actually, which is another one that causes people to scratch their heads. These are animals that evolved in North America, you know, after the chick saloub impact took out the dinosaurs, and evolution sort of started again and began producing the age of mammals. Horses were one of the creatures that evolved in North America. And so, because I like to think in big picture terms, it seems to me hard to justify an argument completely that the horse doesn’t have some place on American soil since it’s been here for fifty six fifty seven million years. Then was only absent for about eight thousand or so years before Old Worlders returned horses to North America. And you know, as I argued in that podcast, that’s this is one of the reasons why horses did so well when they got here. I mean, they were completely preadapted, Their teeth, their hoofs, their speed, everything about their behavior had all been shaped by North America. And so they get back here. And one of the reasons I make a point about that is because there are places where Europeans tried to introduce horses, like South Africa, and they had a very difficult time getting horses to actually survive in any numbers in South Africa. But in North America, man, as soon as they got loose, they were instantly sort of you know, out there replicating the pleistocen. But what I think is, you know, been an issue for most people in thinking about that, is that we all know historically that horses in the last four hundred years came from Europe to North America or one of the species that was brought here and were new then, and so that’s how our perception of history is often a fairly short one, and so that’s how we think of the story of the horse. It’s something that came from Europe and ended up in America a few hundred years ago. And of course now we as we all know, wild horses in the West especially have produced some almost impossibly difficult issues for the BLM, in particular where most wild horses are. And I mean I always try to make the point when people bring that up as well. The problem with the introduction, the reintroduction, the recovery of horses in North America is that we didn’t that the same time bring all of their Pleistocene predators over with them. Just the horse made it. Nobody had tried to domesticate the sabertooth cat, and so we didn’t bring any of their predators along to America with them. And that’s been the difficulty, especially in in America where we’ve suppressed or eliminated the populations of predators, as you’ve got an animal out there that once had big predators and they’re not there anymore.

00:42:28
Speaker 2: But I mean, you have to realize that you laying a lot of traps for yourself because because like I get, like horses were here, okay, and then since someone brought horses back, it’s okay to view them as having like continuity that they’re sort of you know, they’re a native animal with an asterisk. But would you take it so far as to advocate on bringing camels back or does it need to be that they came back four hundred year ago not today?

00:43:02
Speaker 1: Well, you know, we did try to bring camels back. Didn’t work out, No, it didn’t work, but we did make an effort to return camels. I mean, and not because Americans in the eighteen fifties understood that camels were an evolutionary in North American species.

00:43:22
Speaker 2: But it wasn’t on the Spanish mind when they brought horses.

00:43:25
Speaker 1: It wasn’t on their mind either. I mean, we haven’t known this, in fact for more than about half a century. So this is something that’s relatively new in our consciousness, which is I think one of the reasons why acceptance of the idea has kind of lagged. I mean, I’m kind of intrigued by the story of camels. I’ve never really read deeply into it, but you know, I know that camels were used, for example, in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, in the desert country, and they did reasonable well. I mean, there were domesticated Campbell’s, they never went wild, but when a few of them got abandoned, there were so few of them. I don’t think cammels have the same reproductive turnover that horses do. There were so few of them that the ones that were left basically when people saw them they shot them. Indians native people arrowed them when they saw.

00:44:21
Speaker 2: Well it was at that time.

00:44:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was the eighteen fifties and eighteen sixties, and there were still some camels in the West as late as the eighteen eighties, so that period in the yeah, the Civil War, before and after the Civil War, there were actually camels in the West. But now that particular attempt that didn’t take the way the horse thing did.

00:44:45
Speaker 2: What was the horse trader Nolan? What was his first name?

00:44:49
Speaker 1: Philip.

00:44:52
Speaker 2: You mentioned Philip you, I’m sure in the interesting time you mentioned Philip Nolan and said he had eccentricities.

00:45:03
Speaker 1: Many and great many great.

00:45:06
Speaker 2: So if I today was talking about someone and I said, you know, rand, he’s got certain eccentricities, he’s gonna get an image in his mind, you know, like not exactly, but he’s gonna sort of catch my drift. You know what were they?

00:45:24
Speaker 1: Well, the guy who said that was William Dunbar. He was a scientist and that’s just Mississippi who knew Nolan. And he never elaborated. And I don’t think that was that was in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, who was asking about this guy. I couldn’t know.

00:45:38
Speaker 2: Was he like a sexual devian or like what like or he’s just behavioral or what.

