BRINGING HOME ALL THE PRETTY HORSES THE HORSE TRADE AND THE AMERICAN GREAT PLAINS

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In the summer of 1834, just two years after his now-famous adventure visiting and painting the tribes of the Missouri River and Northern Plains country, the prototype western artist George Catlin got his first opportunity to observe and paint that counterpoint world, hundreds of miles to the south, on the Southern Plains of what is now western Oklahoma. Accompanying an American military expedition hoping to treat with peoples like the Comanches and Kiowas, fate and luck offered Catlin a singular chance to see first-hand the similarities and differences between these two regions of the early nineteenth-century American West.

On the Missouri, Catlin had traveled and lived with fur traders from the big companies that were engaged in a competition for wealth stripped from the backs of beavers, river otters, muskrats, and bison. And the artist had duly painted (and mourned) the great destruction then under way there. In the different ecology of the Southern Plains in 1834, however, Catlin saw only a small-scale facsimile of the great economic engines that were stripping the northern landscapes clean of valuable furbearers. Instead, on these southern prairies an altogether different animal caught his attention. Traveling in the vicinity of the Wichita Mountains that summer of 1834, this was how he described his impression of the difference between the Missouri drainage and the Red River country of the southern prairies: “The tract of country over which we passed, between the False Washita and this place, is stocked, not only with buffaloes, but with numerous bands of wild horses, many of which we saw every day.” He went on with obvious admiration: “The wild horse of these regions is a small, but very powerful animal; with an exceedingly prominent eye, sharp nose, high nostril, small feet and delicate leg; and undoubtedly, have sprung from a stock introduced by the Spaniards.”

No other denizen of the plains was “so wild and so sagacious as the horse,” Catlin wrote. “So remarkably keen is their eye, that they will generally run ‘at the sight,’ when they are a mile distant . . . and when in motion, will seldom stop short of three or four miles.” Like many wild horse observers, the artist was struck with the sheer beauty of the horse in its wild state, which somehow seemed amplified by the difficulty of possessing them: “Some were milk white, some jet black—others were sorrel, and bay, and cream colour—many were an iron grey; and others were pied, containing a variety of colours on the same animal. Their manes were very profuse, and hanging in the wildest confusion over their necks and faces—and their long tails swept the ground.”

At roughly the same point in time that Catlin expressed admiration over the wild horses of the Southern Plains, back in the horse country of Kentucky, John James Audubon, Catlin’s fellow painter (and, in private, thorn in Catlin’s side), wrote that he’d become acquainted with a man who had just returned from “the country in the neighbourhood of the head waters of the Arkansas River” where he’d obtained from the Osages a recently captured, four-year-old wild horse named “Barro.” While the little horse was “by no means handsome” and had cost only $35 in trade goods, Audubon was intrigued enough to try him out. He proved a delight. He had a sweet gait that covered forty miles a day. He leapt over woodland logs “as lightly as an elk,” was duly cautious yet a quick study in new situations, and strong and fearless when coaxed to swim the Ohio River. He was steady when birds flushed and Audubon shot them from the saddle. And he left “a superb” $300 horse in the dust. Audubon quickly bought Barro for $50 silver, and gloating over his discovery, concluded that “the importation of horses of this kind from the Western Prairies might improve our breeds generally.”

With an audition like Barro’s, one is tempted to say, no kidding. But historically, what is most intriguing about Catlin’s and Audubon’s wild horse epiphanies is that they came so late. In fact, nearly simultaneous with the evolution of the fur trade on the Northern Plains, the remarkable wild horse herds of the Great Plains had generated an economy of capture and trade (and often, theft) that from the 1780s to the 1840s fairly dominated the region. Wild horses from herds like those Catlin saw in Oklahoma had been driven up the Natchez Trace to the horse markets in Kentucky at least as early as the 1790s, half a century before Audubon’s test-ride on Barro. That neither man seemed aware of this in the 1830s is fairly strong evidence for the long-standing underground character of the early horse trade in the West. Which is why historians have missed it, as well.

Returned to the American West by Spanish settlers, horses quickly went wild and rejoined the ecology of the Great Plains where they had evolved. Artist George Catlin painted these wild herds in present southwestern Oklahoma in 1834. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

Yet on the sweeping plains both south and north of the Arkansas River, during the period when Americans were becoming such a presence in the West, this was the fur trade’s equivalent, schooling many diverse Indian peoples in the nuances of the market economy, providing Spanish Texas a revenue base, intriguing a famous American president, and drawing itinerant American mustangers—who quite literally carried the flag with them—into vast, horizontal yellow landscapes whose ownership seemed up for grabs.

The Great Plains’ wild horse trade had first come to the official attention of the United States in the period, and in the same flurry of motion, that would eventually add the Louisiana Purchase to the early republic. Since at the turn of the nineteenth century bands of western wild horses were still confined to the California valleys, the deserts of the Southwest, and the prairies of the Southern and Central Plains, identifying them as a feature of the natural history and economy of the West emerged during the years when Thomas Jefferson, as vice president in the John Adams administration, was contemplating various schemes for understanding and eventually exploring the West, both north and south.

In conversations about the West with informants like General James Wilkinson, as early as 1798 Jefferson had begun to hear stories about an intriguing individual known as “the Mexican Traveller.” His real name was Philip Nolan, and he was an Irish-American adventurer who, Jefferson discovered, had made a series of journeys far into the unknown Southwest, returning time and again driving herds of captured wild horses into Louisiana and then up the Natchez Trace to the horse markets of Kentucky. Wilkinson had raised Nolan in his own household, where he had no doubt absorbed dinner talk of revolution and westward expansion. That may have given Jefferson pause. He asked for other opinions about Nolan.

The image that emerges of this shadowy and rather legendary figure is of a literate, athletic, and adventurous young man who was confident enough in his wide-ranging abilities to attempt things other men only speculated about. William Dunbar, the Mississippi scientist who became Jefferson’s primary associate in assembling information on the southwestern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, knew Nolan and told Jefferson he thought the man lacked sufficient education and that he was flawed by eccentricities “many and great.” Nevertheless, Dunbar wrote, Nolan “was not destitute of romantic principles of honor united to the highest personal courage.” Another Jeffersonian who knew Nolan, Daniel Clark, Jr., of New Orleans, told Jefferson he thought Nolan “an extraordinary Character,” one “whom Nature seems to have formed for Enterprises of which the rest of Mankind are incapable.”

