American History - Horses

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. 

American History - The Pueblo Revolt

For most of the seventeenth century, Spain was a fading superpower.  Though supplied by a seemingly endless supply of silver from its mines in the New World, poor management and a seemingly endless involvement in wars across Europe kept the country teetering on bankruptcy.  Formerly the pre-eminent explorers of the previous century, the Spanish in the Americas spent most of the 1600s resting on their laurels in well established settlements which seemed to have already seen their best days.

At the time, the northern most settlements of the Spanish were in New Mexico, where around 2,500 Spanish colonials kept a tight control over some 15,000 Puebloans, who were treated little better than slaves in a system where they had to provide a certain level of work to their Spanish overlords without any type of compensation.  New Mexico was on the frontier, with little to no access to silver, and the hostile Apache and Navajo all around, meaning it only attracted from amongst the Spanish the desperate and the foolish, a bad combination even under the best of conditions.  Though there were colonial administrators, the real management of the colony was in the hands of the Franciscan missionaries, who busily tried to convert the Pueblo to Catholicism by eradicating all of their old religion and culture.  The result of this was the reduction of the Puebloan population by some 75% via disease, violence, and forced labor, and for little to no purpose.

Not surprisingly, the Puebloans really didn’t like what was happening to them.  However, when the Spanish first arrived, they were so divided by language, culture, and old grudges that even when revolts did break out, they tended to be limited to a few towns, which made it easy for the Spanish to end them with ruthless efficiency.  However, as things steadily got worst, the Pueblo people increasingly set aside their differences, coming to the realization that if they were to survive, they would have to work together.  Uniting under a single leader named Po’pay, they planned an intricate united uprising which took place in 1680, some 82 years after the Spanish first arrived.  As one they rose up, killing 20 percent of the Spanish population in a matter of days and forcing the survivors to flee south back to Mexico. 

With the Spanish gone, Po’pay attempted to eradicate all signs of the Spanish and to unite the Pueblo people under his rule.  Though such efforts were momentarily buoyed by an attempt by the Spanish to retake New Mexico in 1681, which the Puebloans handily defeateted, things overall did not go well.  Though united in their want to end Spanish rule, the Pueblo were still a divided people, now not just by towns, language, and culture, but also by varying levels of acceptance and integration of Christianity with traditional beliefs.  Things only got worse as the Apache and Navajo, with the Spanish now gone, began to increasingly attack the Pueblo.  Though the Pueblo managed to defeat a second attempt by the Spanish to retake the area in 1687, by the following year Po’pay was dead, any dreams of a united Pueblo people dying with him.

As for the Spanish, they would’ve likely abandoned New Mexico completely, if it wasn’t for French explorers increasingly appearing along the Mississippi River and coast of Texas and the need to create a more secure frontier against the hostile Apache and other native groups.  In 1692, the a third Spanish army marched north.  Unlike the other two, this one proved successful.  Rather than try to engage in battle, the Spanish instead promised protection from the Apache, an end to the pseudo-slavery system, and for the Pueblo to be able to keep their religious ceremonies if they chose to do so.  New Mexico was largely won without a fight, though a second Pueblo revolt took place in 1696, the Spanish retribution was so harsh that a third never occurred.  Though becoming more fully integrated into Spanish culture over the coming century, the Pueblo did manage to retain their unique cultural identity.   

American History - Natives in 1700

When Columbus first arrived in the Americas in 1492, its estimated that North America north of the Rio Grande had a population of some seven million people who belonged to some 600 tribes with a wide diversity of languages and cultures.  By 1700, that population had fallen to around 1.2 million or less, with many tribes scattered and swept far from their original homelands, or outright destroyed by disease, famine and warfare, many having never set their eyes on the Europeans, but their lives still completely altered by their arrival all the same.

Along the northern Atlantic Seaboard, the once dominant Algonquian peoples were nearly gone, the few remnants of the once proud nations found by the earliest European explorers nearly entirely integrated into colonial society as second-class citizens.  Those who had not died in epidemics or the various wars with the colonists had fled westward over the Appalachian Mountains, taking refuge in the Ohio Country, which had largely been emptied itself over the preceding century by disease and the Beaver Wars.  The only areas where the Algonquian remained largely in control were in what is today Maine and New Brunswick, where alliances with the French allowed for a much stiffer resistance to English expansion.

Aside from the fleeing coastal tribes, the Ohio Country was mostly completely empty.  Controlled by the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, most other tribes didn’t dare re-enter their former homelands though the Iroquois had become much more focused on warring with the French rather than the former violence of them trying to control the fur trade.  In comparison, though greatly hurt by disease and war with the Iroquois, the Algonquian peoples of the Midwest were re-establishing themselves in their former homelands in Illinois and Indiana, though some of the weaker nations had been pushed out onto the Great Plains, never to return.  Farther north in Canada, the beaver trade was slowly but surely pushing many Algonquian groups further west as they attempted to retain their role as middlemen between the French and other tribes putting them into contact with many Algonquian groups who had moved westward centuries before. 

Similar to the Algonquian of the Midwest, a similar story could be told for the Siouan peoples, who had been pushed westward by the Algonquian fleeing from the Iroquois.  Greatly reduced in number, they were increasingly shifting towards a way of life involving both agriculture and hunting and gathering.  This migration westward often put them into conflict with the Caddoan peoples, who still controlled significant parts of the Central and Southern Plains and lived in a similar fashion.

Comparatively, the Muskogean tribes in the southeast had managed to a certain degree to stabilize following the devastating pandemics which struck them in the sixteenth century.  Though plagued by the Spanish and English native slave trade along the coastal areas, which spurred conflict amongst various rival groups looking to secure European goods, within the interior many groups began to thrive again to a certain degree, isolated from many of the travesties which befell their more northern neighbors.

In the southwest, though the Spanish controlled large parts of New Mexico, especially in relation to the Pueblo people who were in many ways nothing more than slaves in their own towns, the deserts outside said towns were controlled by the Navajo and Apache, who had spread out and taken control over a fairly wide area, especially the Apache, who had even moved eastward into the Southern Plains, putting them increasingly in conflict with the Caddoan.   

Along the Pacific Coast, things remained largely the same as they had for millennia, with the powerful coastal tribes trading with and enslaving the weaker tribes in the interior, such as the Salishan peoples of the Columbia Plateau and the Numic people of the Great Basin, though both were facing increasing pressure from the north as Algonquian Plains tribes, pushed further north and west by migrating Siouan peoples, began to increasingly move down into what is today Montana from Canada.  Things were only to become more chaotic in the coming century.