Bringing home: All the pretty horses

Montana

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 2008, Pages

  Flores, Dan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61149687347     PISSN: 00269891     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (59)

1. Quote in this paragraph and the following from George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, 2 vols. (1841;
2. repr., New York, 1973), 2:57-59. Catlin adds that wild horses were even then stocking "the plains from this to Lake Winnepeg, two or three thousand miles to the North."
3. John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1835), 3:270-74. A few weeks later, Audubon sold Barro, "not without regret," for $120.
4. Nolan was a figure of considerable interest for twentieth-century historians of the Southwest. Secondary works addressing his life include Maurine Wilson and Jack Jackson's Philip Nolan and Texas: Expeditions to the Unknown Land, 1791-1801 (Waco, Tex., 1987);
5. Noel Loomis and Abraham Nasatir, Pedro Vial and the Roads to Santa Fe (Norman, Okla., 1967);
6. and Noel Loomis's monograph, "Philip Nolan's Entry in Texas in 1800," in The Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 1762-1804, ed. John McDermott (Urbana, Ill., 1974), 120-320.
7. William Dunbar to Thomas Jefferson, Natchez, August 22, 1801, and Daniel Clark to Thomas Jefferson, New Orleans, February 12, 1799, both in "[Documents] Concerning Philip Nolan," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association (April 1904), 315, 310.
8. This argument for the extent of Nolan's early journeys is based on the description of the southern plains that General Wilkinson would later provide to the Jefferson administration, almost certainly (although not definitively) from Nolan's own accounts. The description conveyed with striking accuracy the courses of both major headwater forks of the Red River, the existence of the Wichita Mountains, and the plateau of the Llano Estacado, along with the Pecos River and the Rocky Mountain Front in New Mexico. It appears in James Wilkinson to Henry Dearborn, Natchez, July 13, 1804, War Department, Letters Received, Main Series, Record Group M222, National Archives, Fort Worth, Texas.
9. Philip Nolan to James Wilkinson, Frankfort, Kentucky, June 10, 1796, and Philip Nolan to James Wilkinson, New Orleans, April 24, 1797, both in James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, 3 vols. (1816; repr., New York, 1973), 2: appendix 2. The primary sources do not provide an estimate of the size of the horse herd Nolan drove back from the West on this expedition, but his biographers believe it was the biggest wilderness haul of his career as a mustanger. Wilson and Jackson, Philip Nolan, 34, set the figure for this Nolan trip at 1, 296 horses.
10. Thomas Jefferson to Philip Nolan, Philadelphia, June 24, 1798, and Thomas Jefferson to William Dunbar, Philadelphia, January 16, 1800, both in the Thomas Jefferson Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
11. Various historians, including Noel Loomis, believed Jefferson did get an interview with Nolan. But while Wilkinson's letter of introduction for Nolan arrived at Monticello in November 1800 (duly dated on receipt, as was Jefferson's habit), Nolan himself was once again running horses in the West by then. Using the letters between the various principals in the Thomas Jefferson Papers, I have been able to show that no meeting ever took place. The circumstantial evidence is that someone in Kentucky offered Nolan more money for the paint stallion than he could refuse. See Dan Flores, ed., Jefferson & Southwestern Exploration: The Freeman & Custis Accounts of the Red River Expedition of 1806 (Norman, Okla., 1984). The second edition of this book appeared under the title Southern Counterpart to Lewis &
12. Clark: The Freeman & Cnstis Expedition of 1806 (Norman, Okla., 2002).
13. Philip Nolan to Jesse Cook, Natchez, October 21, 1800, quoted in full in Loomis and Nasatir, Pedro Vial, 217-18.
14. Wilson and Jackson, Philip Nolan, 65-76.
15. For the story of this expedition, see Dan Flores, "A Very Different Story: Exploring the Southwest from Monticello with the Freeman and Custis Expedition of 1806," Montana The Magazine of Western History, 50 (Spring 2000), 2-17.
16. Bruce MacFadden, Fossil Horses: Systematics, Paleobiology, and Evolution of the Family Equidae (New York, 1992);
17. Richard Hulbert Jr., "The Ancestry of the Horse," in Horses through Time, ed. Sandra Olsen (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 13-34;
18. Gaylord Simpson, Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and through Sixty Million Years of History (New York, 1951).
