Horse post

You see them around sometime. Some people love 'em, keep them out back--if they've got an acre--or else board them with somebody who'll put 'em up and feed 'em. At a price. Horses will eat you out of house and home. What's more, they don't do anything any more but give a kid a ride once or twice a summer. And, doggone it, they eat like a horse because they are.

Sure, they're beautiful. A bunch of 'em streaming across an open field will make just about anybody stop the car. They'll make a picture: all by themselves, in a backdrop of open field like so many around here, all you need is a quarter horse, some paint ponies, four or five of them, and you've got a shot you can hang up in your den. They're beautiful.

Nothing--absolutely nothing--changed Native American lives like a horse, a gift from the Spanish. They were astonished when they first laid eyes on them, but from the Comanches to the Lakota, Native people became horsemen and women quicker than a Great Plains change of weather.

If you wonder when horses came to this country, handy historians have a date--1519, a kind of birthday if it wouldn't be for the fact that horses were here earlier but for some reason went extinct. It took some time for the horse to come up this far north from New Mexico, lots longer than it took for Native people to figure out what to do with them.

The Blackfoot people went slack-jawed when a war party came back with horses they'd stolen. They called them “large dogs" because they had no idea what those huge four-leggeds were. The men tried to mount the 'em, but when the horses walked away with them on their backs, the braves, terrified, jumped off.

It was a woman who thought of it—a priceless idea. She said that what they ought to do is tie those horses into a travois, as if that whatever-it-was was nothing more than a huge dog. So, they did. Amazingly, the horse didn’t move or jump. So she politely mounted it and rode off.

Eventually, horses became the medium of exchange. If young men wanted young women, they brought a horse or two to the her family's tipi to account for the loss the family would suffer.

When the Lakota were living in Minnesota, way back when, they ritually traveled west to hunt buffalo; but when horses got plentiful, the hunt got much easier. Stomachs got filled. People got happy. Quality of life rose from levels of impoverishment that had often too frequently threatened because the men--and the women--could reach herds that, just a few winters earlier, would have been beyond the range of hunters on foot.

In his new book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer says, "The horse was a key to this renaissance on the plains cultures. It made everything possible--new art forms, new religions, new societies, and new thinking. It was a time of plenty."

Wasn't just Native folks either. A white settler from up here named Arie Noteboom used to tell the story of how he and others went to the Rock and Sioux Rivers for wood to be used in building barns and other shelters, and for fuel, a long trip with horses or oxen. Once upon a time, clouds began to form and snowflakes followed. Lots of them. Hoardes of them, so many they started for home but soon enough got wretchedly blinded. 

But they also got smart because one of the team had a colt back home, so they put that sweet mare in the lead team, then tied each team to the wagon ahead, and I don't have to tell you what happened, but I will anyway because you just don't get enough chances to tell so fine a story. Through that driving, blinding snow, when at last they came to a stop, it was in front of the door where that beloved mare stopped and whinnied to her colt.

Next time you spot one along the road, pull over and say thanks. Better yet would be a handful of sugar cubes.