What Jefferson learned from these informants was that as early as 1790, when he was barely twenty years old, with a passport in hand from Esteban Miró, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Nolan had embarked on a two-year journey into the Southern Plains, ultimately meeting and traveling with Wichita and Comanche Indians and providing them with an initial, apparently very favorable, impression of Anglo-Americans. Judging from what seem today very precise descriptions of a part of the continent then almost unknown to anyone except tribal people, Nolan got all the way to New Mexico, along the way learning that the numerous Southern Plains Indians were dissatisfied with Spanish trade and very desirous of replacing their former trading partners, the French, with a new source of guns and European goods. The Osages, enemies of many of the groups farther west, were well-armed themselves and making every effort to block traders from St. Louis from establishing trade relations with the tribes of the deep plains. Apparently Nolan had in mind addressing that opening from a different direction.

But—and this was what had caught Jefferson’s attention—the vice-president learned that Nolan had not returned from the Southern Plains with the usual Northern Plains trader’s packs of Indian-processed furs. Instead it was horses he’d brought back from these forays, some of them wild ones that he and his associates had captured, others traded from the Indians.

Although he’d found “the savage life . . . less pleasing in practice than speculation” (he could not “Indianfy my heart” as he put it), Nolan had gone on a second expedition into the deep plains in 1794, and a third one in 1796. He’d brought back only 50 horses in 1794, but the number had jumped to 250 in 1796, several of which he’d decided to take to Frankfurt, Kentucky, to sell, which had brought him and his horses to the attention of important people who clamored for more of his product. So in 1797, packing $7,000 worth of trade goods, “twelve good rifles, and . . . but one coward,” and a sextant and a timepiece, “instruments to enable me to make a more correct map” (which caught the attention of suspicious Spanish officials), Nolan launched a fourth expedition. This time, when he returned in 1798, he was driving a herd variously estimated at between 1,000 and 2,500 western horses, which in the Kentucky horse markets reportedly brought between $50 (for ordinary animals) and $150 for truly outstanding horseflesh.

When Philip Nolan returned from his fourth mustanging expedition, a letter awaited him, requesting—in a fine, clear, and famous hand—natural history information on the wild horses of the West at “the only moment in the age of the world” when the horse might “be studied in its wild state.” What Jefferson really wanted was a visit with Nolan, and he eventually hatched a plan to effect one, writing Nolan in a follow-up letter that he was most desirous of purchasing one of Nolan’s animals “which I am told are so remarkable for the singularity & beauty of their colours and forms.”

The small handful of western historians who’ve been aware of Philip Nolan have long assumed that Jefferson’s letter produced the expected response. According to both Wilkinson and Daniel Clark, Nolan and an “Inhabitant of the western Country” who was a master of the fascinating language of Indian hand signs (he was probably Joseph Talapoon, a Louisiana mixed-blood), departed for Virginia in May 1800 with a fine paint stallion for Jefferson. However, neither Nolan nor the paint horse ever got to Monticello. For a reason that is not clear—one is tempted to speculate that Nolan may have lost Jefferson’s stallion in a game of chance—he got no farther than Kentucky, then turned back. The West’s “Mexican Traveller,” in other words, stood up the Virginian about to be elected the country’s third president.

By October 1800 Nolan was in final preparations for a fifth, and as it would emerge, final, expedition to the western plains. He told a confidante before he left Natchez that he had two dozen good men, armed to the teeth, and was taking a large quantity of trade goods. This time he did not have a passport from Spanish officials, who had grown increasingly alarmed at Nolan’s contacts among the expansionist Americans. Since the 1780s Spain had sought to control and regulate the western horse trade for her own purposes, so the lack of a passport meant that any horses Nolan captured would be illegal contraband. To his contact Nolan enigmatically added: “Everyone thinks that I go to catch wild horses, but you know that I have long been tired of wild horses.”

By December the party was far out onto the Southern Plains beyond the Trinity River. Following a visit to a Comanche village on one of the branches of the Red River, they returned to what seems Nolan’s favorite mustanging country in the Grand Prairie south of present-day Fort Worth, where they built corrals and began running horses. In March 1801, Indian scouts operating for a Spanish force sent out to arrest Nolan located the Americans’ camp. When Nolan refused to surrender the Spaniards attacked, killing Nolan and capturing more than a dozen of his men, although seven of them—including a pair of American mustangers named Robert Ashley and John House—escaped into the vastness of the plains. Philip Nolan’s intriguing adventures were over.

For Thomas Jefferson, who assumed the presidency at almost the same moment that Nolan was dying amongst his wild horse corrals, the intriguing knowledge that horses had gone wild in the West sifted about in that blowtorch mind for years to come. Following Nolan’s death, Jefferson’s hopes for understanding wild horse natural history, and his growing sense that in the southern West the horse trade might play an economic, diplomatic, and geopolitical role similar to the one the fur trade did in the northern West, were embedded in his plans to send a Lewis and Clark–type exploring expedition into the Southwest. With Peter Custis, the young University of Pennsylvania naturalist he attached to his 1806 “Grand Expedition” into the Southwest, Jefferson no doubt thought to put a scientific observer amongst those herds. But of course as we know now, during the same summer that Lewis and Clark’s party was returning from the Pacific, Jefferson’s second major expedition into the West encountered an immovable obstacle on the Red River in the form of a Spanish army four times its size. Regrettably, Peter Custis would never get to be Thomas Jefferson’s eyes amongst the teeming wild horse herds towards the Rockies. Nonetheless, as with the fur trade, wild horses and Jefferson’s dreams for the West would remain linked for years to come.

