Speaker 1: Simultaneous with the appearance of the United States in the
Speaker 1: advance of its frontier westward to the Mississippi River, and
Speaker 1: intriguing trade developed around vast herds of horses that had
Speaker 1: become wild in the West, an animal economy that outlasted
Speaker 1: the fur trade but collapsed in the nineteen twenties in
Speaker 1: the face of modernity. I'm Dan Flores and this is
Speaker 1: the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine,
Speaker 1: where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each
Speaker 1: bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply
Speaker 1: available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot Com. Enjoy responsibly bringing home
Speaker 1: all the pretty horses. In the summer of eighteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: two years after his famous adventure painting the tribes of
Speaker 1: the Missouri River and Northern Plains, artists George Catlan got
Speaker 1: his first opportunity to portray the counterpoint world the southern
Speaker 1: Plains of what is now western Oklahoma. Fate and luck
Speaker 1: offered Catlan a singular chance to see firsthand the similarities
Speaker 1: and differences between these two regions of the early nineteenth
Speaker 1: century American West. On the Missouri, Catlan had traveled and
Speaker 1: lived with fur traders from the big companies, and had
Speaker 1: duly painted and mourned the great destruction then underway there
Speaker 1: on the southern prairies. However, the artists saw relatively little
Speaker 1: of the American economic engines that were destroying so many
Speaker 1: ecologies in the northern West. On these southern prairies, it
Speaker 1: was not fur bearers, but an altogether different animal that
Speaker 1: caught his atte traveling in the vicinity of the Wichita
Speaker 1: Mountains that summer of eighteen thirty four. This was how
Speaker 1: he described his impressions. The tract of country over which
Speaker 1: we passed is stocked not only with buffaloes, but with
Speaker 1: numerous bands of wild horses, many of which we saw
Speaker 1: every day Catlan went on. The wild horse of these
Speaker 1: regions is a small but very powerful animal, with an
Speaker 1: exceedingly prominent eye, sharp nose, high nostril, small feet, and
Speaker 1: delicate leg, and undoubtedly have sprung from a stock introduced
Speaker 1: by the Spaniards. No other denizen of the plains is
Speaker 1: so wild and so sagacious as the horse Catlan rode.
Speaker 1: So remarkably keen is their eye that they will generally
Speaker 1: run at the site when they are a mild, distant,
Speaker 1: and when in motion, will seldom stop short of three
Speaker 1: or four miles. Like many others, the artists was struck
Speaker 1: with the beauty of the horse in its wild state.
Speaker 1: Some were milk white, some jet black, others were sorrel
Speaker 1: and bay and cream color, and many were an iron gray,
Speaker 1: and others were pied, containing a variety of colors on
Speaker 1: the same animal. Their manes were profuse and hanging in
Speaker 1: the wildest confusion over their necks and faces, and their
Speaker 1: long tails swept the ground interestingly. At almost the same
Speaker 1: point in time, back in the horse country of Kentucky,
Speaker 1: John James Audubon, Catlan's fellow painter, wrote that he'd become
Speaker 1: acquainted with a man who had just returned from the
Speaker 1: country in the neighborhood of the headwaters of the Arkansas River,
Speaker 1: where he'd obtained from the O Sages a recently captured
Speaker 1: four year old wild horse named Barrow. While the little
Speaker 1: horse was by no means handsome, as Ottoman said, and
Speaker 1: had cost only thirty five dollars in trade goods, Ottobon
Speaker 1: was intrigued enough to try him out. He proved a delight.
Speaker 1: He had a sweet gait that covered forty miles a day.
Speaker 1: He leapt over woodland logs as lightly as an elk,
Speaker 1: was cautious, but a quick study in new situations, and
Speaker 1: strong and fearless when coach to swim the Ohio River.
Speaker 1: He was steady when birds flushed, and Audobon shot them
Speaker 1: from the saddle to top. All he left a superb
Speaker 1: three hundred dollars horse in the dust. Audoban quickly bought
Speaker 1: barrel for fifty dollars silver, and, gloating over his discovery,
Speaker 1: concluded that the importation of horses of this kind from
Speaker 1: the Western prairies might improve our breeds generally. With an
Speaker 1: audition like barrows, one is tempted to say, no kidding.
Speaker 1: But what intrigues me most about Cantlon's and Audobon's wild
Speaker 1: horse epiphanies is that they seemed almost clueless about a
Speaker 1: phenomenon that had been underway in the West for almost
Speaker 1: two centuries. Simultaneous with the evolution of the fur trade
Speaker 1: in the northern West, the wild horse herds of the
Speaker 1: Great Plains had generated an economy of capture in trade
Speaker 1: that had transformed the native world. It had dominated much
Speaker 1: of the Western trade. In European settlements from Louisiana to
Speaker 1: California since the seventeen eighties, and wild horses from herbs
Speaker 1: like those Catlan saw had been driven up the Natchez
Speaker 1: Trace to markets in Kentucky and the South at least
Speaker 1: since seventeen ninety. That neither of these artists seemed aware
Speaker 1: of this speaks volumes about the underground character of the
Speaker 1: early horse trade in the West, which was never a
Speaker 1: corporate venture like the fur trade, but usually carried out
Speaker 1: by private, independent mustangers. That word an English garbling of
Speaker 1: the Spanish mestanio. The presence of wild horses in the
Speaker 1: West first drew the attention of most Americans with Louisiana purchase.
Speaker 1: By then, wild horses had been running free in the
Speaker 1: California valleys, in the deserts of the Southwest, and especially
Speaker 1: on the Great Plains for many decades, But as was
Speaker 1: true of so many aspects of the West, it was
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson, during the years when he was serving as
Speaker 1: Vice President in the Adams administration, who was the first
Speaker 1: American to understand that horses had become a part of
Speaker 1: the natural history and economy of the West. In his
Speaker 1: conversations about the West, with his informants. In seventeen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: Jefferson began to hear stories about an intriguing individual known
Speaker 1: as the Mexican Traveler. The Traveler's real name was Philip Nolan,
Speaker 1: and he was an American adventurer who Jefferson discovered had
Speaker 1: journeyed numerous times into the unknown Southwest, returning driving herds
Speaker 1: of captured and traded horses into Louisiana and then up
Speaker 1: the Natchezt Trace to the horse markets of Kentucky. Jefferson
Speaker 1: was fascinated. He wanted to know more. The image that
Speaker 1: emerges from his queries is of a shadowy character, a literate, athletic,
Speaker 1: and adventurous young man who was confident enough in his
Speaker 1: abilities to attempt things no one else had tried. The
Speaker 1: Mississippi scientist, Sir William Dunbar knew Nolan, and he told
Speaker 1: Jefferson he thought the young man lacked sufficient education and
Speaker 1: was flawed by eccentricities many and great, as Dunbar put it. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: he added, Nolan was not destitute of romantic principles of honor,
Speaker 1: united to the highest personal courage. Other informant, a lawyer
Speaker 1: in New Orleans, told Jefferson that, in his opinion, Nolan
Speaker 1: was an extraordinary character, one whom nature seems to have
Speaker 1: formed for enterprises at which the rest of mankind are incapable.
