Continued from the previous post
regarding horses in the Americas.
In
1785, the Royal British Cartographer, William Faden, indicated that a Tribe
called “Wachipaunnes” (Wachipa Unnes) was located in Montana.
Lewis and Clark discovering the
Chopunish or Nez Perce toward the headwaters of the Missouri River
Lewis
& Clark came upon them in 1806 alongside the headwaters of the Missouri
River in Idaho. In the entry made in Clark’s journal, the explorer indicated
that “a tribe of Chopunish” or Nezperces (people of the “pierced nose”), of the
Walla-Walla and Kooskooskee countries,” was noted for its beautiful spotted
horses—the Appaloosas). The Chopunish were also identified fifty years later by
French trappers as the Nez Percé They were situated along the banks of
the Columbia River in Oregon. It might be of interest to know that these
Choppunish, who were near the Chinuc tribe, and both were south of the Wakash
and Atnah tribes, from the mountains to the falls of the Oregon or Columbia
River, and according to C. S. Rafinesque, both spoke the Lenapian language, buried
their dead in sepulchers, formed of boards constructed like the roof of a
house. They were an extremely amiable mannered people, with a placid and gentle
character rarely moved into passion, yet not often enlivened by gaiety.
The tribes location and areas of
control
Their
living quarters in the village of Tumachemootool was only a single house one
hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet wide, in the Chopunish fashion with
sticks, straw and dried grass, or built of boards and covered with bark. It
contained twenty-four fires about double that number of families, and might
perhaps muster a hundred fighting men, making five hundred people in a single
house. The interior of the house was entirely above ground, under one roof,
divided into seven distinct apartment containing three or four families, each
thirty feet square, by means of broad boards set upon end from the floor to the
roof, with a single passage or alley four feet wide, extending through the
whole depth of the house, and the only entrance is from the ally through a small
hole about twenty inches wide and not more than three feet high (Lewis H.
Morgan, Houses and Houser-Life of the American Aborigines, Department of the
Interior, U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region,
Government Printing Office, Washington, 1881).
One
of the Indian artifacts found by archeologists and dated by radiocarbon
analysis is the Utz-Oneota Tablet (c.1300). The Tablet shows a horse being
pierced by an arrow. Artworks by Nez Perce warriors show them riding Asian-like
horses not the large, heavy Spanish mounts.
In 1936, Jim Utz unearthed an
engraved catlinite tablet—Catlinite, also called pipestone, a type of argillite (metamorphosed mudstone),
usually brownish-red in color, which occurs in a matrix of Sioux Quartzite,
while plowing his fields near Van Meter State Park, which had just been
established four years earlier. The tablet measured approximately 9 inches long,
6 inches wide and ½ inch thick. The location of this discovery, on the south
side of the Missouri River in Saline County, later understood to be a former Missouria
Indian village and now designated the Utz Site, a National Historic Landmark.
The ancestral people preceding the
Missouria tribe, who also lived on the Utz site, are defined as Oñeota. Other Oñeota
materials found at the Utz site include incised shell-tempered pottery,
snub-nosed scrapers, triangular projectile points, and catlinite pipes and
tablets. J. Allen Eichenburger of the Missouri Archaeological Society studied
the Utz tablet in 1961 and made castings, then outlined each design in a
different color. The original catlinite tablet etchings had no color or at
least no color survived; so the coloring is really an interpretive device added
in the study of the tablet (Eichenberger, Investigations
of the Marion-Ralls Archaeological Society in Northeast Missouri, Missouri Archaeologist, Columbia, 1944).
Archaeologist Robert T. Bray, who
excavated the Utz site through the 1960’s, published this tablet, along with
other tablets found in central Missouri and elsewhere. On the main surface
(obverse side) of the tablet is a series of scratches or etchings that form
several designs superimposed on one another (The Missouri Archaeologist, Vol.25, National Archaeological Data
Base, 1963).
Ancient Wooden Saddles
Another issue to consider is the
famed Indian saddle for their horses. Several
writers have speculated that the Plains Indians didn’t know how to make saddles
until they learned the craft from Spanish cowboys. The Spanish saddle consisted
of a solid wooden foundation that had a curved bottom that fit snugly on top of
a horse’s back; and an inverse curved surface with a leather covering provided
a seat for the rider’s bottom.
However,
this style of saddle was actually unknown among the Plains Indians, who preferred
riding bareback or with a small pad. Riding ponies was not as difficult as
sitting on a large war horse with full armor. The heavy horses that carried
armored cavalry were often huge and difficult to manage. Indians and Mongols
preferred light horses, or ponies. Typically, they wrapped their feet around
the horse’s chest. This manner of riding was impossible with a heavy horse
Bows
used by Marco Polo and by the Hidatsa “Dog Dancer” were essentially the same
kind of weapon. It took a skilled Indian craftsman a whole month to build the
complex weapon – going through all the same steps that were followed in Mongol
and Chinese craft shops.
It should
be noted that the Spanish horse was
mentioned in the writings of Homer and Xenophon, was the same horse breed of
war horse of the Carthaginians, Romans, Moors and Conquistadors of Mexico. The Spanish-Iberian heavy horse was great
for carrying an armored rider; but it had little appeal to Indians who liked
riding light, fast, and agile. But to the, Conquistadors it was
essential. On their Spanish Horses, they were seen as Centaurs, so at one were
they with their horses during the conquest of Mexico and Peru.
It was only after Spanish governors
turned their interests towards developing haciendas, industries, and cattle
ranches that the military suppliers in Barcelona began importing light horses
into New Spain.
Huge herds of horses existed in North and South America before any
Spanish horses could have developed so much in the short time
Yet,
in the American Southeastern Woodlands there were so many horses that American
historians were initially inclined to think that they were strays from
expeditions by Ponce de Leon (1513) and Hernando De Soto (1540-45). However,
most early Spanish explorers brought heavy mounts that were not of much
interest to the Indians. Scholars now accept the interpretation that neither De
Leon nor De Soto contributed significantly to the Indian horse population of
North America.
The
principal Spanish light horse was an Arabian breed that was developed
principally for speed, endurance, and agility—all of which were needed for
controlling cattle. While it is thought that later, after the introduction of
the Spanish war horse, George Catlin
made a sketch of a Crow Chief’s stallion in Montana in 1851. This horse is not the
same as previous Indian ponies, but like the Andalusian breed—with a prominent
neck, elegant head, and powerful body. This was a medium build horse somewhere
between light and heavy, and an excellent mount for parades or warfare; but on
a buffalo hunt, where a faster, more-agile mount, was needed and preferred.
While “hard” evidence is limited, the study of how
the horse was depicted in early Indian art as well as early colonial art,
suggests that the small, fast, ponies of the American Indian as well as those
in pre-Columbia Central and South America, suggest that the horse had always
existed in the Americas and that the American Indian has horses long before the
Spanish arrived.
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