Jefferson never got to know what history now can reconstruct, however imperfectly, about the nineteenth-century West’s wild horses. Deep-time horse history commences with an irony. Euroamericans like Jefferson understood that their ancestors had brought the horse to the Americas, and that after initial fear of it, many indigenous peoples in both North and South America had adopted the animal into their lives, where it had revolutionized their cultures. And yet, back into depths of time that Jeffersonians never suspected lay a surprising story. Unlike so many of the post-Pleistocene animals of the Great Plains, including even the bison, which had come to the Americas from an evolutionary start in Asia, horses joined pronghorns and coyotes as true natives of North America. The ancestors of the horses Philip Nolan sold in Kentucky had begun their evolution into the modern horse 57 million years earlier as distinctively American animals. If anything the irony was even more profound than that. After millions of years of North American horse evolution, indeed by 10,000 years ago into animals so similar to modern horses that paleontologists have difficulty telling them apart, horses unaccountably went extinct throughout the Americas. Equally perplexing, the American horses that had migrated into Asia, Europe, and Africa survived that same extinction episode. So the Barb horses that danced and nickered beneath the Spaniards in their first entradas in the West, although not precisely the same animals that had become extinct here ten millennia earlier, were still ancient America’s cabelline horses, returning to their evolutionary homeland. Except that when they galloped onto the seventeenth-century Great Plains, while the prairie ecology still included wolves and cougars and grizzlies, many of the horses’ Pleistocene predators were now gone.

That Big History is why horses were so phenomenally successful in going wild in the American West. From their primary seventeenth- and eighteenth-century distribution centers in the Spanish settlements of northern New Mexico, Texas, and California, escaped horses had run away into the very landscapes that had shaped their ancestors’ hooves, teeth, and behavioral patterns millennia earlier. When the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico for more than a decade, liberated livestock and horse culture famously got traded to tribes northward up the Rockies, passing from Pueblos to Utes, and from Utes to Shoshones and Salish and Nez Perce, and within a half-century to Blackfeet, Crows, and Crees. But in the chaos of the revolt, many animals also ran loose into the High Plains. Similarly, when Spain abandoned its initial, 1690s attempts at missions in Texas, the fathers simply turned mission livestock out in the wild. Spaniards commonly did not geld stallions, and when they returned to Texas in 1715 they found the stock they’d left had increased to thousands, in places blanketing the whole countryside with animals. Three-quarters of a century later, a similar phenomenon was well under way in California.

By Jefferson’s day, across the southern latitudes of the West, wild horse herds had become enormous. In Texas, Spanish bishop Marin de Porras wrote in 1805 that everywhere he traveled there were “great herds of horses and mares found close to the roads in herds of four to six thousand head.” By 1794, the California missions and presidios—having commenced with virtually no horses in the 1770s—found themselves surrounded by such growing bands of feral animals that beginning in 1806 in San Jose, then in Santa Barbara in 1808 and 1814, in Monterrey in 1812 and 1820, and generally throughout the California settlements by 1827, ranchers and colonists annually slaughtered large numbers of horses in the surrounding countryside as nuisances and threats to grass and water for domestic stock. On the Southern Plains, with a century’s natural increase, wild horses had become a memorable sensory phenomenon, one observer noting that “the prairie near the horizon seemed to be moving, with long undulations, like the waves of an ocean. . . . [T]he whole prairie towards the horizon was alive with mustangs.” And another: “As far as the eye could extend, nothing over the dead level prairie was visible except a dense mass of horses, and the trampling of their hooves sounded like the roar of the surf on a rocky coast.” And a third: “Wandering herds of wild horses are so numerous that the land is covered with paths, making it appear the most populated place in the world.”

It is fascinating to imagine a Great Plains ecology that once again replicated the Pleistocene (or Africa with its wildebeests and zebras) by integrating bands of wild horses in amongst the bison, herds of pronghorns and deer and elk, wolves and cougars and coyotes and grizzlies. How large a component of that ecology they became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is difficult to judge because we have little other than anecdotal descriptions to go on. In the Pleistocene horses had sometimes comprised as much as 25 percent of the biomass of grazing animals, and they may have been on their way to approximating that. No one has been able to suggest historic-era horse numbers in the same way we have worked out bison estimates. The writer J. Frank Dobie speculated that by 1800, some 120 years after the Pueblo Revolt, there were at least 2 million wild horses in the West, and that a million of them were on the prairies south of the Arkansas River, although he made no effort to track wild horse expansion over time or the effects of changing climate on their numbers. A million wild horses on the Southern Plains would have been about 12 percent of bison numbers there in those years. As with other ungulates, wet weather and droughts no doubt affected them, and from seed herds—not just on the Southern Plains but in California, the Columbia Plateau, and Wyoming’s Red Desert—wild herds were spreading out across the West.

In the early years of the horse trade, before 1825, however, the best mustanging grounds were still on the Southern Plains and in the “Mustang Prairie” of South Texas, especially the former because it possessed both wild horses and herds of bison. Like favorite bison ranges, huge herds of horses concentrated in particular ecoregion settings produced profound cultural and ecological effects. The Southern Plains herds drew Indian peoples from all over the West, bringing Utes, Shoshones, Crows, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Lakotas, even Blackfeet to the country below the Arkansas River. Ecologically, as wild and Indian horse herds increased over the decades, their numbers cut into the carrying capacity of the plains for bison and other grazers.

As with bison and beavers and other furbearers farther north, useful animals in such enormous numbers as were found with wild horses filled the human mind with thoughts of acquisition, wealth, and power. In other words, with thoughts of a potential economy.

The “Great Horse Funnel” of this early western economy took in tens of thousands of horses from its flared end on the Southern and Central Plains and then funneled them to trade marts like St. Louis, Natchitoches, Natchez, and New Orleans. Its historical origins are found in a simple equation. There was the supply, the horses, an example of American limitlessness, feral horses begetting horses across all the immense, horizontal yellow plains of the West. And there was the demand, in the form of human desire—the desire for wealth and status on the parts of newly emergent plains people like the Comanches, the desire for a source of revenue on the part of Euroamerican colonial officials, the desire for profits on the part of ambitious American traders, and the demand for the product (in this case animal-powered energy) by Americans on the homesteader frontier pushing westward between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The trick, eventually, would be to get the horses from the high plains of the West to the farms of the woodlands of the American frontier. With one exception, the details of how it would all work are entirely familiar because it was so similar to the functioning of the fur trade. The exception, which is the reason we have never heard much in western history about this particular economy, is the presence of corporate involvement in the fur trade, and its absence in the horse trade.