00:45:44
Speaker 1: I don’t know exactly what he was referring to. But Nolan was, uh, he was one of those kind of people who, uh, he dominated an everywhere pretty clearly, everywhere he went, you know. And I don’t know that this exactly happened, but I suspect it may have happened. Philip Nolan evidently was the kind of guy who being introduced in a comanche camp for the first time would pick out the biggest, meanest looking dude and walk up to him and shove him. And so he exhibited that kind of cocksure confidence that I think enabled him to do a lot of the things that he did. And I suspect that Dunbar was who was you know, he’s a cultured guy out of Edinburgh, Scotland, and highly educated. He was a very well known scientist at the time. I suspect he thought Nolan was. I mean, because he says something like he lacked a sufficient education, but he did have print simples of honor tied to a tremendous amount of personal courage, and so I think he was a kind of guy who was in a different class than Dunbar was. He was somebody who Dunbar probably didn’t entirely understand, but Nolan didn’t. He did cut a large figure in that part of the world. A lot of people knew who he was. He never married, but he very clearly had a girlfriend in every port. He had girlfriends in Natches, in Nacotash, in Arkansas, and probably in every Indian encampment that he went to. And one of the kind of intriguing things about his death was he probably wouldn’t have been killed in that Spanish attack on these mustangers in eighteen oh one when he died, because the accounts of it say that a stray ricochet bully caught him in the forehead, and so it wasn’t even that he was actually successfully targeted. It’s just that he got taken out by a kind of a you know one in one hundred Chants, where a bullet, a stray bullet, hits him in the head and kills him.

00:48:22
Speaker 2: Has he been treated fictionally in film? Have you seen?

00:48:26
Speaker 1: Well? There is I’m trying to remember who wrote this book, The Man Without a Country it was called, and the protagonist in that book was a guy named Philip Nolan, But there’s always been some suspicion about whether he was based this character was based on Philip Nolan, the real Philip Nolan, or just on some invented character. But there is a book with a guy named Philip Nolan as the main character called A Man Without a Country, but no, no one has. Really He’s to me a pretty ripe character for doing that, because, I mean, here’s one of the things I’ve always been stunned by. This guy’s only twenty years old when he first goes to the west, and this is almost twenty years before Lewis and Clark. I mean, this is long before Thomas Jefferson ever sends out his expeditions. Here is this single guy. He probably occasionally would go with companions. I know he had the guy that he was about to take to Monticello to take that paint stay in to Jefferson was a fairly well known figure on the Southwestern frontier, a guy named Joseph Talpoon who knew a lot of the languages and usually went along with some of these traders. So I think he Nolan probably went with somebody like that on some of these trips. But I mean, holy count taking off at the age of twenty, and on that particular trip, that first trip, there’s every evidence that he got as far as New Mexico.

00:50:00
Speaker 2: Just incredibly ballsy, man, I’m telling you.

00:50:02
Speaker 1: You know, just taking out and he knew good and well that the Spaniards regarded this as their territory. So if they catch him, you know, the results are not going to be good. But nonetheless, and he manages to somehow ingratiate himself with all sorts of Native people while he’s doing it.

00:50:25
Speaker 3: One thing that caught my eye in this episode is a parallel with the buffalo robe trade and that, you know, like when people went up to try to encourage tribes to catch beaver. There’s an account of a Mandan chief telling someone from the Hudson’s Bay Company if we could catch him on horseback in a real hunt. That sounds fine, but we’re not about to do this crawling around in the bowels of the earth thing. And both of these you highlight. With the horse trade, like the buffalo rope trade, it’s based on a pre existing native economy, and so the transition from indigenous economies to this global market economy sort of happened seamlessly, whereas it’s more fitful with the with the beaver trade. And I just wonder if you can sort of elaborate on that pattern that we see again and again.

00:51:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s the horse trade was very definitely based on an earlier form of trade, exchange between Native people and the you know, and there’s some wonderful stories I didn’t I didn’t tell them in this episode, but there’s some wonderful stories about about Native people first encountering someone approaching them on horseback or with horses to trade to them. Uh. And those those encounters are mostly farther north, among groups like the Blackfeet and the accentib One, who are pretty far removed from where horses are first wild in the West, which is down in the southern West. But they kind of you know, they look at the animals and they don’t exactly know how to react to them. They you know, there’s an account of some Blackfeet leader offering the first horse he ever sees some buffalo meat to eat. Yeah, and you know, the horse, of course shies and throws its head, and he has to be told that’s not what these animals eat. They’re more like they’re like elk, And that’s the best. Usually when a native person who’s trading horses and taking them to a try for the first time does so that’s the way he does it. But he uses the elk as the as the example. So it requires the culture too. It’s not just the animal. You have to take the culture along with it. You have to show people what the animal eats, how you care for it, how you hobble it to keep it close by and not running off, how you ride it, how you do all these aspects of the equine arts that all has to be taught. But it does fit pretty seamlessly into an existing mode of exchange between Native people, and it does transform some of those modes. As I mentioned in the podcast, you know the reason we think there’s a division between northern Cheyennes and Southern Chyennes. Northern Chyennes are today in Montana, Southern Chyennes and western Oklahoma.

00:53:34
Speaker 2: Is I wanted to ask you about this.

