SPANISH HORSES ARRIVE IN AMERICA

When Christopher Columbus returned to the Americas in 1493, so did horses. The Genoese navigator and explorer landed that time on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and the horses he unloaded there were Spanish, like his patrons. Later the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés would bring more – to the mainland – and by the middle years of the sixteenth century there were horses in Argentina, Brazil, Florida, Mexico, Panama and Peru. British, French and other colonists brought even more, and soon enough the beasts were back in North America too.

Columbus’s second voyage was just a year after his first (‘when he’d sailed across the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, as we used to learn in primary school). For the first time since the Vikings in the tenth century he had shown that seamen might head into the west in search of land, as well as into the east. Columbus would remain convinced he had found an alternative route to Asia, the West Indies, and it was others after him who understood the Americas as new continents entirely.
For the species Equus ferus caballus, however, it was a return to those continents after thousands of years. Palaeontologists believe the wild horse was wiped out there by the first bands of human hunters in the millennia after their crossing of what is now the Bering Strait around 25,000 years ago.

American cartoonist Gary Larson imagined the return. In one of his cartoons a ship lies at anchor on the horizon while a rowing boat containing two dopey looking conquistadors ferries a horse, sitting upright and stony-faced, towards land. Already onshore is a third Spaniard, accompanied by two more horses, up on their hind legs like humans. There are two comicbook Indians, feathers in their hair, and one is politely shaking the hoof of one of the horses. The second horse is pointing inland with one raised foreleg, an excited expression on its face as it contemplates the potential of the place. The caption of the cartoon reads: Circa 1500 AD;
Horses are introduced to America’.
All the comedy of an ‘introduction’ set aside, the return of horses was a moment of note. If indigenous peoples saw trouble ahead from the two-legged incomers, they were quick to see the positive potential of those on four. Along with iron tools and, later, firearms, the horse enabled the development of a way of life that was hitherto impossible. Between 1539 and 1542 Spanish conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led an expedition from Mexico into the Texas panhandle and the south-west of North America. He was looking for a city of gold he called Quivira and while he found no such place, he was the first European to describe the lifestyle of the Plains Indians. In The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542, from the City of Mexico to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and the Buffalo Plains of Texas, published in 1896, George Parker Winship described the lifestyle the Spaniards encountered among a tribe they knew as the Querecho. They lived, he wrote,
in tents made of the tanned skins of the cows. They travel around near the cows killing them for food … They travel like the Arabs, with their tents and troops of dogs loaded with poles … these people eat raw flesh and drink blood. They do not eat human flesh. They are a kind people and not cruel. They are faithful friends. They are able to make themselves very well understood by means of signs. They dry the flesh in the sun, cutting it thin like a leaf, and when dry they grind it like meal to keep it and make a sort of sea soup of it to eat… They season it with fat, which they always try to secure when they kill a cow. They empty a large gut and fill it with blood, and carry this around the neck to drink when they are thirsty.
The Querecho were likely those known later as the Apache, and the cows they depended upon, the buffalo. Like the first hunters everywhere, those in North America had always moved on foot. In the case of the Querecho, domesticated dogs were beasts of burden, pulling travois loaded with belongings. Coronado had horses with him, but not enough to trade with the locals. Gradually in the decades and centuries to come the indigenous peoples obtained horse herds of their own. Elsewhere on the plains of North America, as was true of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America, there were settled farmers subsisting on maize. But it was the horse culture that shone like a well-buffed bridle.
Once they had enough to equip every member of the tribe, the archetypal Plains Indian culture blossomed in its fullest form. With horses, the hunting of the buffalo was made infinitely easier, and a first icon of the American West was born.
The large print gave, however, while the small print would take away.
The life made possible for the first Americans by the introduction (or rather, reintroduction) of the horse was their finest flower. In the scheme of things it was as brief as any blossom, flourishing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and crushed under foot by the advent of the twentieth. It was a grim portent. From South to North the coming of Europeans to the Americas was a death knell for the indigenous peoples.
Beware of Europeans bearing gifts.

Source ~ Neil Oliver “The Stort of the world in 100 moments “