A fundamental characteristic of the American fur trade regardless of geography was the role Indian people played as procurers of the resource. With the creation of trapping brigades by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the American Rocky Mountain Fur Company’s reliance on free trappers and the rendezvous system, eventually the fur trade produced a group of non-native, company employees who acted as procurers of furs. But Indians began as and remained major players in the nineteenth-century fur trade system. In good part that was because the Euroamerican stage of the fur trade was based on a preexisting native economy involving inter-tribal exchange of animal pelts and related trade items.

Precisely the same pattern evolved in the western horse trade. Virtually from the start, horses became such revolutionary cultural agents, and so valuable to tribal ethnogenesis in the European age, that barter exchanges of the animals became a central feature of western Indian life. Annual trade fairs in places like the Black Hills, and at fixed villages like those of the Mandan-Hidatsas on the Missouri, funneled horses in huge numbers from the Southwest to the Northern Plains. Even middleman groups emerged. The horse trade, for example, contributed to the segmentation of the previously agricultural Cheyennes into two geographic divisions, a northern and southern one, because the southern bands became central players in distributing horses northward up the plains.

Captured, domesticated, and trained by plains Indians, horses entirely transformed human lifestyles on the Great Plains. They also became the principal subjects of Indian art, as in this petroglyph from Texas. Dan Flores photo.

The various bands of the Comanches, another people newly drawn to the eighteenth-century plains because of horses, quite literally reconceived themselves in the context of horses and trade. They raided other tribes and Spanish colonists both for horses and captive children, training the latter as herders in an economy that became more pastoral by the decade. The Cheyennes and Comanches not only became famous catchers of wild horses, like the Nez Perce they became horse breeders, selecting animals for conformation, speed, and markings. From the heart of the Southern Plains they marketed their animals northward to horse-poor Northern Plains tribes, westward to the New Mexicans via trade fairs in places like Pecos, Picuris, and Taos. And eventually eastward to the Americans.

No one duped these native peoples into the market economy. Indeed, to a significant degree, they created the western horse trade, built their own internal status systems around it, and for a century used it to manipulate the geopolitical designs of competing Euroamericans anxious for profits and alliances with them. Of course, for native people, the nineteenth-century western market economy came with many decided downsides. As with the fur trade, access to ever-more animal resources meant that the horse trade ultimately would produce inter-tribal raids, wars, and territorial expansion. Eventually the Southern Plains tribes would raid hundreds of miles southward, liberating new supplies of horses from Mexican ranches. And because winters on the Northern Plains could be so hard on horses, raids for replenishment of tribal stock rippled from north to south every spring. As was always the case, when American traders entered these kinds of situations, things could be dicey.

One result was that soon after prototype American horse traders like Philip Nolan joined the economy, initially procuring their horses from the native people via a process carefully regulated and managed by Indian band headmen, a point came when the Americans attempted the same step the fur men did: with millions of wild horses running free on the plains, they would try to procure the resource themselves. Just who originated the technique for catching wild horses in trade-sufficient numbers is difficult to ascertain; it may have begun as a North African or Iberian equine art. By the time Americans entered the horse economy, many different peoples seem to have mastered it. The Wichita Indians taught trader Anthony Glass how to build pens and run wild horses; Nolan and others appear to have learned the art from the French and Spanish settlers of Louisiana towns like Bayou Pierre and Natchitoches. Indeed, while the artist George Catlin and others provide us with accounts and paintings of single horse capture by Southern Plains Indians, the best descriptions we have of early trade-volume mustanging strategies come from a third group involved in the horse trade: the Hispanic residents of Texas.

As the wild horse herds of the plains had grown into the hundreds of thousands across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and private horse hunters began to capture and drive more and more of them to Louisiana and Missouri to supply the emerging American frontier market—Spain acted to declare the animals mesteños, or the king’s property. In a move that neither the United States nor Canada ever effected with bison, Spain proclaimed the vast wild herds of horses to be national property (Real Camara y Fisco de su Magesta), subject to government regulation. This interesting development was part of the famous Bourbon Reforms to strengthen the economies of Spain’s colonies. The edict of 1778 required Spanish officials of the northern provinces (Provincias Internas) of New Spain to place a tax of six reales on every wild horse captured from Spanish domains, thus creating the famous “Mustang Fund.” Since captured wild horses were worth only three reales at the time, the initial tax was something of miscalculation. So to grow the economy, in 1779 officials reduced the tax to two reales, a mere 67 percent rate! Spain required a license for citizens, plus a passport for noncitizens who sought to catch or trade for its horses. Without the license or the passport, the trade was illegal and contraband.

Enforcing this law proved impossible for a small Spanish population in an enormous setting. Yet, given how lucrative the mustang trade was, Spain needed to be able to enforce it. Nonetheless, it worked after a fashion. In the first six years of the tax, by January 1787, mustangers had paid taxes to Spain on 17,000 captured wild horses, some of which became colonial remounts, but most of which appear to have ended up east of the Mississippi River, carrying American farmers and merchants and supplying mounts for southeastern Indians like the Chickasaws and Seminoles (in fact, the “Chickasaw horse,” a foundational type that led to the quarter-horse, sprang directly from this trade). As one San Antonio official put the matter in 1785, “The number of mustangs in all these environs is so countless that if anyone were capable of taming them and caring for them, he could acquire a supply sufficient to furnish an army. But this multitude is causing us such grave damage that it is often necessary to shoot them.”

Catching wild horses in this kind of volume required the same sort of natural history understanding of the animals that trapping did. It also obviously required organization and carefully honed skills. Like trapping, in effect it became a kind of wilderness art form, with its own material culture, its own internal terminology, but one that differed from trapping by aiming at live animal capture. We know all of this in some detail because of a French scientist named Jean-Louis Berlandier, who saw and described the process of volume wild horse capture in the 1820s. What Berlandier recounts is so like Indian techniques for impounding bison and pronghorns that the source of the technique seems obvious. But wild horse capture had clearly developed some nuances all its own.