Speaker 1: As early as seventeen ninety, Jefferson learned, when Nolan was
Speaker 1: barely twenty, he had embarked on a two year journey
Speaker 1: into the West, ultimately meeting and traveling with Wichitas and Comanches,
Speaker 1: and giving those tough appraisers of human nature a quite
Speaker 1: favorable early impression of Americans. On this trip, Nolan apparently
Speaker 1: journeyed all the way to New Mexico, meanwhile learning that
Speaker 1: the numerous Southern Plains tribes were dissatisfied with Spanish trade
Speaker 1: and hoped to replace their former trade partners the French,
Speaker 1: with a new source of guns and European goods. The
Speaker 1: Osages from farther east were enemies of these Western groups,
Speaker 1: and making every effort to block traders from Saint Louis
Speaker 1: from contacting the tribes of the Deep Plains. Nolan had
Speaker 1: in mind addressing that opening from a different direction. What
Speaker 1: really caused Jefferson's attention, though, was that Nolan had not
Speaker 1: returned from the West with the usual Indian processed firs.
Speaker 1: It was horses he had brought back from these forays,
Speaker 1: some of them wild ones that he and his associates
Speaker 1: had captured. Nolan himself told his friends that he found
Speaker 1: the savage life less praising in practice than speculation. I
Speaker 1: could not indianfy my heart, he said. But he had
Speaker 1: gone on a second expedition into the Deep Plains in
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety four, and a third one in seventeen ninety six.
Speaker 1: He returned with two hundred and fifty horses in seventeen
Speaker 1: ninety six drove them to Frankfurt, Connecticut, and that had
Speaker 1: brought Nolan and his horses to the attention of important
Speaker 1: people who now invested in him. So, in seventeen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: packing seven thousand dollars worth of trade goods and with
Speaker 1: what he said were twelve good rifles and but one coward,
Speaker 1: he launched a fourth expedition. When he returned in seventeen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, he was driving a herd, some estimated at
Speaker 1: twenty five hundred animals, some of which brought one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty dollars a piece in Kentucky. At this point
Speaker 1: in Nolan's career, he found a letter awaiting him, requesting
Speaker 1: natural history information on Western horses at the only moment
Speaker 1: in the age of the world, it read when the
Speaker 1: horse might be studied in its wild state. Those words
Speaker 1: were from Vice President Thomas Jefferson, who wanted badly to
Speaker 1: have a conversation with Nolan about the West. So Jefferson
Speaker 1: wrote a follow up letter, telling Nolan he very much
Speaker 1: wanted to purchase one of those Western horses, which I
Speaker 1: am told are so remarkable for the singularity and beauty
Speaker 1: of their colors and forms. According to several informants, young
Speaker 1: Nolan and an inhabitant of the Western country, a master
Speaker 1: of the fascinating language of Indian hand signs, who was
Speaker 1: probably the same Joseph Talapoon who would go west with
Speaker 1: Anthony Glass, departed for Virginia in eighteen hundred with a
Speaker 1: fine paint stallion for Jefferson. Somehow, though neither Nolan nor
Speaker 1: the paint horse ever got to Monticello. I'm tempted to
Speaker 1: guess that somewhere along the way Nolan lost jefferson stallion
Speaker 1: on a bet or in a game of chance. So
Speaker 1: the West's Mexican traveler stood up the man about to
Speaker 1: be elected the third president of the United States. Nolan
Speaker 1: was now in preparation for a fifth and his fate
Speaker 1: would have it final expedition to the Although he claimed
Speaker 1: that I have long been tired of wild horses, the
Speaker 1: money was just too good. This time he took two
Speaker 1: dozen men and a large quantity of goods, but by
Speaker 1: now Spanish officials had grown increasingly alarmed at Nolan's trips.
Speaker 1: In the seventeen eighties, Spain had proclaimed wild horses and
Speaker 1: her territories government property, and had placed at tax on
Speaker 1: captured animals. That meant that any horses Nolan captured or
Speaker 1: traded for would be illegal contraband. Yet by December of
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, the party was far out on the southern
Speaker 1: plains and what seems to have been Nolan's favorite mustanging country,
Speaker 1: the Grand Prairie, southwest of today's Fort Worth. There they
Speaker 1: built corrals and started capturing wild bands, but in March
Speaker 1: of eighteen oh one, Indian scouts for a Spanish force
Speaker 1: sent out to arrest Nolan located them. When Nolan refused
Speaker 1: to surrender, the Spaniards attacked, killing Nolan and capturing more
Speaker 1: than a dozen of his men. At the age of
Speaker 1: thirty one the Mexican travelers pre Lewis and clark adventures
Speaker 1: in the West were over. Thomas Jefferson never got to
Speaker 1: understand what deep time science and history have now told
Speaker 1: us about the West's wild horses. It's a story that
Speaker 1: commences with an irony. Old worlders understood that their ancestors
Speaker 1: had brought the horse to the Americas, and that, after
Speaker 1: initial fear of it, indigenous peoples in both North and
Speaker 1: South America had adopted the animal into their lives, where
Speaker 1: it had revolutionized their cultures. Yet in the depths of
Speaker 1: time lay a surprising story. Horses are actually evolutionary natives
Speaker 1: of North America. Their ancestors had begun their into the
Speaker 1: modern horse on this continent fifty seven million years earlier,
Speaker 1: after a vast presence where horses were found from Alaska
Speaker 1: to Florida. The irony deepened profoundly by eight thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: horses so similar to the modern version that palaeontologists have
Speaker 1: difficulty telling them apart unaccountably when extinct throughout the Americas. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the horses that had migrated from America into Africa, Asia,
Speaker 1: and Europe survived to become domesticated by humans. Four to
Speaker 1: six thousand years ago. So the barb horses that danced
Speaker 1: and nickered beneath the Spaniards were ancient American horses, their
Speaker 1: zebra like legs and dorsal backstripes still intact. Now they
Speaker 1: had returned to their evolutionary homeland, except it was a
Speaker 1: homeland with many of their Pleistocene predators gone. This, this
Speaker 1: big history, is why horses were so successful in going
Speaker 1: wild in the West. By the sixteen fifties, the Southwest
Speaker 1: Native peoples were riding horses into the very landscapes that
Speaker 1: had shaped horses hoofs, teeth, and behavioral patterns for millions
Speaker 1: of years. When the Pueblo Indians sixteen eighty revolt liberated
Speaker 1: Spanish livestock in and around Santa Fe, horses and horse
Speaker 1: culture famously made their way decade by decade to tribes
Speaker 1: northward up the Rockies. But in the chaos, many animals
Speaker 1: also ran loose into the country. Meanwhile, in Texas, the
Speaker 1: Spanish Franciscans often turned surplus mission livestock out into the wild,
Speaker 1: so by seventeen fifteen, from Texas to New Mexico, the
Speaker 1: whole country featured wild horses. Rapidly replicating Pleistocene America. Three
Speaker 1: quarters of a century later, the same fine dominon was
Speaker 1: underway in California. By the time Americans were eyeing the West,
Speaker 1: across the region's southern latitudes, wild horse herds had become enormous.
