ENHS Nature Trails March 2001 Article 4

And the Response
by Nathan Tublitz

Reida Kimmel, in her usual thoughtful manner, raises several good points in her article that, taken together, appear to argue in favor of the commonly held viewpoint that the native American horse disappeared from North America only to return with the colonization of the Americas by Spain. She may indeed be correct, but her arguments are less than convincing. Her first two points, that native Mexicans were astonished to see horses and that they spread from Mexico to the Great Plains, are both beyond dispute. However, these "facts" by themselves do not refute the possibility that small, Przewalski-type horses may have persisted in the upper Great Plains to be tamed and used by the Lakota. Her second point is that the equestrian vocabulary of the Lakota may not tell us anything. Then again, maybe it does, especially given their richly detailed lexicon for horse types including separate words for large horse (introduced by the Conquistadors) and small horse (Przewalski-type). The presence in the Lakota language of a specific word for the small, Przewalski-type horse, one that presumably went extinct thousands of years before the appearance of the Lakota tribe is especially perplexing, unless the small horse and the Lakota were contemporaries.

Reida's third point, that Spanish mustangs were relatively easy to tame as they were only feral not wild, may also be true. Yet there are too many 19th Century stories of intemperate horses throughout the Western US untamable by even the best horsemen. Did the Lakota, well-known even among other native nations as gifted horsemen, possess a cultural reservoir of horse taming tricks gleaned from centuries of horsemanship with the Przewalski horse from which they tapped to quickly tame the newly introduced large horse? Certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Reida's fourth point, that the genetics of horse body coloration is consistent with the extinction of the native horse from North America, is also true. However her genetic argument makes several critical assumptions, any one of which if incorrect would negate her conclusion.

Reida's final point, "show us the bones", is the most compelling since one might expect to find the remains of horse bones. However those who study decaying bones tell us that bone preservation is not as simple as one might expect. Harsh climates, alkaline soils, strong winds, and the presence of scavengers all destroy bones. Even in the best conditions most bones are decomposed by bacteria into dust-sized particulate matter. Preservation of large bones is a very rare event, the lucky combination of mild climate and quick burial in oxygen-free, clay soils. Such soils were and still are quite uncommon in the midnorthern Great Plains, the highly fertile homelands of the Lakota. The funeral practices of the Lakota (remains left on top of the ground for a year) combined with the harsh Plains climate probably lead to the rapid decomposition of all organic materials, including horse bones. Did the native American horse go extinct as commonly thought? Maybe or maybe not. My point is that a re-visiting of the data suggests the latter may be true. Reida may indeed be correct about the horse's extinction, but I am not swayed by her evidence.

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