Once mustangers were on the plains, amongst the herds and stallion bands, the first step was understanding the landscape sufficiently to know how to site what Berlandier called the corrale. “These are immense enclosures situated close to some pond,” he wrote. Commonly they were built of mesquite posts lashed together with rawhide, and were large enough that once inside, a herd could be swept into a circling, milling confusion in its center. “The entrance,” Berlandier tells us, “is placed in such a way that it forms a long corridor, and at the end there is a kind of exit.” That corridor often consisted of brush wings that fanned out a half-mile or more from the capture pen itself, usually oriented towards the south so that prevailing southwesterly winds would envelop an approaching herd in its own dust cloud, blinding it.

To start the action, Berlandier relates, mustangers divided themselves into three groups, each with different roles to play. After reconnoitering a likely herd, one group of well-mounted riders, the adventadores, had the task of startling the herd into flight and pushing it towards the brush funnel leading to the pen. Once the action was in motion and a direction established, the herd would find itself squeezed into a flight path by a second group of mustangers, the puestos, who were the most skilled riders and whose “role consists of conducting that dreadful mass of living beings by riding full gallop along the flanks and gathering there, in the midst of suffocating dust, the partial herds which sometimes unite at the sound of the terror of a large herd.” Finally, at the moment of truth, as the white-eyed, terrified horses were sweeping at breakneck speed into the trap, a third group of mustangers, the encerradores, were charged with closing the gate, sometimes dashing in to open it for an instant to allow stallions and older horses to escape.

What followed were scenes of such emotional impact that mustangers had a specialized vocabulary to describe them. Captured wild horses “squeal terribly and rage like lions.” They also died. Hispanic horse-catching jargon was rife with the language of death—horses that died from sentimiento (broken-heartedness over capture) or from despecho (nervous rage over capture). Then there was the term hediondo (stinking), whose meaning Indians who impounded bison would have well understood. It designated a corral ruined for use from the aftereffects of having been too often jammed with panicked and dying animals.

Berlandier’s description continues: “When these animals find themselves enclosed, the first to enter fruitlessly search for exits and those in the rear . . . trample over the first. It is rare that in one of these chases a large part of the horses thus trapped do not kill one another in their efforts to escape. . . . It has happened that the mesteñeros have trapped at one swoop more than one thousand horses, of which not a fifth remained.”

Exhausted by their efforts to escape, surviving horses were then roped one by one. “After some hours of ill treatment,” Berlandier concludes, “these mesteñeros have the ability to render them half-tame a short while after depriving them of their liberty.”

The rhythmic creaking of saddle leather, the rustling and tinkling of swaying packs of trade goods, and the snick of hooves on the cobbled prairie surface must have paused for a few moments on the Southern Plains in early August 1808. After a five-week outward journey, Anthony Glass and his party of ten traders, driving sixteen pack horses carrying more than $2,000 in goods and a riding remuda of thirty-two animals, had finally come in sight of the thatched-roof village complex on the Red River, inhabited by peoples the American horse traders and their government knew as the “Panis.” In the horse trade this complex was the equivalent of the Mandan/Hidatsa towns on the Missouri, a trio of villages occupied by people who called themselves Taovayas and Iscanis (as prairie Caddoans they were related to the Pawnees farther north). Today we refer to them, collectively, as the Wichitas, and know them as the plains people Coronado found in his sixteenth-century search for Quivira. To make them more accessible for Euroamericans embarking westward from Natchez and Natchitoches, a half-century earlier French traders had persuaded them to move from the Arkansas to this location on the Red. In 1808 their acknowledged headman was Awahakei, or Great Bear. And he had been expecting these Americans.

Whether they built corrals and ran wild horses, or traded for them from the Southern Plains tribes, American horse traders like Philip Nolan had preceded the Louisiana Purchase in getting Americans into the horse-trade economy. But in the 1806 aftermath of Jefferson’s failed “Grand Expedition,” horse traders like Anthony Glass—who would ride down into the Wichita villages this August morning wearing the uniform of a US military captain, his party of a dozen men traveling under an American flag—became private but overt agents of Jeffersonian geopolitical designs on the West. In the Northern Rockies, of course, the trading posts and trapping parties of the American, Missouri, and Rocky Mountain fur companies consciously advanced US claims for territory and tribal alliances in a sharp competition with the posts and brigades of the Northwest and Hudson’s Bay companies, agents of the British empire. On the Southern Plains, however, it was itinerant horse traders like Glass to whom the task of advancing America’s empire fell. Indeed, in the decades following the Jefferson administration’s clash with Spain over territory and boundaries, a whole series of almost unremembered American horse-trading expeditions worked as a kind of economic/diplomatic wedge to assert the interests of the new American republic against a Spanish empire distracted and overwhelmed by colonial revolutions across the Americas.

From the middle of the 1700s through the end of the 1800s, Indians and horse traders fashioned a major western economy around the wild horse herds of the plains, with traders like Philip Nolan, Anthony Glass, and Thomas James initiating the trade. Map courtesy Montana: The Magazine of Western History.

How successful the strategy was of allowing private economic interests to advance state geopolitical design is open to question (although one could argue it has remained a fundamental of American foreign policy for two centuries now). On the Southern Plains between 1806 and 1821 it seems to have worked pretty well. In the aftermath of the events of that summer of 1806, with a Spanish army halting and turning back an official American exploring expedition, and the ensuing escalation that in the fall would put an American force of 1,000 troops eyeball-to-eyeball with a Spanish army of 1,400, Spain seemed to blink. In 1807 it instructed frontier officials in its northern provinces to avoid any more “noisy disturbances” involving the Americans, and to direct their ire and retribution over the contraband horse trade towards participating tribes rather than American traders. Hence when Jefferson’s Indian agent, Dr. John Sibley of Natchitoches, authorized and helped plan the Glass expedition, the captain’s coat and American flag (which Glass was to present to Awahakei to fly over their villages) reflected a Jeffersonian’s musings about how to turn the horse trade to state advantage. As Sibley would go on to remark, sagely: “whoever furnishes Indians the Best & Most Satisfactory Trade can always Control their Politicks.”