Speaker 1: A Spanish bishop in Texas road in eighteen oh five
Speaker 1: that everywhere he traveled there were great herds of horses
Speaker 1: and mares found close to the roads, and herds of
Speaker 1: four to six thousand by eighteen hundred. Residents of California's
Speaker 1: missions and presidios, having had virtually no horses in the
Speaker 1: seventeen seventies, regarded escaped horses in the surrounding countryside as
Speaker 1: such threats to grass and water that they shot them
Speaker 1: on sight. On the Great Plains, wildhorses now struck observers
Speaker 1: as an iconic experience of the region. One traveler was
Speaker 1: stunned to see that, as he put it, the prairie
Speaker 1: near the horizon seemed to be moving with long undulations,
Speaker 1: like the way waves of an ocean. Then realized that
Speaker 1: the ocean waves were actually herds of mustangs blanketing the
Speaker 1: entire prairie. Another wrote that as far as the eye
Speaker 1: could extend, nothing over the dead level prairie was visible
Speaker 1: except the dense mass of horses, and the trampling of
Speaker 1: their hoofs sounded like the roar of the surf on
Speaker 1: a rocky coast. Wandering herds of wild horses are so numerous.
Speaker 1: Another wrote that the land is covered with paths, making
Speaker 1: it appear the most populated place in the world. In Pleisscene, America,
Speaker 1: horses had sometimes made up as much as twenty five
Speaker 1: percent of the biomass of grazing animals, and by the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, the wild bands were heading in that direction.
Speaker 1: Writer J. Frank Doby once guessed that by eighteen hundred
Speaker 1: there were two million wild horses in the West, a
Speaker 1: million of them on the prairie south of the Arkansas River.
Speaker 1: On the Southern Plains, a million wild horses would have
Speaker 1: been about twelve percent of bison numbers. So from seed
Speaker 1: herds not just in New Mexico and Texas, but California,
Speaker 1: the Columbia Plateau, and Wyoming's Red Desert, wild horses were
Speaker 1: spreading out all over the West. The Southern Plains herds
Speaker 1: drew Indian peoples from everywhere, bringing utes, Shoshonees, crows, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Lakotas,
Speaker 1: even Blackfeet, and most famously Comanches to the horse country
Speaker 1: below the Arkansas River, as with bison and beavers. Useful
Speaker 1: animals and such enormous numbers filled the human mind with
Speaker 1: thoughts of acquisition, wealth and power, with thoughts, in other words,
Speaker 1: of a potential economy. I've imagined this economy as a
Speaker 1: great horse funnel which took hundreds of thousands of horses
Speaker 1: from its flared in on the plains and then funneled
Speaker 1: them to trade markets like Saint Louis, Nakotish, Natchez, and
Speaker 1: New Orleans. The demand came from Americans on the homestead
Speaker 1: or frontier, who needed animal powered energy to push westward
Speaker 1: from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and beyond. As with
Speaker 1: the fur trade farther north, the Native people began as
Speaker 1: and remained major players in the trade, in good part
Speaker 1: because the horse trade was based on a pre existing
Speaker 1: native economy involving inner tribal exchange. From the start, horses
Speaker 1: were such revolutionary agents of cultural change for Native people
Speaker 1: that exchange of the animals became a central feature of
Speaker 1: Western Indian life. There were annual horse fairs in places
Speaker 1: like the Black Hills, and it fixed villages like those
Speaker 1: of the Mandani Dotsas on the Missouri and the Wichitas
Speaker 1: on the Red River. Even middleman groups emerged. The horse
Speaker 1: trade even contributed to the breakup of the Cheyennes into
Speaker 1: two geographic divisions, a northern one and a southern one
Speaker 1: that became a central player in distributing horses northward up
Speaker 1: the planes. The Comanches, another group drawn from the north
Speaker 1: to the southern plains because of horses, literally reconceived themselves
Speaker 1: in the context of horses and trade. They raided other
Speaker 1: tribes and Spanish ranches for both horses and children, training
Speaker 1: the latter as herders and an economy that became more
Speaker 1: pastoral by the decade. They marketed their animals northward to
Speaker 1: horse poor Northern Plains tribes, westward to the New Mexicans
Speaker 1: via trade fairs in places like Pacos Picres and Taos,
Speaker 1: and eventually eastward to the Americans to a significant agree.
Speaker 1: Then the native people created the Western horse trade, built
Speaker 1: their status systems around horse ownership, and used the horse
Speaker 1: trade to manipulate Euro Americans anxious for profits and alliances
Speaker 1: with them. There were downsides. As with groups like the
Speaker 1: Comanches and Lakotas, the horse trade produced territorial expansion. Entire
Speaker 1: cottonwood groves along rivers like the Arkansas also disappeared as
Speaker 1: tribes endeavored to get their herds through snowy winters, and
Speaker 1: because winters on the northern plains could be hard on
Speaker 1: horse survival, Raids for replenishment of tribal stock rippled from
Speaker 1: north to south every spring, as happened in the fur
Speaker 1: trade with the mountain Men. A point came when the
Speaker 1: Americans attempted a similar step. With millions of horses running free,
Speaker 1: they tried their hand at capture. Catching wild horses may
Speaker 1: have begun as a North African or Iberian technique. By
Speaker 1: the time Americans entered the horse economy, many different peoples
Speaker 1: seem to have mastered it. Nolan may have learned the
Speaker 1: art from the French and Spanish settlers of Louisiana towns
Speaker 1: like Bayou Pierre and Nacotish, but the best descriptions of
Speaker 1: trade volume mustanging strategies came from a third group involved
Speaker 1: in the horse trade, the Hispanic residents of Texas. In
Speaker 1: the first six years of Spain's tax on captured wild horses.
