(gentle music) - [William] From the deepest of deep time, horses have been a part of the landscape here in North America.

- [Celinda] And native horses are really what stitched this continent together.

- [Chance] We did have horses.

Indigenous knowledge and our oral traditions and oral stories are important in connecting.

The archeological research of these bones will help support our oral histories and stories.

- [Carlton] The introduction of horses are an understudied component in archeology.

We just take for granted the European accounts.

- [Judy] The kids in school need to grow up learning the truth about our wild horses.

It's amazing history.

It's the true history.

- [Announcer] This program was made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund, supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect, and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund.

Create the future.

Honor the past.

With additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E. La Camera by Hassel and Marianne Ledbetter and by members like you.

Thank you.

With special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado, and to these organizations.

With funding provided by Ben Mares.

(inquisitive music begins) (inquisitive music picks up) (inquisitive music ends) - [Narrator] The horse transformed the West and the ability of humans to thrive in it.

But the accepted account of the human-horse alliance may have been mistold for centuries.

European settler histories tell the story of how Spaniards introduced domesticated horses to the peoples of what the conquistadors considered the New World.

But many Indigenous oral traditions tell of their people riding horses long before meeting these Spanish newcomers.

Some Indigenous stories tell of horses having always been with Native Americans.

So which version of history is true?

The most common history schoolchildren are taught today is that Native cultures acquired horses many decades after the Pueblo Revolt.

- The Pueblo Revolt occurred in 1680 in what is now New Mexico and represented a revolt of the Pueblo people against the practices and presence of the Spanish colonizers.

They were revolting against what was a very exploitive encomienda system, which was a feudalistic form of servitude and sort of land control, resource control that the Spanish exercised in the area.

And in 1680, the Pueblo peoples throughout New Mexico communicated with each other and kicked the Spanish out.

- When it comes down to how do Indians get horses, the main idea is, well, there's a bunch of horses in New Mexico around Santa Fe, and then they get out during the Pueblo Revolt.

And they let loose the horses, and that's when the horses escaped.

The archeological evidence really seems to start to suggest that Indigenous folks had horses well before the Pueblo Revolt.

So the archeological dating is showing it's happening before the Pueblo Revolt, and the Indigenous oral traditions or histories, they talk about, "Well, we saw horses before we saw white folks in some places."

- [Narrator] Today, archeologists studying physical evidence concur with the Native American oral histories.

But Indigenous voices are new to the academic conversation.

Archeologists used to support the Pueblo Revolt version of horse history.

So what changed: the science or the scientists?

- One of my favorite quotes in archeology is "Archeology gives a voice to the voiceless," and it really does matter who is that voice.

If you look at the original archeologists, they're white rich men on a hobby trying to explore the world, and over time, that's changed into a profession but was still very much dominated by white men, as most academic disciplines.

Indigenous people have largely been not included and a lot of that has to do with, you know, over 300 years, 400 years of cultural human genocide that has been perpetrated.

And it was really a professor of mine at community college who really pushed me to go into archeology, stating that we need more Indigenous perspectives in this field.

- This is a really rich, rich legacy embodied in these horses because it speaks to so many facets of our shared history, of our shared past.

- [Carlton] The story of the horse is fascinating.

Horses evolutionarily came from the Americas.

This is where you'll find some of the oldest horse fossils.

- The earliest horses were really a part of this incredible rise in the diversification of mammals in general.

Between about 50 and 60 million years ago, we have these first critters who are really not much like the horses that we know today.

What some folks like to refer to as the dawn horse, otherwise known as Eohippus, really kind of a small creature about the size of a dog, were the ancestor of a broad group which later became horses.

By around somewhere between two and four million years ago, the first ancestors of the animals that we today know as the genius Equus were thriving here in the plains of North America.

- [Narrator] Then, around one million years ago, these animals crossed the Bering Strait land bridge and populated the rest of the world, diversifying in places like Africa and Asia.

- At the end of the last glacial maximum, a lot of megafauna along with horses disappeared, and that's a highly debated topic.

- Problem is, when you read these historical records and documents and books, is it's often told without the input of Native people.

- I think it's really kind of a mythical story because it's all very simple.