Of course it was profit rather than statecraft that motivated American horse traders, and that required no official sanction. In addition to Nolan, Glass had been preceded in the West by several other American horse-trading parties. We know little about them now, but in 1794–1795, for instance, a twenty-seven-year-old Philadelphia gunsmith named John Calvert had spent fourteen months pursuing horses with the Wichitas and Comanches before a Spanish patrol snagged him. As far as the documents inform us, Calvert’s example was followed in 1804–1805 by a very active plains trader named John Davis and a Corsican carpenter, Alexandro Dauni, who seem to have also prospected for minerals in the Wichita Mountains. They were followed by one of Philip Nolan’s mustangers, John House, who successfully drove a herd back from the plains in 1805 at the age of twenty-five. Then there were trading parties led by Francisco Roquier in 1805 and John Cashily in 1806, who ingeniously planned to tell Spanish officials that the horses they were driving eastward were intended to help them bring their families west as new Spanish emigrants.

Almost in the middle of the uproar over Jefferson’s attempts to explore the Red River, Dr. Sibley licensed yet another horse-trading party, led by John Lewis and William Alexander and guided by Nolan’s sign-language expert, Lucas Talapoon. Lewis and Alexander seem to have been the Jefferson administration’s first experiment with traders as official government emissaries: they also took US flags to the western Indians, and in Sibley’s name they invited the tribes of the Southern Plains to a grand council in Natchitoches in 1807. In June 1807, three of this party (the rest were still on the plains, running horses) arrived in Louisiana driving a herd of mustangs. Did they pay the Spanish tax on their horses? Of course they did not. As Sibley noted, a few years earlier Spanish records had shown 1,187 horses officially leaving for Louisiana, but somehow more than 7,300 horses had managed to arrive there! Helpless to stem the tide, one Spanish official estimated the number of the king’s horses herded into the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century at a thousand a month, which gives some idea of the size of this economy.

The paucity of surviving information on so many of the horse traders both before and after Glass does mean we ought to linger on Glass a bit. In apparent contrast to many of his contemporaries in the economy, Glass was literate. Remarkably, Sibley had persuaded him to keep a journal, which he did—sporadically—during his ten months on the plains. This document not only gives us a sense of the early horse trade, but leaves an impression of Glass himself as a sort of John Colter figure of the Southern Plains.

Glass was more solidly middle-class than most American horse traders. He and a brother were hardware store owners and merchants in the river town of Natchez, the terminus of the famous wilderness trail of the same name that funneled western horses into Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1808 he was about thirty-five and a recent widower. Either legitimately, or perhaps as an explanatory ruse in case Spanish officials captured him, the year before he had inquired about emigrating to New Spain. How much experience he had with horses, Indians, or the West is difficult to determine, but there is little doubt he viewed his 1808–1809 trading expedition as high adventure.

If Glass’s experiences were typical, the horse trade of the early West was at least as much adventure as entrepreneurial enterprise. Judging from the address he describes making before the assembled peoples of the Wichita villages in August 1808, despite the conflicting territorial claims with Spain over the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, the United States was convinced these western tribes were already economic allies of the Americans. Jefferson was their “Great Father,” Glass told them, and as for him: “I have come a long Journey to see you & have brought with me some goods to exchange with you and your brothers—the Hietans [Comanches], for Horses if you will trade with us on fair and Equal terms.”

Establishing those terms took some effort and caused some arguments, but within a few days Glass was assembling his herd—twenty horses one day, thirteen the next, eleven a few days later, and apparently at that rate for week after week. There were also losses. Osage raiders, whom the Wichitas reported had driven off 500 of their horses shortly before Glass arrived, took 29 of his best horses late that August. A month later, during a second Osage raid on the Wichita horse herds, Glass was chagrined to find that “one of them was riding a remarkable Paint Horse that used to be my own riding Horse, which was stolen with those on the 22d of August.”

After two months of daily trade negotiations with the Wichitas, Glass’s party—accompanied by a large Indian contingent—headed deeper into the plains in search of Comanche bands to trade with. While horses were his main goal, Glass clearly had another objective, too. The Wichitas had told him about a remarkable object far out on the plains, a large metallic mass they and the Comanches regarded as a powerful mystery, and after much verbal persuasion Glass had prevailed on them to take him to it. As he describes the scene, “Our whole party now became very numerous containing of men women and children near one thousand souls and three times that number of Horses & Mules,” so many of the latter it became impossible to remain in a camp because the herds so quickly ate down the grass. Diverted from horses for the moment, Glass cajoled the Indians to lead him on, and “observing considerable ceremony” they finally took the Americans to the place where the metal was. Glass was as mystified as anyone else, but what he was seeing in fact was a 1,600-pound iron-nickel meteorite, a major healing shrine for Southern Plains Indians. Fancying it a giant nugget of platinum, some of the members of Glass’s party would return two years later and contrive to haul and float it back to civilization.

Discontented with their inability to trade for horses from the Comanche bands they were encountering, in mid-October Glass’s party divided their goods, several of the experienced horse traders among them heading off in search of particular Comanche trading partners from previous trips. Glass continued on southward, camping with increasingly larger numbers of Comanche bands from the north and west, although he reported with disappointment, “trade dull[,] the Indians are unwilling to part with their best Horses.” They were, however, willing to part him from his, stealing twenty-three one night in late December, and smaller numbers later on, although the chiefs did manage to return some to Glass’s possession.

During the dead of winter, 1809, with snow six inches deep on the plains, Glass finally attempted the mustanger’s ultimate art—catching wild horses himself. Wild ones by this point “were seen by the thousands,” and Glass, two remaining companions, and the Indians traveling with them built a strong pen and spent many days attempting to corral the wild herds around them. But “the Buffalo were so plenty and so in the way we succeeded badly in several attempts.”

Unfortunately—one suspects quite by design—Glass remained vague on the number of horses he ultimately drove back from the plains in May 1809, but the sense is of a herd of many hundreds of animals, including several of those best-quality $100–$150 ones. It is difficult to say just how typical his horse-trade experience was. But in an economy for which so few other day-by-day accounts exist, Anthony Glass’s journal provides a quite remarkable look at an early nineteenth-century western experience. He allows us to imagine a history where one had barely been imaginable before.