00:53:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, the southerns managed to find themselves or went far enough south to get into the horse country and they stayed. They were drawn like the Comanches, and the kiwas to that part of the world where horses were first available, either wild or easily stolen from Spanish settlements, and so that became an the inducement for a segment of the Cheyennes to go south and remain and not return to the north, where the larger body of their tribe was. But I mean, there are all kinds of wonderful stories. I was just a reader on an article in the journal Science about two years ago about some archaeological excavations in Colorado where radiocarbon dating indicates and these were horse bones and radiocarbon dating was indicating a time frame between about sixteen twenty and sixteen seventy, which is before the Pueblo Revolt, which we’ve long used as the moment when horses really are spread across the West. And it’s one of the reasons I said in the podcast, and I told the people who were working on this article. I mean, there are accounts in the Spanish documents that what they were doing when settled in New Mexico, they brought their horse herds with them, of course, and sheep and goats and cattle, and what they often did was to train young Pueblo men to be the herders of these various domestic animals, and some of those there are accounts that some of these young Pueblo horse guys, who are hurting horses, would also learn how to ride, and would mount up and take off into a west where no native people had ever really ridden before. And they clearly some of them by sixteen fifty or so managed to get up into Colorado, which seems to be the explanation for that site. But yeah, it’s a revolutionary the advent of a revolutionary animal that’s not been present in North America for eight thousand years and it sort of transforms the native world and their trade possibilities, and it becomes, particularly on the southern half of the West, the kind of counterpart to the fur trade up north.

00:56:08
Speaker 2: I feel like tastes and horses must have changed a lot, because these guys Nolan and others that are catching horses, they’re catching horses to just directly supply people’s horse needs. I remember I had a much older half a much older half brother, and he’d always been out in Colorado as a game warden and a guide. And I remember being when I was ten years old, I went out and hung out with him. We were driving around somewhere and there’s a bunch of wild horses, and I remember him saying to me. I asked, because he had horses, and I asked him about those horses, and I remember him saying, they’re all not heads. And I kept looking at I remember this so clearly. I kept looking at him, trying to understand what that meant, what he meant by not like a notthead. Then I realized he’s saying, you know, these they’re all idiots or whatever. So is it that people have just gotten I’m anything, I’m anything but a horseman. Is it people that have just changed their tastes for other breeds because now these wild these feral horses, wild horses what eevery you want to call them, depending on your how you view the issue. They’re not like extra extremely popular as riding horses, right.

00:57:20
Speaker 1: No, they’re not. I mean, you know, and they’ve they’ve been wild, and so they’re difficult to you know, horses are not particularly easy to train to ride anyway. I mean I have had horses. I had horses for many years. I I uh uh. I had a horse when I was living in Texas and I took him to Montana. It was a paint horse that I got in North Dakota. Uh. He was supposed to have been a horse that sitting bulls people had taken to Canada and then when they came back to the States, they brought the ancestors of this horse back that probably that probably just cost me an extra hundred dose. It was a good story horse, special horse. But this horse I got as a five month old colt, and by the time he was about a year and a half old, I was uh. I was first putting blankets on his back, and then I put a buffalo robe on his back, and then I started leaning over him and finally sliding over him, and after doing that a few times, I swung my leg over him and he never bucked one time. We just and then I for a long time, I didn’t put a bridle in his mouth. I just rode him with a hackamore, which of course is a leather band across his nose. And so I rode him pretty much in the way, bareback and with a hack of more, pretty much in the way a lot of Native people would have ridden their horses. And he was quite He certainly was, uh, you know, a knucklehead later in his life, but when he was till the time he was about five years old, he was a really good horse. And then I moved off to Montana, and I had to leave him in Texas for about three years before I could create a situation to bring him up. And I had turned him loose in a pasture with a bunch of other horses, and he learned a bunch of bad habits, and I was never able to yeah, and so I ended up getting other horses after that that we were better than he was. But I did have that experience which was a very interesting kind of a replication maybe of how Native people would have done it, and it was not really very difficult at all. He was really he was really pretty easy to wasn’t really breaking him. It was just finally getting on him and riding him, and he was pretty easy to do that with. But it’s you know, one of the things I didn’t I didn’t include, and I didn’t include a lot of things that I know about this because I’ve written about it in other places, but in the episode, I didn’t talk about things that are fairly I suppose you could say explanatory in terms like that, because, for example, in that Berlandier story about how Hispanic mustangers in Texas would catch those horses and how you would lose sometimes eighty percent of them in the process of corralling them and catching them because they would trample over one another and then they would die of as the terms went, of broken heartedness overcapture or nervous rage over capture. The other thing he said that I didn’t include. He said that these Hispanic messoneros in Texas could render those horses, the ones that survived, they could render them green broke in less than an hour. Really, they could get them out of those corrals and within an hour they would have them green broke. And that’s what happened with a lot of the horses that those mustangers in the twentieth century up in the Montana Badlands. They were catching wild horses and selling them to the buyers for the Allies to use them in World War One, and they were just spending an hour or so green breaking them. And so I’ve always had, because I’ve had horses and experience what horses can be like, I’ve always had the idea that, oh my god, they took those horses over to France and let brit soldiers who didn’t know anything about riding horses get on them. I mean, what a friggin rodeo that would have been with animals that you know, were actually wild mustangs. I mean, it would have been a crazy thing, no doubt. Someone must have written the you know, a journal entry or.

01:01:51
Speaker 3: Something about it.

01:01:52
Speaker 2: Well, thanks, Dan, appreciate it.

01:01:53
Speaker 1: How you bet women say other games saying

01:02:02
Speaker 2: The music tree hundred visitation