Speaker 1: Texas horse catchers paid up on seventeen thousand captured wild horses,
Speaker 1: a great many of which appear to have ended up
Speaker 1: east of the Mississippi River, carrying American farmers and merchants,
Speaker 1: and supplying mounts for Southeastern Indians, like the Chickasaws and
Speaker 1: the Seminoles. As one San Antonio official put it, the
Speaker 1: number of mustangs and all these environs is so countless
Speaker 1: that if anyone were capable of taming them and caring
Speaker 1: for them, he could acquire a supply sufficient to furnish
Speaker 1: an army. But this multitude is causing us such grave
Speaker 1: damage that it is often necessary to shoot them. Catching
Speaker 1: wildhorses in volume became a kind of wilderness art form,
Speaker 1: with its own material culture, its own internal terminology. It
Speaker 1: differed from trapping by aiming at live animal capture, although
Speaker 1: making that happen was more difficult than you'd think. We
Speaker 1: know all this because of a French scientist named Jean
Speaker 1: Louis Brelandier, who in the eighteen twenties witnessed and described
Speaker 1: the process of volume wild horse capture. Once mustangers were
Speaker 1: among the herds and stallion bands. The first step was
Speaker 1: understanding the land escape to know how to cite what
Speaker 1: Burlandier called the corral. These are immense enclosures situated close
Speaker 1: to some pond, he wrote. They were built of planted
Speaker 1: posts with horizontals last to them with rawhide, and were
Speaker 1: large enough that, once inside, a herd could be swept
Speaker 1: into a circling milling confusion. The entrance, Berlandier wrote, is
Speaker 1: placed in such a way that it forms a long corridor,
Speaker 1: one consisting of brush wings fanning out a half mile
Speaker 1: or more from the capture pen itself, and usually oriented
Speaker 1: towards the south, so that prevailing southwesterly winds would envelop
Speaker 1: an approaching herd in its own dust cloud, blinding it.
Speaker 1: To start the action, mustangers divided themselves into three groups,
Speaker 1: each with different rolls. A group of well mounted riders,
Speaker 1: the Adventadores, had the task of startling the herd into
Speaker 1: flight and pushing it towards the funnel leading to the pin.
Speaker 1: The herd would find itself squeezed into a flight path
Speaker 1: by a second group of mustangers, the Questos, who were
Speaker 1: the most skilled riders and whose role consists of conducting
Speaker 1: that dreadful mass of living beings by riding full gallop
Speaker 1: along the flanks and gathering there in the midst of
Speaker 1: suffocating dust the partial herds, which sometimes unite at the
Speaker 1: sound of the terror of a large herd. Burlandier rode
Speaker 1: at the moment of truth as the wide eyed horses
Speaker 1: were sweeping at breakneck speed into the trap. A third
Speaker 1: group of mustangers, the inseradoris, were charged with closing the gate,
Speaker 1: sometimes dashing in to open it for an instant to
Speaker 1: allow stallions in older horses to escape. The scenes that
Speaker 1: followed had such an emotional load that Messioneiro's had a
Speaker 1: special vocabulary for them. It was a jargon rife with
Speaker 1: the language of death. Some horses died from sentimiento are
Speaker 1: broken heartedness over capture. Others from DSpace show nervous rage.
Speaker 1: Another term of art was adiando stinking. It referred to
Speaker 1: a capture corral ruined for use from the effect of
Speaker 1: having been too often jammed with panicked and dying animals.
Speaker 1: Burlandier ended his story this way. When these animals find
Speaker 1: themselves enclosed, the first to enter fruitlessly search for exits,
Speaker 1: and those in the rear trample over the first. It
Speaker 1: is rare that in one of these chases. A large
Speaker 1: part of the horses thus trapped do not kill one
Speaker 1: another in their efforts to escape. It has happened that
Speaker 1: the Messing Arrows have trapped at one swoop more than
Speaker 1: one thousand horses, of which not a fifth remained. What
Speaker 1: made these Southern planes horse trade expeditions shadowy and northern
Speaker 1: planes for activities well known, was actually a simple difference.
Speaker 1: The horse trade featured live, not dead animals, so horses
Speaker 1: became their own transportation to markets. There was no need
Speaker 1: for corporate investment in freight wagons, steamboats, or shipping. That
Speaker 1: also meant a meager historical trail in an economy for
Speaker 1: which so few day by day accounts exist. Eighteen o
Speaker 1: eight eighteen oh nine, Trader Anthony Glasses Journal, conveying a
Speaker 1: story I told in a prior podcast episode, provides one
Speaker 1: of the best looks at the otherwise little known Western
Speaker 1: horse trade. Glasses Journal allows us to recreate a history
Speaker 1: in our heads where one had barely been imaginable before.
Speaker 1: It took a full decade after Spain in the US
Speaker 1: finally agreed on the Red and Arkansas Rivers as the
Speaker 1: official boundary between the two North American powers before another
Speaker 1: American horse trader would leave us an account rivaling Glasses.
Speaker 1: In those years, scores very likely hundreds of unknown and
Speaker 1: undocumented American horse traders traversed the plains, running wild horses,
Speaker 1: trading for animals from the Indians, and probably encouraging such
Speaker 1: a general theft of horses across the West that one
Speaker 1: observer estimated that ten thousand were stolen from Spanish ranches
Speaker 1: almost every year. Murky accounts exist for a few of
Speaker 1: these traders. The Osages plundered Alexander McFarlane and John Lemons's
Speaker 1: Mustaging party in eighteen twelve. August Pierre Chateau, Jules Demon
Speaker 1: and Joseph Philibert of Saint Louis opened up a significant
Speaker 1: horse trade with the Comanches and Rappa Hose between eighteen
Speaker 1: fifteen and eighteen seventeen, and Cafias Ham and David Burnett
Speaker 1: became modestly famous horse traders in the same years, as
Speaker 1: did Jacob Fowler, who left us a journal written in
Speaker 1: phonics along with Hugh Glynn. Then came Thomas James of
Speaker 1: Saint Louis, whose book Three Years among the Indians and
Speaker 1: Mexicans left us a nicely close grained look at the
Speaker 1: Mustanger's west, James set a pattern to come. He was
Speaker 1: both a mountain man and a mustanger. He had first
Speaker 1: gone west by ascending the Missouri to the Three Forks
Speaker 1: in eighteen oh nine and eighteen ten, and he didn't
Speaker 1: make his first trip onto the southern plains until eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty one, riding out from Fort Smith in president Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: before being confronted by Comanches under Spanish orders not to
Speaker 1: allow Americans to approach Santa Fe. Eyeing those splendid Comanche
Speaker 1: horse herds, Thomas James got a sense of the possibilities.
Speaker 1: Invited to trade for horses the next summer, James did so.
