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((Acquisition of the horse. . . gave a last colorful fillip to a mode of life old when the first Conquistadores set foot on the Great Plains." WEDEL ((As an intensifier of original plains traits, the horse presents its strongest claim. " WISSLER HEN WE think of buffalo we picture horsed Indians riding carefree amidst loping buffalo , drawing taut the bowstring, releasing the arrow into the buffalo's flank, galloping on to another buffalo-the Indian we've seen so often in movies, the horsed Indian. Yet, when the buffalo disappeared in the 1880s, most buffalo-hunting Indians had been hunting them on horseback less than 150 years. The horse came to the Indian from the Spanish herds in Mexico, from the enormous remudas necessary to operate the stock-raising haciendas that sprang up all across nothern Mexico. At first the Spanish governors decreed that no Indian could learn to ride a horse; they knew the part their horse had played in the Conquest: "After God, we owe the victory to the horses," said Hernando Cortez. The Spanish tried to keep the natives fearful of this tequane, this monster, warned them against the ferocious horses that might kill and eat them. Only Spaniards were to ride herd on the cattle of the haciendas. But cattle increased faster than did Spaniards, and soon the conquistadores found their herds too big for them to care for alone. If the wealth of New Spain was to fill coffers, Indians had to ride horses, ranchers had to put their Mexican help in the saddle, raise the servile peon to an independent vaquero. And the re49 mudas continued to grow; a hacienda found it needed about twenty horses for every rider; luckily, horse breeding had boomed to the south, and Spanish horses flooded into northern Mexico to supply the need. Soon puddles of horses dribbled farther north, across the Rio Grande. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries southern Mexico had to send horses by the thousands to the northern haciendas to replace those flowing north illegally. Then the Pueblo revolt of 1680 drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico and forced them to leave their horses behind, prey for the raiding buffalo hunters, Apaches and others. Thousands of horses came into the hands of buffalo-hunting Indians. l The horse revolution spread north and east across the grasslands in about a century after the Pueblo revolt . By 1754 Antony Hendry saw wild horses on the Canadian prairie and commented on the frequency of horse dung. He had expected to find Blackfeet hunting buffalo on horseback and he did.1 By 1770- 1780 most of the plains tribes rode horseback, so commonly by 1800 that a woods Indian assumed Alexander Henry a Sioux because he'd ridden up on a horse. The fastest and strongest of horses Indians learned to train as buffalo chasers. In the brief span of years he rode the horse, the American Indian became one of the finest equestrians in history. Heads, Hides & Horns Dogs the buffalo people still had knee deep (a visit to a camp meant fighting off a horde of dogs). They continued to use pack dogs through the nineteenth century, even though an occasional rabbit-chase scattered spoons and kettles throughout the sagebrush and once lost a baby completely. In a rare winter move, pack horses broke trail for pack dogs. With dogs, five or six miles had been a good day's journey; with the horse, ten, fifteen or even twenty miles could be traversed. The tribes now could insure better winters by carrying more pemmican and dried meat, seek out better camping grounds, escape from danger more easily. In the spring the horse carried people through the mud and melting snow to follow the buffalo who had begun to leave their winter shelter . At any season, riding rested their feet. And the horse swam while they rode or floated by his side clinging to his mane. The horse toted the aged and sick; carried toddlers in a "tray shaped basket or hoop, latticed with hide thongs." Mothers rode and dangled baby's cradleboard from the saddle. Any traveling done before on foot, the Indian now did on horseback . The horse suited nomadic needs exactly. Yet the horse little changed the part-time buffalo hunting habits of those tribes that lived in fixed villages . The Mandan used the horse for hunting buffalo but continued to live part-time in permanent villages. They became horse traders who sometimes traded too many and...

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