In previous posts about the Columbian Exchange, I’ve mentioned horses in passing. To see previous posts on my series explaining the Columbian Exchange, perhaps the most important event in modern history, click here: (Introduction to the Columbian Exchange) (The Columbian Exchange and Human Extinction) (Smallpox and the Columbian Exchange). Today I want to blog about horses and bison, key animals of the Columbian Exchange, in more detail.
It is 99% true that the horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors represent the introduction of horses into the Americas. A species of horse did exist prior to European arrival. But this species went extinct thousands of years before 1492. (Check out Tim Flannery’s book The Eternal Frontier for more on this. It’s a great history of the different species to appear and go extinct in North America over the millennia. Just ignore the last couple chapters on modern history.)
So, for our purposes, the horses the Spanish brought with them after 1492 revolutionized life in the Americas. Let’s explore a specific example of how.
Horses and Bison on the Great Plains
If ever the perfect match existed, it was horses and bison and the Great Plains of North America. The Great Plains store vast amounts of energy in grasses. Humans cannot eat this grass, but horses and bison can. So, humans and animals do not compete for this resource. The Great Plains offered horses and bison nearly unlimited food. Horses offered people almost unlimited mobility. The perfect match.
This was obvious to everyone. Native American people living on the margins of the Great Plains grasped the possibilities immediately. Prior to the 1600s, the number of Native Americans living full time on the Great Plains was relatively small. Tribes would go there to hunt, but living on the Plains all the time was difficult because bison were hard to kill without horses. (One technique was to run them over bison jumps, bison being a herd animal, but as one might imagine, this was risky to the people trying to initiate the stampede.) Bison were large and fast while humans were weak and slow in comparison. To many American Indians, it seemed safer to live on the margins of the Great Plains and harvest plants as their main way of life.
Please Click Here to Subscribe to My History Blog!
But horses changed everything. Now, humans were just as fast as the bison. They could also range much farther afield in search of bison herds. Wait! Didn’t the Great Plains feature unlimited numbers of bison? Was searching even necessary? More on this myth shortly.
Filling the Great Plains
It was during the 1700s and 1800s that the Great Plains began to fill up (relatively speaking, anyway) with Native Americans hunting bison as their way of life. Groups like the Sioux, Comanche, and others ventured out of the woodlands of the east and onto the Plains full time after acquiring horses. Thus, the classic Hollywood image of Indians warriors on horseback living in tepees is a relatively recent event. It reflects a temporary situation, perhaps even an aberrant situation, in North American history.
It also shows that Native American people were not static. Some inhabited a certain territory fairly continuously, but others moved according to perceived opportunities and pressure applied from other tribes. And by the late 1700s European settlement forced the pressure up on all tribes several notches.
Please Click Here to Subscribe to My History Blog!
In short order, American Indians became skilled horsemen, whether hunting bison or fighting each other. Groups who had access to firearms from European traders became more formidable still. They lived off the bison and off raiding their former neighbors on the fringes of the Great Plains. Horses and bison had inverted the power dynamic of the center of North America. Temporarily, at least.
The Unlimited Bison Myth
It’s one of the great myths of the American past—the myth of unlimited bison herds stretching to the horizon. This myth ranks up there with the Pristine Indian myth, the idea that Native Americans floated lightly over the landscape, leaving little sign of their presence. Both are powerful, and both are potent political tools, but both are false.
“But,” supporters stammer, “how could it not be true? Lewis and Clark say so in their journals! They reported herds of bison as far as they could see. You worked for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission, Rob. Have you forgotten already?”
No, I’ve not forgotten. But what Lewis and Clark saw was a historical anomaly. They did see huge herds of bison. But what they saw was not typical of the Great Plains. Recall my previous post about the toll disease took on Native American populations resulting from the Columbian Exchange. Lewis and Clark arrived on the Plains as these waves of disease were rolling over the Plains, too. Native American population was falling during the early 1800s. Many of the people who used to hunt the bison had died. This allowed bison to expand their population far past their usual numbers and expand into places one normally did not find bison.
As proof of this, I often ask my students to consider what they know about the National Football League. I point out the team in New York named the Buffalo Bills. Now, we don’t usually associate western New York with buffalo habitat, do we? Yet, a major city with that name exists in New York state. Why? Because when early Americans arrived there, they found bison. They found bison because so many of the Native Americans who used to hunt bison weren’t alive to hunt them anymore.
End of an Era for Horses and Bison
This glorious way of life for Native Americans did not last. The power inversion in favor of Native Americans on horseback on the Great Plains was only temporary. As Native American populations dropped, casualties of the diseases of the Columbian Exchange, European immigrants caused the population of the US to boom, doubling every generation. Especially after the Civil War, Americans crowded onto the Great Plains in ever-greater numbers.
Eventually, people on the Great Plains, Indian and American both, ran up against Liebig’s Law. This is the concept that the limits on a population should be determined by when the resources available are stingiest. The difference was that Americans could import things they needed from outside the Great Plains. Native Americans could not. In this sense, a way of life that appeared the ultimate life of freedom was far more limited than most of us, before or since, have imagined. (Someday, I’ll write a similar post about why every cultural symbol about cowboys is wrong.)
This is just one way that horses changed life in North America, courtesy of the Columbian Exchange. Please join me for my next post where I’ll blog about a new aspect of the Columbian Exchange.
Please Subscribe!
If you enjoyed this blog, please sign up to follow it by scrolling down or clicking here, and recommending it to your friends. I’d love to have you aboard! You can also join my Readers Club at Rob Bauer Books by clicking here.
As always, I welcome constructive and polite discussion in the comments section. Thank you!