Speaker 1: The result was a three year expedition from eighteen twenty
Speaker 1: two to eighteen twenty four that was financed with fifty
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars in goods. Ascending the Canadian River, James's
Speaker 1: party of twenty three finally met the Wichitas under their
Speaker 1: headman Alsare, and the trading commenced. James quickly bought seventeen
Speaker 1: that he knew would fetch one hundred dollars apiece back
Speaker 1: in the settlements. Eventually, the Wichitas introduced him to the
Speaker 1: command achies a band under Big Star, and James got
Speaker 1: a taste of a little twist the Comanches put on
Speaker 1: horse trading. They were perfectly willing to trade their best horses,
Speaker 1: since they had every intention of stealing them back. Despite
Speaker 1: the frustrations, the life of a Western horse trader held
Speaker 1: a real allure. James was smitten. I began to be
Speaker 1: reconciled to a savage life and enamored with the simplicity
Speaker 1: of nature. Here there were no debts, no sheriffs, no marshals,
Speaker 1: no hypocrisy or false friendships. Once he had assembled a
Speaker 1: drove of three hundred and twenty three high quality animals,
Speaker 1: James departed for the settlements, but not before Olsiree made
Speaker 1: a present of his own fine war horse, Chakoba, and
Speaker 1: urged James to return the next year to the headwaters
Speaker 1: of the Red, where the Wichitas grazed sick steam thousand
Speaker 1: fine ponies. That would have been the horse trader's promise
Speaker 1: of the golden fleece. But James never returned. Pushing his
Speaker 1: herd eastward, he lost all but seventy one to stampedes
Speaker 1: and what must have been a biblical attack of horseflies.
Speaker 1: More attrition followed as he penetrated the woodlands. If James
Speaker 1: can be believed, when he finally reached Saint Louis for
Speaker 1: his troubles, he had just five horses left. That was
Speaker 1: precisely the number he had started with three years earlier.
Speaker 1: As the wild horse herds spread farther north and west,
Speaker 1: the trade expanded geographically and in volume. The markets evolved too.
Speaker 1: Overland immigrants plying the trails across the plains needed a
Speaker 1: constant supply of fresh horses, and during the War with
Speaker 1: Mexico in the late eighteen forties, the US Army of
Speaker 1: the West needed remounts for its cavalry, so between eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty two and eighteen fifty the horse trade shifted to
Speaker 1: a new phase. In eighteen thirty four, the Trade and
Speaker 1: Intercourse Act for the Indian Country made horses a legal
Speaker 1: trade item in the West. The trading firm of Bent,
Speaker 1: Saint Vrain and Company got its license that same year
Speaker 1: and built Bent's Fort on the north side of the
Speaker 1: Arkansas River the next year. That trade took a leap
Speaker 1: forward in eighteen forty when the Cheyennes made peace with
Speaker 1: the Comanches, and kiwas so much so that the horse
Speaker 1: and mule trade became the key to Bentz Fort's success.
Speaker 1: The Colorado traders benefited from wildcought and Indian horses from
Speaker 1: off the surrounding prairies, but they also reaped profits from
Speaker 1: the large number of horses that former mountain men, seeking
Speaker 1: new animal resources. With beaver now entirely trapped out, drove
Speaker 1: eastward from California. Mountain man Old Bill Williams claimed that
Speaker 1: the greatest coup of his long career in the West
Speaker 1: was stealing four thousand horses from California ranches and driving
Speaker 1: them to Bentce Forward. Jim Beckworth, long adopted into the
Speaker 1: Crow tribe, arrived at Pueblo in eighteen forty six with
Speaker 1: one thousand horses from California, trading almost all of them
Speaker 1: to Stephen Carney's Army of the West. Former beaver trappers
Speaker 1: Solomon Sublette and Joseph Walker came with ten drovers and
Speaker 1: five hundred California horses at about the same time. With
Speaker 1: beaver gone and the buffalo slaughter not yet under way,
Speaker 1: for Western outdoorsmen, the horse trade was now pretty much
Speaker 1: the story. So the trade kept shifting ever northward because
Speaker 1: of the Oregon Trail By the eighteen fifties, Fort Laramie
Speaker 1: had become the epicenter of the trade, but especially in
Speaker 1: the years after the Civil War, as the slaughter of
Speaker 1: bison took away the wild herds competition for grass and water,
Speaker 1: wild horses underwent a population explosion on the northern plains,
Speaker 1: filling the Red Desert of Wyoming and the badlands of
Speaker 1: Montana and the Dakotas with wild bands. Like almost all
Speaker 1: the rest of the West, wild animals except in the
Speaker 1: most parched deserts, the vast horseherds did not survive long
Speaker 1: into the twentieth century. Ranchers paid their cowboys to shoot
Speaker 1: wild horses on site, then bait the carcasses with poison
Speaker 1: to kill wolves and coyotes. It was a strange kind
Speaker 1: of murder to shoot an animal exactly like the one
Speaker 1: you were riding, but it was doubly efficient for ranchers
Speaker 1: who dreamed of a world without wild horses or wolves.
Speaker 1: Enough horses were still out there that during the Great
Speaker 1: War World War One, Miles City furnished Allied buyers, thirty
Speaker 1: two thousand of them. That helped the British and French
Speaker 1: hold off the Germans till the Yanks arrived. Then modernity hit,
Speaker 1: and with it a story that tied past and future.
Speaker 1: One of the markers of the modern world in the
Speaker 1: Roaring twenties was the remarkable growth in household pets. The
Speaker 1: wild horse trade finally acquired a corporate player when Kettel Ration,
Speaker 1: the first of the national pet food companies, began to
Speaker 1: put up plants in the Midwest. Some of the sangers
Speaker 1: building capture corrals in the badlands of eastern Montana evidently
Speaker 1: were unaware that the horses they were selling to buyers
Speaker 1: in fancy at the railroad stations were going to pet
Speaker 1: food slaughterhouses. One of them, a young man named Frank Litz,
Speaker 1: learned the truth around a campfire one night. We're up on.
Speaker 1: Litz bought one hundred and fifty sticks of dynamite and
Speaker 1: a train ticket to Illinois with the intent of performing
Speaker 1: eco terrorism on a dog food plant. There. Guards caught
Speaker 1: him before he could set off his charges. But I
Speaker 1: like to imagine that a wild horse somewhere nickered when
Speaker 1: that story circulated in the West.
Speaker 2: Dan.
Speaker 3: When we talk about wildlife in North America, a lot
Speaker 3: of the debates fall around what animals belong where and
Speaker 3: what animals should be where That's how I yeah, I mean, well,
Speaker 3: I think just generally speaking, you're talking about wolves in
Speaker 3: the West, you're talking about invasive species. You're talking, you know,
Speaker 3: like what animals should properly be in a certain place,
Speaker 3: And obviously that depends on your chronological framework, right, and
Speaker 3: so here I think horses are one of these species
Speaker 3: that when people look at them on the landscape today,
Speaker 3: they say, these things shouldn't be there, they don't belong.
Speaker 3: But you obviously take a different approach to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I take the deep time approach. And so you
Speaker 1: know what one has to so to be sure, old
Speaker 1: whirl horses brought here by Spaniards, the Brits, the French.
