to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place
and in this place had died. ~ CORMAC McCARTHY
The horses weren’t much to look at in comparison to the immense steeds ridden by the royalty and cavalries of England, France and Germany. They were light colored and small, barely 14 hands high with concave Arabian faces and tapering muzzles. But they were smart and fast and did not need grain-heavy diets and frequent waterings.
This was the Iberian mustang that Hernán Cortés brought to the New World in the early 16th century, and it prospered in Mexico. As the Spanish conquests spread, so did their horses, but the indigenous tribes that the Spanish subjugated showed little interest in learning to ride them. Besides which, they were prohibited from doing so.
It was not until the 17th century that the Apaches of New Mexico began to adapt themselves to the horse. It was even later that the Comanches, long disparate and primitive bands of hunter-gatherers, would master the mustang, master the demanding skill of horse breeding, and in doing so master the buffalo.
This was one of the great social and military transformations in history and the Comanches become in effect a Native American superpower. They ruled over 26 million square miles of the lower Great Plains and 20 other tribes with a political and economic deftness and were so ferocious that it took thousands of American troops and militiamen 40 years to finally subjugate them.
This is one of the two major back stories to S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, a 2010 book that tells in masterful style the story of the battle between the Comanches and white settlers for control of the West. The other back story is the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest Comanche chief.
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