The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures

Extract

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