19. Francis Haines, "Where Did the Plains Indians Get Their Horses?" and "The Northward Spread of Horses among the Plains Indians," American Anthropologist, 40 (January-March and July-September, 1938), 112-17, 429-37;
20. Gilbert Wilson, "The Horse and Dog in Hidatsa Culture," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 15 (1924), 125-311;
21. Frank Roe, The Indian and the Horse (Norman, Okla., 1955).
22. On the spread of horses in Texas, see Nettie Benson, "Bishop Marin de Porras and Texas," Southwestern Historical Qiiarterly, 51 (July 1947), 16-40;
23. and Charles Wilson Hackett, ed. and trans., Pichardo's Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas, 4 vols. (Austin, Tex., 1931-46). For the spread of horses in California, I relied on the California Manuscripts, Provisional Records, Letters Registers, 1794-1823, and the Herbert Eugene Bolton Papers (hereafter Bolton Papers), pt. 1, both collections in the Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley (hereafter UC-Berkeley).
24. Quotes from John Bartlett of the Mexican boundary survey and Texas Ranger John Duval, items 16771 and 16773 in the J. Frank Dobie Papers, Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin (hereafter UT, Austin), and from Fray Juan Agustin de Morfi, "Journey among the Indians and New Mexican Diary," typescript in Bolton Papers, pt. 1, p. 449, UC-Berkeley.
25. Because of the quality of his work on the wild horses of the nineteenthcentury West, I follow J. Frank Dobie, although he admits that his estimate is not scientific or even systematic and that "all guessed numbers are mournful to history."' See Dobie, The Mustangs (Boston, 1934), 108-9. O" bison calculations, see Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850," Journal of American History, 78 (September 1991), 465-85.
26. See Richard White, "Animals and Enteprise," in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde Milner et al. (New York, 1994), 247-84.
27. The literature here is vast, but see, for example, William Swagerty, Indian Trade in the Trans-Mississippi West to 1870, vol. 4 of The Handbook of North American Indians: Indian-White Relations, ed. William Sturtevant, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1978-89), 351-74;
28. Arthur Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade (Toronto, 1974);
29. and David Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807-1840 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1979).
30. Joseph Jablow, The Cheyennes in Plains Indian Trade Relations, 1705-1840 (Seattle, 1950);
31. Elliott West, "Called Out People: The Cheyennes and the Southern Plains," Montana The Magazine of Western History, 48 (Summer 1998), 2-15;
32. H. Clyde Wilson, "An Inquiry into the Nature of Plains Indian Cultural Development," American Anthropologist, 65 (April 1963), 355-70.
33. The best discussion of horsepropelled ethnogenesis, or cultural re-creation, among the Comanches is Gary Anderson's The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman, Okla., 1999). See also Thomas Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, 1706-1785 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1996);
34. and Pekka Hamalainen, 'The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System," Western Historical Quarterly, 29 (Winter 1998), 485-513.
35. The best account (for the early nineteenth century) of Indian raids southward into Mexico for horses is by trader David G. Burnet, who estimated that, in 1818-19, 'he Comanches were stealing ten thousand horses a year there. See Ernest Wallace, ed., "Burnet's Letters," West Texas Historical Association Yearbook, 30 (1954), 115-40.
36. In "Ecological Aspects of Equestrian Adaptations in Aboriginal North America," American Anthropologist, 85 (September 1983), 563-91, Alan Osborn explains the science of winter horse mortality on the northern plains as compared with the mortality farther south. For the raiding patterns that resulted, see Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman, Okla., 2001).
37. Both Wilson and Jackson, in Philip Nolan (pp. g-10)
38. and Terry Jordan, in North American Livestock Ranching Frontiers (Lincoln, Nebr., 1993), argue that Americans learned the nuances of catching wild horses from residents of Louisiana Creole outposts like Bayou Pierre, near present-day Shreveport.
39. See especially letter 15, Commandant General Teodoro de Croix's communication of the new regulation, in the collection of translated manuscript letters in the Bexar Archives (the Spanish Archives of Texas), Barker Texas History Center, UT, Austin. According to the commandant, "Another contributing factor in these [evils] has been the liberty with which everyone, up until now, has considered himself authorized to go out and build corrals or stockades, then round up, enclose and take possession of wild and unbranded cattle and horses." The best secondary account is found in Jack Jackson's Los Mesten̄os: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721-1821 (College Station, Tex., 1986).
40. For examples of monthly figures on horses caught and taxed, see letter 45 (1784) and letter 51 (1785) in the translated series at the Bexar Archives, UT, Austin. Mustang total figures to January 1, 1787 (17,000 animals and 8,805 pesos), are from Hackett, Pichardo's Treatise, 2:31-32. The quote is from Texas governor Domingo Cabello to José Antonio Rengel, San Antonio (Bexar), October 3, 1785, letter 50 in the translated series, Bexar Archives, UT, Austin.