This is a story that cast Europeans in leading roles for the most part and that really aligned with a lot of other myths of the West in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

But there's all sorts of problems with this story, as it turns out.

An anthropologist named Clark Wissler who was one of the leading North American anthropologists around the turn of the last century was operating within this very, very different mindset where Europeans were the major actors, where it was really their view of history that mattered the most.

Wissler saw Native American horse use in a very limited sense, and importantly, this was also a very male-centric approach to the question.

- In the 1990s, that was challenged by scholars like Vine Deloria, who put forth a theory that that was just a very Eurocentric view of the origins of Indigenous peoples on these continents and that, indeed, we need to listen to the oral histories of these peoples.

Oral history is a critical component to the historiography of anything and especially of this country, and so in order to come up with a fuller understanding of the history of this country and this state, this region, we have to look to oral history.

It is absolutely critical.

- The Nez Perce is one of the nations that has an oral tradition of always having had the horse.

Not everyone agrees that they disappeared and were reintroduced by the Spanish.

We have quite a number of oral traditions.

The Nez Perce, the Ute people have that.

- We sing our histories.

We know that this song is at least after 1492.

That's what it's referencing because that's when horses show up.

In Pawnee oral tradition, it's a young boy, a very poor young boy who, the tribe takes pity on him.

He has this dream from Atius, Father, God, that of horses, but he doesn't know what they are.

So he starts making these mud ponies by a creek, and he goes back every day and just kind of makes these little mud ponies, and he plays with them.

One night, he has another dream, and Atius tells him, "The next time you do that, they'll come to life."

And so he goes to the creek, and instead of the mud ponies he's left there, there are two actual horses, and people don't know what these are.

And so this kid ends up becoming wealthy within the tribe.

He has the horses.

He ends up becoming a raiding chief.

And this sounds, like, fantastical, right?

Because it's, like, two mud ponies becoming life.

Like, okay.

But there's truth in this, the fact that the story's talking about the introduction of horses not from the Spanish, that horses just show up.

- The First Nations got the horse, and when they did, it transformed their societies.

The hunter-gatherers here, west of the Mississippi, all belong to the Uto-Aztecan language groups.

The Uto-Aztecan language group is really one of the key points in the dissemination of the native horse into Native American cultures.

- Having horses gives you that ability to traverse the Great Plains much quicker and with many more objects than you would otherwise using dogs, which is what they used beforehand.

And in many Indigenous languages, you see that either the word for horse was the word for dog and they came up with a new word for dog, like old dog and new dog.

- In our language, the word for horse translates to similar to, like, the spirit of, like, a dog, and dogs were kind of our main mode of pack animals before we got horses.

- [Carlton] Horses completely changed life ways on the Great Plains and created the groups that we now know of as, like, nomadic bison hunters.

- Cheyenne and Arapaho people would migrate into what's now Colorado from present-day Minnesota.

But with horses, they embark on these tremendous migrations and journeys of reinvention over the course of the 1700s and early 1800s.

- You have groups like the Pawnee, like the Comanche, who became expert horse people.

The Sioux became an expanding empire with the assistance of the horse, with the mastery of the horse.

- Then, the other band that split away with the acquisition of the horse were the Shoshone Nation, and they went up northward.

They followed the superhighways, all the waterways, and they spread out.

The Shoshones, that's where Lewis and Clark got their horses when they needed them to finish their explorations westward.

Otherwise, they would've had to turn around.

The average Native American in the contact had at least three horses of their own.

They had a war pony, they had a hunting pony, and they had a traveling pony.

And then their family would have horses for transport.

And they had special people that oversaw the breeding of these called Twisted Hairs.

They were very savvy about animal husbandry because their life depended on it.

They were very, very careful and very selective about which horses bred, because you wanted your best stock for your nation.

- Treasured horses, often referred to as buffalo runners or war ponies, the owners of which would often sleep connected to them, bound to them, because these horses were not simply economic or military.

It was actually emotional.

Randolph Marcy, a US Army officer, talks to a Comanche leader, and the Comanche leader speaks really vividly and really poignantly about the love that he felt for his horse.

You know, this was a horse that he refused to sell, that he refused to trade, because the horse meant that much to him.

