The History of Horses in North America
The image of a wild horse, free and running through a rugged landscape, has long been the symbol of the American West. This is echoed in our film and literature and contributes to the idea of America as a bold new landscape. However, much of the history of wild horses in America is disputed. The origin of this species is a debate that looks not only at the deep history of our planet, but also the claims to land management and ecology that various organizations and communities are involved in, to this day.
The once common idea that horses arrived in the "New World" via Columbus in 1492, has now been discussed in several publications that look at the prehistoric records of North America. Wild horses have always been a part of the North American landscape. It is the question of whether or not this animal is "native" or introduced to the landscape that has people looking closer at this narrative.
Modern horses belong to the genus Equus, the only surviving genus in a once diverse family, the Equidae. Based on the fossil record, the Equus genus developed in North America about 4 million years ago. The species then crossed over to Eurasia, via the Bering Land Strait, about 2 to 3 million years ago. In North America, the last prehistoric horse species (Equus occidentalis, or the Western Horse) went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age (about 11,000-12,000 years ago).
The horse species that we are familiar with today is called E. callabus. When it was coined by "the father of modern taxonomy," Carl Linnaeus, he was thinking of the domesticated species. The species E. ferus is commonly considered the wild ancestor of these animals that we see today. But there is no evidence in the fossil record to show that E. callabus and E. ferus are different species.
It is likely that as horses spread across the world due to the Bering Land Strait, and subsequently bred over thousands of years, the domesticated species arose over several different times in various locations. Researchers have been looking at new tools for finding out the exact relationships between the different horse species, in order to determine where the animal diverged from its paleontological history.
Genetic analyses, carried out by the San Diego Zoo's Center for Reproduction in Endangered Species, indicated several different forms of wild E. callabus at 20,000-30,000 years ago. These studies show that even though this is not where the species originated from, there was a lot of genetic divergence within the species at that time. Mitochondrial DNA analysis studies have shown that E. callabus species had originated in the North American continent about 1.7 million years ago. Additionally, Ann Forsten of the Zoological Institute of Helsinki, examined a sample of mtDNA (or mitochondrial DNA) from the species E. lambei and found that it is genetically similar to E. callabus.
These findings show us that the "domesticated" horse that Linnaeus coined as E. callabus, was already within that genetic strain before the reintroduction of the species to North America. The molecular biology, in the case of E. callabus, agrees with the interpretation of the fossil record.
However, the fossil record is not the only record to show horses in the North American continent. From American Indigenous historians like Yvette Running Horse Collins, the study of horses still coexisting with native peoples long before European contact is a new avenue of archaeological and indigenous research.
Collins reaffirms a Native American claim that the prehistoric horses did not in fact go extinct after the last Ice Age and that early Indigenous peoples had a relationship with these horses. In this investigation, Critical Indigenous Research Methodology and Grounded Theory are used to determine the record of horses interacting with humans in early continental history.
Collins draws from the documentation that early Spanish colonizers recorded when they arrived in the Americas. These early records denote that the first sightings of Native people with horses occurred in 1521. Interestingly enough, there are no records stating that any Spanish horses were stolen by Native peoples at this time.
From interviewing American Indian study participants from different Nations, Collins reported that each of the communities claimed having horses prior to European arrival. Each community had an oral story, in the form of a traditional creation story, that explained the sacred horse within their society.
Recent findings of other Pleistocene fossils with human carvings on them, dating to 130,000 years ago, suggest that human societies have been in the Americas for longer than previously thought. This could also point to longer relationships with the Equus genus.
The narrative of Europeans bringing the horses to America is synonymous with the history of the American west and the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. The sturdy horses from places like Spain and Portugal carried the settlers across the continent as they developed "pueblos" in the 1600s. Some of these ranching horses escaped into the wild and ended up breeding with the horses that had already been living in North America with the Native population.
These horses ended up becoming the free-running "mustangs" of the modern American west. These escaped Spanish breeds grazed freely on the plains and roamed across the landscape. At one point there were millions of wild horse herds across the United States. Due to the harsh weather and conditions of the land, many of these horses became smaller in size over time.
Wild horses today are considered "feral", and it is implied within the use of that word to mean "invasive or intrusive." The debate surrounding native and no