Speaker 1: They had gone through several thousand and four to six
Speaker 1: thousand years of domestication and alterations in their confirmation and
Speaker 1: so forth and size and everything. So they had certainly
Speaker 1: been bred to some different you know, conformations than classic
Speaker 1: American horses. But the horse is one of those animals,
Speaker 1: like the wolf, like the camel actually, which is another
Speaker 1: one that causes people to scratch their heads. These are
Speaker 1: animals that evolved in North America, you know, after the
Speaker 1: chick saloub impact took out the dinosaurs, and evolution sort
Speaker 1: of started again and began producing the age of mammals.
Speaker 1: Horses were one of the creatures that evolved in North America.
Speaker 1: And so, because I like to think in big picture terms,
Speaker 1: it seems to me hard to justify an argument completely
Speaker 1: that the horse doesn't have some place on American soil
Speaker 1: since it's been here for fifty six fifty seven million years.
Speaker 1: Then was only absent for about eight thousand or so
Speaker 1: years before Old Worlders returned horses to North America. And
Speaker 1: you know, as I argued in that podcast, that's this
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons why horses did so well
Speaker 1: when they got here. I mean, they were completely preadapted,
Speaker 1: Their teeth, their hoofs, their speed, everything about their behavior
Speaker 1: had all been shaped by North America. And so they
Speaker 1: get back here. And one of the reasons I make
Speaker 1: a point about that is because there are places where
Speaker 1: Europeans tried to introduce horses, like South Africa, and they
Speaker 1: had a very difficult time getting horses to actually survive
Speaker 1: in any numbers in South Africa. But in North America, man,
Speaker 1: as soon as they got loose, they were instantly sort
Speaker 1: of you know, out there replicating the pleistocen. But what
Speaker 1: I think is, you know, been an issue for most
Speaker 1: people in thinking about that, is that we all know
Speaker 1: historically that horses in the last four hundred years came
Speaker 1: from Europe to North America or one of the species
Speaker 1: that was brought here and were new then, and so
Speaker 1: that's how our perception of history is often a fairly
Speaker 1: short one, and so that's how we think of the
Speaker 1: story of the horse. It's something that came from Europe
Speaker 1: and ended up in America a few hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: And of course now we as we all know, wild
Speaker 1: horses in the West especially have produced some almost impossibly
Speaker 1: difficult issues for the BLM, in particular where most wild
Speaker 1: horses are. And I mean I always try to make
Speaker 1: the point when people bring that up as well. The
Speaker 1: problem with the introduction, the reintroduction, the recovery of horses
Speaker 1: in North America is that we didn't that the same
Speaker 1: time bring all of their Pleistocene predators over with them.
Speaker 1: Just the horse made it. Nobody had tried to domesticate
Speaker 1: the sabertooth cat, and so we didn't bring any of
Speaker 1: their predators along to America with them. And that's been
Speaker 1: the difficulty, especially in in America where we've suppressed or
Speaker 1: eliminated the populations of predators, as you've got an animal
Speaker 1: out there that once had big predators and they're not
Speaker 1: there anymore.
Speaker 2: But I mean, you have to realize that you laying
Speaker 2: a lot of traps for yourself because because like I get,
Speaker 2: like horses were here, okay, and then since someone brought
Speaker 2: horses back, it's okay to view them as having like
Speaker 2: continuity that they're sort of you know, they're a native
Speaker 2: animal with an asterisk. But would you take it so
Speaker 2: far as to advocate on bringing camels back or does
Speaker 2: it need to be that they came back four hundred
Speaker 2: year ago not today?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, we did try to bring camels back.
Speaker 1: Didn't work out, No, it didn't work, but we did
Speaker 1: make an effort to return camels. I mean, and not
Speaker 1: because Americans in the eighteen fifties understood that camels were
Speaker 1: an evolutionary in North American species.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't on the Spanish mind when they brought horses.
Speaker 1: It wasn't on their mind either. I mean, we haven't
Speaker 1: known this, in fact for more than about half a century.
Speaker 1: So this is something that's relatively new in our consciousness,
Speaker 1: which is I think one of the reasons why acceptance
Speaker 1: of the idea has kind of lagged. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of intrigued by the story of camels. I've never
Speaker 1: really read deeply into it, but you know, I know
Speaker 1: that camels were used, for example, in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Speaker 1: in the desert country, and they did reasonable well. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were domesticated Campbell's, they never went wild, but when
Speaker 1: a few of them got abandoned, there were so few
Speaker 1: of them. I don't think cammels have the same reproductive
Speaker 1: turnover that horses do. There were so few of them
Speaker 1: that the ones that were left basically when people saw
Speaker 1: them they shot them. Indians native people arrowed them when
Speaker 1: they saw.
Speaker 2: Well it was at that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was the eighteen fifties and eighteen sixties, and
Speaker 1: there were still some camels in the West as late
Speaker 1: as the eighteen eighties, so that period in the yeah,
Speaker 1: the Civil War, before and after the Civil War, there
Speaker 1: were actually camels in the West. But now that particular
Speaker 1: attempt that didn't take the way the horse thing did.
Speaker 2: What was the horse trader Nolan? What was his first name?
Speaker 1: Philip.
Speaker 2: You mentioned Philip you, I'm sure in the interesting time
Speaker 2: you mentioned Philip Nolan and said he had eccentricities.
Speaker 1: Many and great many great.
Speaker 2: So if I today was talking about someone and I said,
Speaker 2: you know, rand, he's got certain eccentricities, he's gonna get
Speaker 2: an image in his mind, you know, like not exactly,
Speaker 2: but he's gonna sort of catch my drift. You know
Speaker 2: what were they?
Speaker 1: Well, the guy who said that was William Dunbar. He
Speaker 1: was a scientist and that's just Mississippi who knew Nolan.
Speaker 1: And he never elaborated. And I don't think that was
Speaker 1: that was in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, who was
Speaker 1: asking about this guy. I couldn't know.
Speaker 2: Was he like a sexual devian or like what like
Speaker 2: or he's just behavioral or what.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what he was referring to. But
Speaker 1: Nolan was, uh, he was one of those kind of
Speaker 1: people who, uh, he dominated an everywhere pretty clearly, everywhere
Speaker 1: he went, you know. And I don't know that this
Speaker 1: exactly happened, but I suspect it may have happened. Philip
Speaker 1: Nolan evidently was the kind of guy who being introduced
Speaker 1: in a comanche camp for the first time would pick
Speaker 1: out the biggest, meanest looking dude and walk up to
Speaker 1: him and shove him. And so he exhibited that kind
Speaker 1: of cocksure confidence that I think enabled him to do
Speaker 1: a lot of the things that he did. And I
Speaker 1: suspect that Dunbar was who was you know, he's a
Speaker 1: cultured guy out of Edinburgh, Scotland, and highly educated. He
Speaker 1: was a very well known scientist at the time. I
Speaker 1: suspect he thought Nolan was. I mean, because he says
Speaker 1: something like he lacked a sufficient education, but he did
Speaker 1: have print simples of honor tied to a tremendous amount
Speaker 1: of personal courage, and so I think he was a
Speaker 1: kind of guy who was in a different class than
Speaker 1: Dunbar was. He was somebody who Dunbar probably didn't entirely understand,
Speaker 1: but Nolan didn't. He did cut a large figure in
Speaker 1: that part of the world. A lot of people knew
Speaker 1: who he was. He never married, but he very clearly
Speaker 1: had a girlfriend in every port. He had girlfriends in Natches,
Speaker 1: in Nacotash, in Arkansas, and probably in every Indian encampment
Speaker 1: that he went to. And one of the kind of
Speaker 1: intriguing things about his death was he probably wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been killed in that Spanish attack on these mustangers in
Speaker 1: eighteen oh one when he died, because the accounts of
Speaker 1: it say that a stray ricochet bully caught him in
Speaker 1: the forehead, and so it wasn't even that he was
Speaker 1: actually successfully targeted. It's just that he got taken out
Speaker 1: by a kind of a you know one in one
Speaker 1: hundred Chants, where a bullet, a stray bullet, hits him
Speaker 1: in the head and kills him.
