Calgary & Southern Alberta

The Horse

Until the 16th century, the only domesticated beast of burden available to North America's native residents was the dog. In 1519, Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes brought European horses to what is now Mexico. Initially awed by the strange new animal, the indigenous inhabitants of the lands Spain colonized soon began breeding stolen, purchased, and feral Spanish horses, both for their own use and for trade. Over the next two centuries, traded and stolen horses moved northward across the Great Plains, profoundly affecting most aspects of Aboriginal life.

The Blackfoot, Assiniboine, and Cree of the Northern Plains had all acquired horses by the 1730s, although they were never as plentiful amongst the Cree as amongst Assiniboine and Blackfoot. Nevertheless, by the 1800s, the horse was central even to the economy of the poorly-endowed Plains Cree.

Horses became so valuable that Blackfoot warriors sometimes traveled as far as Santa Fe to obtain good mounts. Theft, however, outranked trade as a means of augmenting local horse herds. By the 19th century, horse raiding had evolved into an institutionalised feature of Aboriginal societies throughout the western plains.

The practice, which was everywhere regarded as a high-ranking deed of war, became an important avenue through which men elevated their community status. The number of horses a man owned (and could thus give away) was the definitive measure of his valour, wealth, and generosity. These qualities, in turn, determined his prestige in his community. Men gave horses to prospective fathers-in-law, for example, to obtain wives. They donated horses to the poor in return for gratitude and loyal support. They also bestowed the animals on peers in expectation of receiving future gifts of similar magnitude. In short, the horse generated a new prestige economy, accentuating differences in wealth and status between the rich and the poor. Amongst the Plains Cree, for example, it was far easier for a chief's son to attain acceptance as a brave than it was for the son of a man with few horses.

Given the profound impact this European import exerted on Aboriginal plains societies, it is a curious irony of history that the horse itself actually evolved in North America. Horses were abundant on the continent when people first arrived here from Asia. In the last Ice Age, "Paleo-Indians" sometimes hunted the animals for meat.

In the millennia after the glaciers retreated, the still undomesticated horse became extinct in North America. By this time, however, it had long since expanded its habitat westward across the ice-free land bridge connecting Ice Age North America and Asia. Eventually, people on the Asian steppes tamed the animal. From the steppes, the horse spread into Europe, returning to North America only in the 16th century.

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