- One of the things that the Ute people did, and then later the Comanche and then you find the Crow and I think the Shoshone did it too, is that each morning, when you're in an encampment, everyone would put on their full regalia and dress up their horses, and they'd do a horse parade around the village.

And these parade songs were still existing by the time of France, as Denmore documented them in the early 1900s.

- Within any given Native community, then, there would be a tremendous spectrum of horses, so you have, you know, pack horses, they were more utilitarian, and their function, figuring out, like, which horses are wild and which horses are tamed.

If we were to visit a Native community in the 1700s or 1800s, that wouldn't be immediately clear.

You know, they're not picketed.

They're not corralled.

They're essentially free running.

And those horses would wander off.

Our best guess about where wild horses originate is that Native peoples have enough horse wealth by the mid to late 1700s that those processes of abandonment or just horses doing their own thing, wandering off, that leads to scattered populations of unmanaged animals begin to essentially begin to do what horses do.

They breed.

They form equine societies.

And so by the late 1700s, you see really clear mentions of wild horses among Spanish government officials, American explorers, and there actually becomes pretty lucrative markets in doing what was called mustanging, which was rounding up these wild horses and trying to move them to places where they were in demand.

By the early 1800s, folks would estimate that the herds on the southern plains might have been as large as half a million, a million.

- Wild Horse Mesa is located five miles north of the New Mexico-Colorado border and it's just south of the town of San Luis, and it's 36,000 acres, and the horses have run free there.

It's a wonderful place to live.

There are about 200 wild horses.

There's maybe another 75 on the valley.

When I first moved to the mesa, there was probably 350 horses, and now, we're lucky to have 200.

Horses came to the mesa with the Spanish when they came through in the 1500s.

Many horses were released.

Some escaped.

Some were just left behind.

And the Old Spanish Trail runs right behind the mesa, and those horses have been there since the 1500s.

The DNA testing that I have done, some of these horses are 90% Spanish.

Spanish mustangs are characterized by their small size.

They average 14 hands.

Because they're small, they can eat a lot less food and don't require as much water, and that's how they have survived for thousands of years.

I formed a 501c3 nonprofit, Spirit of the Wild Horse Foundation, and we keep track of those horses.

I spend a lot of time and energy protecting them.

But the foundation is to bring awareness to the plight of the Spanish mustang and why we need to protect them.

They're the history of the area.

- [Narrator] Past generations of wild horses and horses generally have bequeathed scientists the bones needed to determine their origins.

But do science, white-settler-written accounts, and Indigenous histories align?

- In archeology for a long time, and still present in our discipline, that Indigenous oral traditions are looked down on.

They're seen as inferior.

Our understanding of who has horses is just basing on which French or Spanish guy came to a village and noted they had horses.

Clearly they had horses by that time, but how much further in the past did they have them before that European took note?

That's what the archeology can show us, reclassifying a lot of these museum collections and trying to answer that question.

Who has the horses and when?

- We really had to develop some tools for connecting what we did have from the archeological record, which is things like horse bone, a horse skull.

We ended up with a lot of new tools in our toolkit by studying modern museum collections.

Like, certain kinds of horse equipment or certain ways of using a horse might actually leave skeletal markers that we can identify and interpret in ancient horses.

There's also been, just over the last 10, 15 years, just this incredible explosion in the capacity for biomolecular tools to tell us things.

- We can do some isotope analysis on the teeth.

We can learn even the color of the coat that the horse had.

We can show what it was eating.

- The archeology was able to provide the where and when, but the oral traditions provided the why and the how, and they matched very well on top of one another.

- The name of the Lehi horse is in reference to the location of its discovery in the town of Lehi on the outskirts of Salt Lake City sometime in 2018.

Later that year, myself, along with colleagues from University of Utah, from BYU, and from the BLM, visited and and analyzed the horse.

The assumption on this horse is that it was a late Pleistocene, which means the end of that last ice age.

The very first thing that we saw when we got in the laboratory and had a look are these really characteristic fractures of the lower back, and the most common context in which an archeologist like me would find them would be in horses from the first millennium BC in Eurasia that had been ridden without a saddle, right?

