We partner with Mustangs and Indian ponies, both of which have often been vilified as everything from scrawny and unattractive good-for-nothings to invasive “Old World” immigrants that aren’t a natural part of the “New World” at all. The photograph on this page is of one of the beautiful and intelligent Mustang mares who partners with us. The video clip about Indian ponies embedded on the page What Is a Horse? tells you more about the heart and soul of these extraordinary beings. Mustangs and Indian ponies are not scrawny or unattractive. And they belong on this land at least as much as do any of the people of European descent who insist that mustangs don’t belong here.
Yes, the natural ecosystems of the North American continent are out of balance. Those throwing stones at wild horses as The Cause for this imbalance are selectively ignoring the demands contemporary culture itself is making on the environment, and the increasingly unbearable pressure it’s applied to that environment through land use, water impoundment, and predator eradication. Horses are by no means the most ecologically destructive species in North America. They aren’t even the most destructive domestic animal in North America, if you want to frame the issue that way. Both in population size and habitat impact, the domestic cow takes that dubious honor
These days, the most common arguments that mustangs are an invasive species that doesn’t belong in wild North American grasslands habitats claim that herds of wild mustangs were not present either historically or prehistorically, but have only been on this continent for the last few hundred years. Many people have even come to think the wild mustangs of today are a recent phenomenon, the feral descendants of contemporary domestic horses their owners turned loose on federal lands for economic or other reasons. That argument just doesn’t hold water, either historically or prehistorically.
Let’s consider history first. In his autobiography, Civil War general and two-term US President Ulysses S. Grant described “the huge herds of wild horses that sometimes blanketed the plain as far as the eye could see”* as he rode through them in Texas in 1845 as part of US forces preparing to engage in war with Mexico. He was riding, at the time, on a mustang caught and tamed by Texans who routinely engaged with those herds and had been reporting on their abundance, stamina, and merit since at least the late 1820s.** In addition to all this, many Indigenous oral histories tell us that some contemporary Mustangs are, at least in part, descendants of Indian ponies that escaped slaughter on some of the occasions when the US Army seized and killed bands of ponies during the Plains Indian wars. These slaughter events are themselves well-documented, as are the occasional escapes of groups of horses (such as those in the video on our page about the nature of Indian ponies). Many of the Indigenous peoples of North America have, in fact, pointed out that their tribal relationships with wild and free-roaming horses here go back much farther than that, as you can see in the 26 minute film clip embedded as a Youtube windown at the bottom of this page, just above the list of cited references.# But even cursory attention paid to historical literature, almost all of it written by people of the dominant culture who were on the scene then, documents the fact that mustangs have been a big part of several major North American ecosystems for over 100 years. They are not just the feral descendants of horses that modern ranchers dumped like unwanted litters of kittens, and it’s actually ignorant to claim they are.
As far as the longer-term prehistoric picture goes, even paleontological evidence doesn’t permit us to claim that horses are an invasive species foreign to North America. These days, rangeland managers, land use planners, and politicians often cloak their judgments of North America’s Indigenous horses in science, tagging mustangs as an invasive species introduced by European settlers. But if horses were absent from the North American continent, it was for only the last 7000 to 8000 years at the very most — which is 0.014 % (14/1000ths of 1%) of the 55 million years during which horses arose, evolved, and lived on this continent. No matter how you see that recent time period when they may or may not have been here, the simple and uncontested fact is that horses actually evolved in North America and then spread out into the rest of the world from here. If they disappeared here at any point in their history, it was quite recently and for only a very short period of time. North America is quite literally the place horses evolved and existed until, at most, the last blink of an eye.
Unfortunately, the difference between those who focus on a possible late extinction of horses in North America and those who focus on a long history of relationship between Indigenous North American peoples and horses is often framed as a “science” versus “Indians” conflict. That particular framework is a very old one that casts Indians as ignorant and superstitious, and science as inherently true and even civilized. Therein lies the same gigantic load of serious and long-term cultural oppression that exists in the assumption that people of European descent can shed their unpleasant colonialist history by simply saying all humans — and horses too — are really immigrants from the “Old” to the “New” World, so it’s somehow “okay” for people of the dominant culture to dispossess them of their homes. So historical and prehistorical arguments about whether wild horses in North America are or are not really wild or feral, native or invasive, don’t help resolve the deeper and more inherent problems that are really present here.
What’s most unfortunate about this particular part of the conflict, however, is that it doesn’t even address the real issue relevant to Mustangs and Indian ponies being a natural part of North America’s grasslands ecosystems. Scientifically speaking, they clearly are. Whether they disappeared here for a brief period of time just before First Contact, or were here the whole time, is quite literally immaterial compared to the larger facts established by both historic and prehistoric data, that clearly indicate horses evolved and flourished for millions of years, right here in North America, as an integral part of the grasslands ecosystems of this continent.
References cited
#Rocky Mountain PBS published a video entitled, “Colorado Experience: Native Horses” on November 17, 2022, discussing the presence of Native horses in the Americas before Europeans arrived. To see a clip from their work, use the link in the Youtube window embedded on the bottom of this page, below this list of cited references.
*Ron Chernow. Grant. 2017. Penguin Books:New York, NY. Quote is from Chapter 3, “Rough and Ready,” para. 15. See also Grant’s autobiography, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Volume 1. Charles L. Webster & Company: New York. 1885. Available at Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4367.
** See, for example, 1827 Texas settler Noah Smithwick’s 1900 publication “Evolution of a State, or Recollections of Old Texas Days,” available here: https://texasproud.com/the-evolution-of-a-state/
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