Speaker 2: Has he been treated fictionally in film? Have you seen?
Speaker 1: Well? There is I'm trying to remember who wrote this book,
Speaker 1: The Man Without a Country it was called, and the
Speaker 1: protagonist in that book was a guy named Philip Nolan,
Speaker 1: But there's always been some suspicion about whether he was
Speaker 1: based this character was based on Philip Nolan, the real
Speaker 1: Philip Nolan, or just on some invented character. But there
Speaker 1: is a book with a guy named Philip Nolan as
Speaker 1: the main character called A Man Without a Country, but no,
Speaker 1: no one has. Really He's to me a pretty ripe
Speaker 1: character for doing that, because, I mean, here's one of
Speaker 1: the things I've always been stunned by. This guy's only
Speaker 1: twenty years old when he first goes to the west,
Speaker 1: and this is almost twenty years before Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is long before Thomas Jefferson ever sends
Speaker 1: out his expeditions. Here is this single guy. He probably
Speaker 1: occasionally would go with companions. I know he had the
Speaker 1: guy that he was about to take to Monticello to
Speaker 1: take that paint stay in to Jefferson was a fairly
Speaker 1: well known figure on the Southwestern frontier, a guy named
Speaker 1: Joseph Talpoon who knew a lot of the languages and
Speaker 1: usually went along with some of these traders. So I
Speaker 1: think he Nolan probably went with somebody like that on
Speaker 1: some of these trips. But I mean, holy count taking
Speaker 1: off at the age of twenty, and on that particular trip,
Speaker 1: that first trip, there's every evidence that he got as
Speaker 1: far as New Mexico.
Speaker 2: Just incredibly ballsy, man, I'm telling you.
Speaker 1: You know, just taking out and he knew good and
Speaker 1: well that the Spaniards regarded this as their territory. So
Speaker 1: if they catch him, you know, the results are not
Speaker 1: going to be good. But nonetheless, and he manages to
Speaker 1: somehow ingratiate himself with all sorts of Native people while
Speaker 1: he's doing it.
Speaker 3: One thing that caught my eye in this episode is
Speaker 3: a parallel with the buffalo robe trade and that, you know,
Speaker 3: like when people went up to try to encourage tribes
Speaker 3: to catch beaver. There's an account of a Mandan chief
Speaker 3: telling someone from the Hudson's Bay Company if we could
Speaker 3: catch him on horseback in a real hunt. That sounds fine,
Speaker 3: but we're not about to do this crawling around in
Speaker 3: the bowels of the earth thing. And both of these
Speaker 3: you highlight. With the horse trade, like the buffalo rope trade,
Speaker 3: it's based on a pre existing native economy, and so
Speaker 3: the transition from indigenous economies to this global market economy
Speaker 3: sort of happened seamlessly, whereas it's more fitful with the
Speaker 3: with the beaver trade. And I just wonder if you
Speaker 3: can sort of elaborate on that pattern that we see
Speaker 3: again and again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the horse trade was very definitely based on
Speaker 1: an earlier form of trade, exchange between Native people and
Speaker 1: the you know, and there's some wonderful stories I didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't tell them in this episode, but there's some
Speaker 1: wonderful stories about about Native people first encountering someone approaching
Speaker 1: them on horseback or with horses to trade to them. Uh.
Speaker 1: And those those encounters are mostly farther north, among groups
Speaker 1: like the Blackfeet and the accentib One, who are pretty
Speaker 1: far removed from where horses are first wild in the West,
Speaker 1: which is down in the southern West. But they kind
Speaker 1: of you know, they look at the animals and they
Speaker 1: don't exactly know how to react to them. They you know,
Speaker 1: there's an account of some Blackfeet leader offering the first
Speaker 1: horse he ever sees some buffalo meat to eat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, the horse, of course shies and throws
Speaker 1: its head, and he has to be told that's not
Speaker 1: what these animals eat. They're more like they're like elk,
Speaker 1: And that's the best. Usually when a native person who's
Speaker 1: trading horses and taking them to a try for the
Speaker 1: first time does so that's the way he does it.
Speaker 1: But he uses the elk as the as the example.
Speaker 1: So it requires the culture too. It's not just the animal.
Speaker 1: You have to take the culture along with it. You
Speaker 1: have to show people what the animal eats, how you
Speaker 1: care for it, how you hobble it to keep it
Speaker 1: close by and not running off, how you ride it,
Speaker 1: how you do all these aspects of the equine arts
Speaker 1: that all has to be taught. But it does fit
Speaker 1: pretty seamlessly into an existing mode of exchange between Native people,
Speaker 1: and it does transform some of those modes. As I
Speaker 1: mentioned in the podcast, you know the reason we think
Speaker 1: there's a division between northern Cheyennes and Southern Chyennes. Northern
Speaker 1: Chyennes are today in Montana, Southern Chyennes and western Oklahoma.
Speaker 2: Is I wanted to ask you about this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the southerns managed to find themselves or went far
Speaker 1: enough south to get into the horse country and they stayed.
Speaker 1: They were drawn like the Comanches, and the kiwas to
Speaker 1: that part of the world where horses were first available,
Speaker 1: either wild or easily stolen from Spanish settlements, and so
Speaker 1: that became an the inducement for a segment of the
Speaker 1: Cheyennes to go south and remain and not return to
Speaker 1: the north, where the larger body of their tribe was.
Speaker 1: But I mean, there are all kinds of wonderful stories.
