Open the Gate

You all know that horses were imported to the New World with the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. Horses had originally been native to North America but died out 10,000 years ago, along with prehistoric camels. 

They were re-introduced when Europeans arrived. The Spanish did everything they could to keep horses out of the hands of indigenous people -- the horse was part of the conquering war machine -- but a few inevitably escaped.

The biggest escape of domesticated horses into the wild, to rapidly become feral herds populating the west, happened at Santa Fe. After 100 years of domination by the Spanish, the native pueblos around Santa Fe united and drove the Spanish out in 1680. The native people took over the Palace of the Governors and surrounding Spanish farms. 

They were an agricultural and trading society, with little use for horses. They let them go -- 1,500 horses by most historical counts. Those 1,500 horses became the population of tens of thousands of mustangs that plains Indians adopted. By the 1800s, less than 150 years after the New Mexican pueblos released the Spanish herd, the Comanche and Arapahoe and other plains tribes were horsemen, mounted raiders, breeders and horse societies with no match. 

The Spanish came back and re-conquered Santa Fe in 1692. They were only gone 12 years, but when they got back their horses were gone.

History is hard to understand when it is so large and so sweeping. I have trouble grasping most historical events, especially here in the west where the collision between cultures was so catastrophic. But for some reason, the simple fact that the Pueblo Indians in Santa Fe said "Horses? Meh. The Spanish overlords are gone. Open the gate." makes it real for me. 

A gate, some horses, dust blowing and they are gone. I can picture it. The overwhelming rise of Indian horse culture and the ensuing wars and conflicts, not to mention the indelible movie images of mounted cowboys and Indians are so hard to absorb, but I can see, clearly, the moment when the native victors released the Spanish horses from Santa Fe farms.