Though once native to North America, most horses went extinct around 12,000 years ago as the end of the last ice age led to major climate shifts. Horses didn’t return to North America again until the arrival of well-known dingbat Columbus in 1492, which led to the establishment of horse breeding in the Caribbean, and then the proliferation of horses into Mexico via the conquistadors in the sixteenth century. The majority of these horses were smaller breeds, because it was expensive as hell to bring horses across the Atlantic, with draft horses not arriving until the nineteenth century. Anyways, though some Spanish explorers used horses when exploring the southwestern and southeastern portions of what is today the United States, freaking the shit out of the local peoples, they didn’t appear and stay in large numbers until colonization of New Mexico at the end of the 1500s.
Now from the beginning, the Spanish recognized the distinct advantage their horses and guns gave them over the natives peoples they sought to control, so they did everything in their power to keep both out of local hands. A policy they doubled down on even more after the Chichimeca in northern Mexico managed to get their hands on horses, leading to a forty-year war. However, as anyone with a few years under their belt can tell you, the best laid plans rarely work out, especially when one considers the human penchant for losing things, laziness, and greed. Over the next half century or so, many Puebloans learned to ride horses, and as things got steadily worse for them, many fled north, taking horses with them, where they were more than happy to teach others how to ride and care for them. Now at the time, there were already feral horse herds ranging across the area, the result of horses getting away or just being abandoned, but the natives in the southwest didn’t seem to have much use for them beyond carrying stuff and the occasional meal. Either way, the horse slowly began to make its way northward through the Great Basin, home to the Numic peoples.
The Numic peoples originated in what is today southeastern California and after a series of climatic shifts around a thousand years ago began moving into the Great Basin do to increased competition with other groups around their homelands. Though some groups already lived in the area, the Numic peoples displaced and replaced them over the next several centuries. Now being a giant fricking desert, life in the Great Basin wasn’t easy, and most of the Numic tribes lived in small groups which ranged over a wide area hunting and gathering. This scattered lifestyle didn’t make it easy to defend themselves, which often led to them getting pushed around or enslaved by more dominant tribes.
The Utes of Utah and western Colorado were the first Numic people to get the horse around the middle of the seventeenth century. Unlike the Apache and Navajo to the south, who were more interested in Spanish goats and sheep then Spanish horses, the Utes quickly recognized the value of the horse, transforming themselves from a meek people digging in the dirt to mobile warriors who ranged onto the Great Plains to hunt buffalo and didn’t take shit from anybody. The demand for horses from the Utes quickly created a new trade, wherein Navajo and Apache stole or purchased horses from the Spanish and then traded them to the Utes for deer hides and slaves, most of whom were the Utes’ unmounted Numic brethren. Unsurprisingly, some of these brethren, namely the Shoshone, began obtaining the horse soon afterward.
The Shoshone inhabited parts of Wyoming and southern Idaho, and much like the Utes, prior to the introduction of the horse they were often times the victims of their more prosperous neighbors to the west, north, and east. Similar to the Utes, the Shoshone quickly embraced a new horse/warrior culture which allowed them to not get their asses kicked so often. However, unlike the Utes, the Shoshone went a step further, emerging from their desert homeland like some kind of terrifying mounted force of nature, attacking and expanding into the territories of their former tormentors in eastern Oregon, Montana, and eastward onto the Great Plains. It was the beginning of a sweeping change would which transform life in the Great Basin and on the Great Plains. It was the beginning of the horse empires.
