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8 The Animals Ganado Mayor S paniards typically refer to horses, donkeys, mules, cattle, and oxen as ganado mayor (larger domestic animals). Sheep and goats are known as ganado menor. Pigs and chickens are not categorized. Horses, Donkeys, and Mules Though long absent when the Spaniards arrived upon the scene, relatives of modern horses were widespread in New Mexico and across much of North America during the last major ice age, which peaked in the Late Pleistocene some eighteen thousand years ago. This was a time when socalled megafauna flourished, when oversize mammals, including mammoths , camels, ground sloths, giant armadillos, saber-toothed cats, and horses, widely roamed the continent. But changing environmental conditions caused most of the megafauna, including the horses, to become extinct in the New World around 9000 BC. Such was not the case in the Old World, however, where wild horses continued to populate the land, becoming a favorite subject for the Paleolithic cave artists of western Europe. Humans are thought to have first domesticated wild equines in the regions of Ukraine and Kazakhstan in central Asia between 3500 and 4000 BC—substantially later than when other farm and ranch animals were first brought into the human sphere.1 Horses, including the Andalusian breed also known as the Pure Spanish Horse (Pura Raza Española or PRE), were being ridden in Spain long before the Roman conquest. The muscular Andalusian was considered a warhorse and was ridden by the conquistadors into Mexico. Sleek Arabians probably arrived in Spain when Moors from North Africa ruled between AD 711 and 1492. Donkeys, which Spaniards called burros, were domesticated from the African wild ass about the same time horses were domesticated—some five chapter two The Animals: Ganado Mayor • 9 to six thousand years ago. People learned to crossbreed male donkeys (jacks) with mares to produce the first mules about one thousand years later. Columbus brought horses to America on his second voyage, which began in 1493. Donkeys (four jacks and two jennies, or females) arrived in the West Indies two years later. Soon afterward, jacks were bred with mares to give rise to the New World’s first mules. Horses were slow to adapt to the tropics, but eventually, after many more animals arrived from Spain, ranches stocked with horses thrived on most of the Spanish-ruled Caribbean islands. Sixteen steeds accompanied Hernán Cortés and his fellow conquistadors when they landed on the east coast of Mexico in 1519. The Aztec and related Indians in Mexico were at once terrified by these strange, often armor-covered beasts, which proved to be one of several factors in their conquest by Cortés. Cortés was a horse breeder par excellence, and not long after the conquest, he established a stud farm in the Valley of Oaxaca. In 1533 a Spanish royal ordinance decreed that the public could graze livestock on the royal lands north of Mexico City, fostering the spread of horses as Spaniards colonized the grassy plains and fertile river bottoms as far north as Chihuahua. Indians turned to horse breeding later in the century, using stock stolen from the ever increasing number of Spanish haciendas.2 Horses and their kin were thus in ready supply as Oñate began his protracted preparations to assemble men, women, and livestock for his intended entrada to the north. Fourteen hundred horses and mules were counted as the expedition got under way, but it’s certain that fewer actually completed the seven-hundred-mile journey that led to the founding of Nuevo México’s first Spanish colony at San Gabriel. However, the Valverde Investigation, which Spanish authorities conducted in July 1601 to look into conditions at the colony, suggests that fewer than three hundred animals were lost along the way.3 Once the colony was in place and a growing number of far-flung missions had been established, horses and mules were needed to conduct efficient farm and ranch operations. Mission friars couldn’t possibly do all the necessary riding, so teaching horsemanship to Puebloan converts must have been a priority, regardless that Indian ownership of horses was discouraged if not downright forbidden. Soon enough, though, a horse would stray from its mission settlement and become semiwild, only to be recaptured and secretly retained by a Puebloan who likely had gained his experience in handling livestock by observing the Franciscans. Though Pueblo Indians were principally farmers, at some point during the 1600s riding became integrated into their way of...

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