Speaker 1: I was just a reader on an article in the
Speaker 1: journal Science about two years ago about some archaeological excavations
Speaker 1: in Colorado where radiocarbon dating indicates and these were horse
Speaker 1: bones and radiocarbon dating was indicating a time frame between
Speaker 1: about sixteen twenty and sixteen seventy, which is before the
Speaker 1: Pueblo Revolt, which we've long used as the moment when
Speaker 1: horses really are spread across the West. And it's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I said in the podcast, and I
Speaker 1: told the people who were working on this article. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are accounts in the Spanish documents that what they
Speaker 1: were doing when settled in New Mexico, they brought their
Speaker 1: horse herds with them, of course, and sheep and goats
Speaker 1: and cattle, and what they often did was to train
Speaker 1: young Pueblo men to be the herders of these various
Speaker 1: domestic animals, and some of those there are accounts that
Speaker 1: some of these young Pueblo horse guys, who are hurting horses,
Speaker 1: would also learn how to ride, and would mount up
Speaker 1: and take off into a west where no native people
Speaker 1: had ever really ridden before. And they clearly some of
Speaker 1: them by sixteen fifty or so managed to get up
Speaker 1: into Colorado, which seems to be the explanation for that site.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's a revolutionary the advent of a revolutionary
Speaker 1: animal that's not been present in North America for eight
Speaker 1: thousand years and it sort of transforms the native world
Speaker 1: and their trade possibilities, and it becomes, particularly on the
Speaker 1: southern half of the West, the kind of counterpart to
Speaker 1: the fur trade up north.
Speaker 2: I feel like tastes and horses must have changed a lot,
Speaker 2: because these guys Nolan and others that are catching horses,
Speaker 2: they're catching horses to just directly supply people's horse needs.
Speaker 2: I remember I had a much older half a much
Speaker 2: older half brother, and he'd always been out in Colorado
Speaker 2: as a game warden and a guide. And I remember
Speaker 2: being when I was ten years old, I went out
Speaker 2: and hung out with him. We were driving around somewhere
Speaker 2: and there's a bunch of wild horses, and I remember
Speaker 2: him saying to me. I asked, because he had horses,
Speaker 2: and I asked him about those horses, and I remember
Speaker 2: him saying, they're all not heads. And I kept looking
Speaker 2: at I remember this so clearly. I kept looking at him,
Speaker 2: trying to understand what that meant, what he meant by
Speaker 2: not like a notthead. Then I realized he's saying, you know,
Speaker 2: these they're all idiots or whatever. So is it that
Speaker 2: people have just gotten I'm anything, I'm anything but a horseman.
Speaker 2: Is it people that have just changed their tastes for
Speaker 2: other breeds because now these wild these feral horses, wild
Speaker 2: horses what eevery you want to call them, depending on
Speaker 2: your how you view the issue. They're not like extra
Speaker 2: extremely popular as riding horses, right.
Speaker 1: No, they're not. I mean, you know, and they've they've
Speaker 1: been wild, and so they're difficult to you know, horses
Speaker 1: are not particularly easy to train to ride anyway. I
Speaker 1: mean I have had horses. I had horses for many years.
Speaker 1: I I uh uh. I had a horse when I
Speaker 1: was living in Texas and I took him to Montana.
Speaker 1: It was a paint horse that I got in North Dakota. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was supposed to have been a horse that sitting
Speaker 1: bulls people had taken to Canada and then when they
Speaker 1: came back to the States, they brought the ancestors of
Speaker 1: this horse back that probably that probably just cost me
Speaker 1: an extra hundred dose. It was a good story horse,
Speaker 1: special horse. But this horse I got as a five
Speaker 1: month old colt, and by the time he was about
Speaker 1: a year and a half old, I was uh. I
Speaker 1: was first putting blankets on his back, and then I
Speaker 1: put a buffalo robe on his back, and then I
Speaker 1: started leaning over him and finally sliding over him, and
Speaker 1: after doing that a few times, I swung my leg
Speaker 1: over him and he never bucked one time. We just
Speaker 1: and then I for a long time, I didn't put
Speaker 1: a bridle in his mouth. I just rode him with
Speaker 1: a hackamore, which of course is a leather band across
Speaker 1: his nose. And so I rode him pretty much in
Speaker 1: the way, bareback and with a hack of more, pretty
Speaker 1: much in the way a lot of Native people would
Speaker 1: have ridden their horses. And he was quite He certainly was, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a knucklehead later in his life, but when
Speaker 1: he was till the time he was about five years old,
Speaker 1: he was a really good horse. And then I moved
Speaker 1: off to Montana, and I had to leave him in
Speaker 1: Texas for about three years before I could create a
Speaker 1: situation to bring him up. And I had turned him
Speaker 1: loose in a pasture with a bunch of other horses,
Speaker 1: and he learned a bunch of bad habits, and I
Speaker 1: was never able to yeah, and so I ended up
Speaker 1: getting other horses after that that we were better than
Speaker 1: he was. But I did have that experience which was
Speaker 1: a very interesting kind of a replication maybe of how
Speaker 1: Native people would have done it, and it was not
Speaker 1: really very difficult at all. He was really he was
Speaker 1: really pretty easy to wasn't really breaking him. It was
Speaker 1: just finally getting on him and riding him, and he
Speaker 1: was pretty easy to do that with. But it's you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things I didn't I didn't include, and
Speaker 1: I didn't include a lot of things that I know
Speaker 1: about this because I've written about it in other places,
Speaker 1: but in the episode, I didn't talk about things that
Speaker 1: are fairly I suppose you could say explanatory in terms
Speaker 1: like that, because, for example, in that Berlandier story about
Speaker 1: how Hispanic mustangers in Texas would catch those horses and
Speaker 1: how you would lose sometimes eighty percent of them in
Speaker 1: the process of corralling them and catching them because they
Speaker 1: would trample over one another and then they would die
Speaker 1: of as the terms went, of broken heartedness overcapture or
Speaker 1: nervous rage over capture. The other thing he said that
Speaker 1: I didn't include. He said that these Hispanic messoneros in
Speaker 1: Texas could render those horses, the ones that survived, they
Speaker 1: could render them green broke in less than an hour. Really,
Speaker 1: they could get them out of those corrals and within
Speaker 1: an hour they would have them green broke. And that's
Speaker 1: what happened with a lot of the horses that those
Speaker 1: mustangers in the twentieth century up in the Montana Badlands.
Speaker 1: They were catching wild horses and selling them to the
Speaker 1: buyers for the Allies to use them in World War One,
Speaker 1: and they were just spending an hour or so green
Speaker 1: breaking them. And so I've always had, because I've had
Speaker 1: horses and experience what horses can be like, I've always
Speaker 1: had the idea that, oh my god, they took those
Speaker 1: horses over to France and let brit soldiers who didn't
Speaker 1: know anything about riding horses get on them. I mean,
Speaker 1: what a friggin rodeo that would have been with animals
Speaker 1: that you know, were actually wild mustangs. I mean, it
Speaker 1: would have been a crazy thing, no doubt. Someone must
Speaker 1: have written the you know, a journal entry or.
Speaker 3: Something about it.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks, Dan, appreciate it.
Speaker 1: How you bet women say other games saying
Speaker 2: The music tree hundred visitation