It would be a full decade later, when Spain and the United States finally agreed on the Red and Arkansas rivers as the official boundary between them (in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819), before another American horse trader would leave us an account rivaling Glass’s. In the interim, scores—very likely hundreds—of unknown and undocumented American mustangers traversed the plains, running wild horses, trading for horses from the Indians, and encouraging such a general theft of horses across the West that one source estimates 10,000 were stolen from Spanish ranches in a single year. Murky references exist for a few of these traders. Ezra McCall and George Schamp (who had been with Glass) were back on the plains in 1810. The Osages plundered Alexander MacFarland and John Lemons’s mustanging party in 1812. Auguste Pierre Chouteau, Jules DeMun, and Joseph Filibert opened up a significant horse trade with the Comanches and Arapahos between 1815 and 1817. Caiaphas Ham and David Burnet became modestly famous horse traders in the same years, and so did Jacob Fowler (who left us a journal written in phonics) and Hugh Glenn. When Mexico finally achieved its independence from Spain and moved to open up its markets to the United States, the man who opened the Santa Fe Trail—William Becknell—could do so because he, too, was an old plains horse trader.

What made these Southern Plains horse trade expeditions shadowy and Northern Plains fur trade activities well known was actually a simple difference. Since the horse trade featured live, not dead, animals, horses became their own transportation to markets. There was no need, as in the fur trade, for corporate investment in freight wagons, steamboats, or shipping. That difference not only created a documentary disparity for later historical writers, it affected the comparative fiduciary risk involved at the time.

Consider, for instance, one more example from the early western horse trade, that of Thomas James of St. Louis, who gives us another fine-grained look at the mustanger’s Great Plains before Mexico’s revolution changed the ground. James, intriguingly, was both a mountain man and a mustanger. He’d first gone west by ascending the Missouri to the Three-Forks in 1809–1810, and didn’t make his first trip onto the Southern Plains until 1821, riding out from Fort Smith to the Salt Plains of present Oklahoma before he was confronted by Comanches under Spanish orders not to allow Americans to approach Santa Fe. Eyeing those splendid Comanche horse herds appreciatively, Thomas James got a sense of the possibilities.

Invited to return the next summer to trade for horses, James did, and the result was a three-year expedition (1822–1824) financed with $5,500 in goods. Ascending the various forks of the Canadian River, James’s party of twenty-three finally met the Wichitas under their headman, Alsarea, and the trading commenced. Four yards of British strouding and two yards of calico, along with a knife, a mirror, flint, and tobacco, was the going rate for a well-broken horse, and James quickly bought seventeen that he knew would fetch $100 apiece back in the settlements. Eventually the Wichitas introduced James to the Comanches, a Yamparika band under Big Star, and James got his first taste of a little twist the Comanches put on horse trading: they were perfectly willing to trade their best horses since they had every intention of stealing them back! At one point he watched the Comanches drive 100 wild mustangs into a ravine corral, at the end of the day riding them about the prairie. According to James, despite the frustrations, the life of a nineteenth-century horse trader on the Southern Plains held a real allure. He was smitten: “I began to be reconciled to a savage life and enamored with the simplicity of nature. Here were no debts, no Sheriffs, no Marshals; no hypocrisy or false friendships.”

Once he had assembled a drove of 323 high-quality animals, James departed for the settlements, but not before Alsarea made a present of his own fine war horse, “Checoba,” and urged James to return the next year to the headwaters of the Red, where the Wichitas grazed 16,000 fine ponies. That would have been the horse trader’s Promise of the Golden Fleece. But James never returned. Pushing his herd eastward he lost all but seventy-one to stampedes and what must have been a Biblical attack of horseflies. More attrition followed as he penetrated the woodlands. If James can be believed, when he finally reached St. Louis, for his troubles he had just five horses left. That happened to be precisely the number he’d started with.

James’s account, published under the title Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans, may explain the lack of corporate interest in the horse trade. At least until the Mexican Revolution ended Spain’s hold on the plains in 1821, the volume trading of horses on the Spanish border was probably too risky a business to attract corporate interest. Although Philip Nolan and his backers possibly made as much as $40,000 to $60,000 (figuring 1,000 horses at a minimal $40 each) from a $7,000 trade goods investment in 1797–1798, the cost-effectiveness figures for other early traders look a lot less impressive. And Nolan’s speculated profits do not take into account the work, fatigue, and personal risk factors in a dangerous wildlands vocation like the wild horse trade.

The reason literary men like Catlin and Audubon had missed the full dimensions of the early horse trade of the Great Plains was that it was an example of what we might call a “concealed economy,” in this case one that emerged where different empires—a fading Spanish one and a vibrant, emerging American one—overlapped. In this kind of situation, shadowy freelances, Indian traders, and even American presidents all ended up dealing with one another, at least indirectly. But there is a coda to this story. The wild horse trade on the Great Plains and in the West did not evaporate after 1821. If anything, as wild horses spread farther north and west, the horse trade expanded geographically and even in volume. The markets evolved, too, as overland emigrants plying the trails across the plains needed a constant supply of fresh horses, and the US Army of the West searched for remounts for its cavalry during the Mexican War.

So from 1822 to 1850 the plains horse trade began to shift to the Arkansas River and northward. The trading firm of Bent, St. Vrain & Co. got its license in 1834, the same year that the Trade and Intercourse Act for the Indian Country made horses a legal trade item. They built Bent’s Fort on the north side of the Arkansas River in 1835 and especially after the Cheyenne peace with the Comanches and Kiowas in 1840 facilitated Indian trade at the fort, the horse and mule trade became key to their success.

The Central Plains traders benefitted from wild-caught and Indian horses from off the surrounding prairies, but they also reaped profits from the large numbers of horses that adventuring mustangers were rounding up and driving eastward from California. The mountain man Old Bill Williams told artist Richard Kern years later that his “greatest coup” was stealing 4,000 horses from California ranches and driving them to Bent’s Fort. Eventually both Bent’s Fort and the town of Pueblo became horse trading destinations for army quartermasters. The adopted Crow, Jim Beckwourth, arrived at Pueblo in May 1846, with 1,000 horses from California, and traded almost all of them to Colonel Steven Kearny’s Army of the West. So did mountain men Solomon Sublette and Joseph Walker, who arrived at Central Plains trading locations with ten drovers and 400–500 California horses about the same time. Meanwhile, local horse traders like William Tharp worked the Cheyenne villages at the Big Timber on the Arkansas for horses and mules to trade to the army at Bent’s.