So we started to have a closer look, and the more that we looked, the more kinds of skeletal features we saw that suggested, actually, this animal was probably ridden quite extensively.

We radiocarbon dated this animal to find out if it was truly ice age in origin, and what we discovered is this animal dates sometime to the last 350 years.

We clarified that this is in fact a domestic horse, probably born and raised and died locally in the southern Salt Lake suburbs.

- This was a mare.

We know that the warriors did not ride mares.

This was a woman's horse.

And they know from all of their studies that this mare had been used for breeding purposes.

What's exciting to me, too, is that this horse was buried.

Now, you buried something very sacred.

There should be a woman's burial near that, and she was probably one of the Twisted Hairs.

- Our conclusions with the Lehi horse, where it was miscategorized as being a paleontological specimen, it turns out it was indeed a historic horse belonging to Indigenous folks out there where it was found in Utah.

It could be Ute.

It could be any of the Shoshone folks or Paiutes.

- One of the most important discoveries in recent years is a site from southwestern Wyoming called Blacks Fork.

When the horse was discovered, it's a burial of a juvenile horse, probably about six months old.

In the last several years, a student at the University of Wyoming, Cassidy Thornhill, began to reanalyze these horse remains.

What she discovered is that, in fact, this horse dates to the early decades of the 17th century, long before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

When this horse first was identified, some folks raised the question of, well, is this a Spanish horse?

And you can start to see the wheels turning and the impact of this kind of Euro-American bias in action a bit.

So one of our first tasks was to try to tackle those questions.

This is a baby horse that was badly wounded and then cared for until its death.

And we have osteological suggestions that may indicate that the horse was actually tethered.

The other example I think is really nice to highlight here, there's a horse that we encountered from basically the banks of the Kaw River in Lawrence, Kansas.

The horse was encountered by a paleontologist in the early 20th century who was exploring the banks and finding all kinds of extinct ice age fauna.

He said, "Haha!

We have a new species of wild horse."

But lo and behold, in 2010-ish, a group of paleontologists went back and had a look.

- It's another case of a misidentified museum collection.

We're redating the horse for how old it is but also looking at the isotopes and the bones, because where you get your water from, where you're getting your food from, there's isotopes from the ground that are leaching into the water or the grass, and you can pretty well trace that back.

I want to see where that horse was from.

And so far on the bone shows it's pre-Pueblo Revolt as well.

- We have Spanish documents from 1637 talking about a battle between the Spanish and mounted Ute Indians.

This is 1637, and the Spanish only came into this territory about 1598.

So that's around 40 years' time that we had a Native American tribe that was sophisticated and had enough prowess in riding the horse and of horse mastership to do mounted battle with the Spanish Army.

Then we have, in 1659, we have another Spanish document that says 80 Ute slaves escaped from the Spanish in Santa Fe, drove off 300 head of horses.

So that's another documented instance.

That's much, much prior to the Pueblo Revolt.

The culture clash concerning historians and Native Americans really stems from a lack of respect, and it's about time that that was bridged.

- I think we're quite late to the party in recognizing that good science requires diversity.

It requires Native archeologists leading the charge because we're now seeing that science and the Indigenous perspective often are converging on the same story.

- Oral histories are like that missing piece that we have to seek out in order to gain a fuller understanding of our history.

- If we lose our stories and these songs, we're basically losing more of our culture, which we're still struggling to hang on to.

You know, songs, language, ceremonies, if we don't keep practicing these, we're basically losing part of our culture.

- We need to rethink, as a society, really reidentify with how long have Indigenous people had horses.

It's earlier than what we were led to believe.

This is a understudied subject in the field of North American archeology, and so by redating these horses, we're not only telling a different story and giving the story back to Indigenous people, but we're also telling a story about the horses themselves.

- I would hope that my ancestors would be proud of me trying to connect our people, our tribe, to our connection with horses, our oral stories, histories, our traditions, past, you know, from generation to generation, and hopefully the work we're doing helps support and strengthen those.

Our stories aren't wrong.

They're not made up.

Hopefully, doing this work will help prove that and strengthen that and support it.

- Our hope is to bring more awareness to the plight of these Spanish horses.

- [Judy] The legacy for them is to be preserved for generations to come.

(bright music)