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The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures
Pekka Hämäläinen
| After more than a century of intense academic scrutiny and popular fascination, the history of Plains Indians and horses has become a quintessential American epic. A sweeping story of cultural collision and fusion, it tells how the obscure foot nomads of the Great Plains encountered and embraced the peculiar Old World export and, by reinventing themselves as equestrian people, created one of history's most renowned horse cultures, personified in the iconic figure of the mounted warrior. Such romantic images may have lost much of their appeal for modern historians, but recent academic trends have, rather curiously, only further glorified the history of Plains Indians and horses. As studies in Indian-European relations and environmental history have established the destructiveness of the Columbian exchange, it has become standard academic practice to set the splendor and prosperity of the mounted Plains Indians against the dark backdrop of death, disease, and despair that defines Europe's biological expansion to the Americas. In today's scholarship, the Plains Indian horse culture represents the ultimate anomaly—ecological imperialism working to Indians' advantage.1 |
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Taking a cue from that juxtaposition, virtually all modern histories portray the rise of the Plains Indian horse culture as a straightforward success story. According to this view, horses spread northward from the Spanish Southwest, repeatedly creating a frontier of fresh possibility, opening for each tribe in its path a new era of unforeseen wealth, power, and security. With the dispersal completed by the late eighteenth century, the entire Plains became the scene for an equestrian experiment that lifted the Indians, both materially and figuratively, to a new level of existence, while uniquely equipping them to resist future Euro-American invasions.2 Arguably, this view holds its appeal because it makes for a compelling and fundamentally uplifting story that is easy to incorporate into historical overviews and textbooks. |
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That success story has a bleak undercurrent that went largely unnoticed until recently, when ground-breaking studies shed light on the harmful effects of horses on Plains Indian socioeconomic systems and the environment.3 Horses did bring new possibilities, prosperity, and power to Plains Indians, but they also brought destabilization, dispossession, and destruction. The transformational power of horses was simply too vast. Although Plains Indians had experienced constant and profound culture changes before European contact, the sudden appearance of horses among dog-using pedestrian people set off changes that could spin out of control as easily as they could make life richer and more comfortable. Horses helped Indians do virtually everything—move, hunt, trade, and wage war—more effectively, but they also disrupted subsistence economies, wrecked grassland and bison ecologies, created new social inequalities, unhinged gender relations, undermined traditional political hierarchies, and intensified resource competition and warfare. The introduction of horses, then, was a decidedly mixed blessing. The horse era began for most Plains Indians with high expectations but soon collapsed into a series of unsolvable economic, social, political, and ecological contradictions. |
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