Over time the Great Plains horse trade shifted even farther northward. In the mid-1830s the artist Alfred Jacob Miller, accompanying British adventurer William Drummond Stewart to the Green River rendezvous, found wild horses numerous among the bison and pronghorns of the Wyoming plains, marveled at “the beauty and symmetry of their forms,” and rendered several lovely, ghostly paintings of them. By the early 1850s the epicenter of the trade was in Wyoming, as far north as Fort Laramie, where the former Southern Plains traders and Arkansas River drovers began journeying to trade animals to the emigrants on the overland trails. By then, and in the decades after the Civil War, wild horses were undergoing the same kind of population explosion on the Northern Plains they had a century earlier farther south, and the Red Desert of Wyoming and the badlands of Montana and the Dakotas filled with wild stallion bands.

Like the other charismatic megafauna of the nineteenth-century Great Plains, the mustang herds did not survive very long into the twentieth century. In the 1880s, in the Southern Plains country where Nolan, Glass, and others had founded the horse trade economy, there were still an estimated 50,000 wild horses running free in the breaks along the Llano Estacado escarpment in West Texas. But wild horses had gone from being a resource to being pests, and what happened to those 50,000 horses is a predictable finale: ranchers paid their cowboys to shoot them on sight and to bait the carcasses with poison to kill wolves and coyotes. It was cold-eyed murder, pure and simple, but it was doubly efficient if you dreamed of a world without wild horses or wolves in it.

In some parts of the Great Plains the wild horse herds—and an economy of capturing them—lasted longer. During World War I, Miles City, Montana, on the edge of the Northern Plains badlands, furnished Allied buyers some 32,000 wild horses that sold, green broke, at between $145 and $185. American horses helped the British and the French hold the Germans off till the Yanks arrived. After the Ken-L-Ration company began to build pet food plants in the Midwest in the 1920s, most of the remaining wild horse capture and trade in the West fell to mustangers who at first seemed unaware of the fate of their captured stock. (That led to the sad, bizarre story of Montana/Wyoming mustanger Frank Litts, who—on realizing the wild horses he was bringing to Miles City were ending up slaughtered for pet food—actually caught a train to Illinois with 150 sticks of dynamite to blow up a dog food plant there.) Pet food was a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the 1930s, and since any horse at all brought $50–$60, mustangs once again became the target of an economy, only this time the mesteñeros herded them to capture with pickups and planes, with slaughterhouses and tin cans as their final destinations.

Thanks to a Californian named Velma Johnston (“Wild Horse Annie”), and an expose in the form of the Marilyn Monroe/Clark Gable movie The Misfits, the Wild Horse and Burro Conservation Act of 1959 finally brought an end to the practice of airplane mustanging. Richard Nixon took the next step, signing the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Protection Act of 1971, which recognized wild horses as “living symbols of the historical and pioneer spirit of the West [and] . . . as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.”

Wild horses now had a tenuous place in the West based on their history, along with a series of new federal wild horse refuges, including the Pryor Mountains Wild Horse Range, with its herd of zebra-striped dun mustangs from the earliest days of wild horses in the West, at the edge of the Northern Plains. But as has repeatedly been the case with the Great Plains, the scarcity of public lands on the grasslands east of the Rockies has relegated wild horses largely to other places than the setting where most of their history actually played out. Too, many biologists and land managers still ignore the horse’s evolutionary history. Neither paleontology nor molecular genetics lends any support whatsoever to the idea that horses evolved into their modern form anywhere but in North America. Nonetheless, most state and federal land agencies continue to insist that horses, with 50 million years of evolutionary history here, are still “non-native.” That’s a shortsighted view, not a Big History one, but so far it still prevails.

The National Park Service, committed to the idea of preserving American nature in the presumably magical form in which Europeans first saw it, for decades religiously removed “feral” horses from every national park where they were found, including Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, a plains badlands where Roosevelt himself had watched horses “as wild as pronghorns” in the 1880s. But since this particular park is a historic park, beginning in 1970 its managers recognized wild horses as part of the historical setting its namesake had witnessed in the area. Since then a mustang population that park management keeps between 70 and 110 animals preserves the ancient/historic relationship between wild equines and bison on at least this piece of the plains. A Great Plains national park with wild horses is a grand thing, but without their predators, park managers have had to control both horse and bison populations at the park artificially. Not so grand a thing.

And the Southern Plains, where so much wild horse history played out? The Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge there, a 59,000-acre paradise of rolling plains and granite mountains in southwestern Oklahoma—exactly the country where George Catlin found himself so bedazzled by wild horses in the 1830s—is one of the oldest federal wildlife refuges in the country. In 2001, on a tour of the Special Use Area in its backcountry, I got to see many of this famous refuge’s 500-plus bison, descendants of the very animals that preserved bison from extinction in America a century ago. We saw a beautiful royal bull elk herding his band of cows across a high, grassy ridge, animals reintroduced here from the Rockies and a stunning and historic sight on the Great Plains once again. And of all things, we even had longhorn cattle amble sullenly away from the trails we were hiking on in the backcountry, the refuge’s nod to ranchers and cowboys and the role longhorns and nineteenth-century cattle drives played here.

But wild horses? Here in the precise Great Plains country where Catlin had exulted over wild horses and painted them with their manes in wild confusion over their faces and their tails sweeping the ground? Where Philip Nolan and Anthony Glass had traded for mustangs to drive all the way to Kentucky, and pursued them through clouds of dust into mustang corrals that had dotted this very landscape by the score? The very place where Thomas James heard tales of a wild horse Elysian Fields, and about which Thomas Jefferson had marveled, on top of his Virginia mountain, over this rare “moment in the age of the world” when the horse could “be studied in its wild state”?

Evidently not. Why, after all, would anyone expect wild horses roaming across a country like the Southern Plains?