41. Except where noted, this account and the quotes are from Jean Louis Berlandier, Journey to Mexico during the Years 1826 to 1834, trans. Sheila Ohlendorf, Josette Bigelow, and Mary Standifer, 2 vols. (Austin, Tex., 1980), 2:545-46. Zebulon Pike offered an earlier, briefer description of this technique, to which he appended the salute, "For this business I presume there is no nation in the world superior to the Spaniards of Texas." Donald Jackson, ed., The Journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, 2 vols. (Norman, Okla., 1966), 2:77-78.
42. The "squealing" quote is from Father Bernabe Cobo, in a typescript translation of his History of the New World, Lawrence Kinnaird Papers, Bancroft Library, UC-Berkeley. Spanish horse-catching terminology is from Jackson, Los Mesten̄os, 465. Pike does not offer Spanish terms but refers to the effect associated with hediondo.
43. Pike rounds out these details by noting that the Spanish mustangers kept their captured animals without food and in constant motion until they submitted.
44. The account here is from Dan Flores, ed., Jonrnal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier, 1790-1810 (College Station, Tex., 1985).
45. See also Elizabeth Ann Harper, "The Taovayas Indians in Frontier Trade and Diplomacy, 1779-1835," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review, 26 (1953), 41-72. As prairie Caddoans, these people were related to the Pawnees farther north. Half a century before Glass came upon them, they had been persuaded by French traders to move from the Arkansas River to this location on the Red. By relocating, they were more accessible to Euramericans embarking westward from Natchez and Natchitoches.
46. See the epilogue in Flores, Southern Counterpart, for the story of the confrontation between the United States and Spain in 1806. The new policy toward American interlopers in Spanish lands seems to have been suggested by Texas governor Antonio Cordero. It was then approved by the commandant general of the northern provinces, Nemecio Salcedo. See Cordero to Salcedo, San Antonio, February 4, 1807, and Salcedo to Cordero, Chihuahua, July 12, 1807, both in the Bexar Archives, UT, Austin. Sibley's remark is taken from John Sibley to William Eustis, Natchitoches, November 28, 1812
47. in Julia Kathryn Garrett, ed., "Doctor John Sibley and the Louisiana Texas Frontier, 1803-1814," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 49 (January 1946), 415-
48. See Flores, Journal of an Indian Trader, 15-24;
49. and Dan Flores, Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque, N.M., 1999), 116-18.
50. John Sibley to W. C. C. Claiborne, Natchitoches, October 10, 1803, in The Territory of Orleans, 1803-1812, comp. and ed. Clarence Carter and John Bloom, vol. 9 of The Territorial Papers of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1933), 75. The one-thousand-horses-a-month estimate was made by Texas governor Juan Bautista de Elguezabal. Loomis and Nasatir, Pedro Vial, 66-67. Historian Jack Jackson (Los Mesten̄os, pp. 470) also thinks the extralegal horse trade from Spanish domains was often ten times the legal number during these years.
51. Anthony Glass, August 12, 1808, journal entry, in Flores, Journal of an Indian Trader, 47-48.
52. Glass, September 28, 1808, journal entry, ibid., 65.
53. Wallace, "Burnet's Letters," 115-40.
54. and Flores, Horizontal Yellow, 116-18. Loomis and Nasatir also investigate many of the horse traders of the era, especially those who came to the notice of Santa Fe officials, in Pedro Vial, 248-64. William Becknell, who opened up the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, initially advertised for "a company of men destined westward for the purpose of trading for horses and mules." The trip turned into one to open Santa Fe to American trade.
55. John Aston, History of Jack Stock and Mules in Missouri (Jefferson City, Mo., 1924), 10;
56. and [William Becknell], "Journal of Two Expeditions from Boon's Lick to Santa Fe," Missouri Historical Society Collection, 2 (July 1906), 56-67.
57. This account is from Thomas James, Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans, ed. Walter Douglas (St. Louis, Mo., 1916), 110-27.
58. For comparison, Nolan reported that of the 250 horses he herded to Frankfort in 1796, he lost all but 42 to an affliction called "yellow water," a distemper that had even killed a horse he had brought for his patron, General Wilkinson. Nolan to Wilkinson, Frankfort, June 10, 1796, in Wilkinson, Memoirs, 2: appendix 2.
59. The estimate of forty thousand to sixty thousand dollars for Nolan's herd in 1797-98 assumes a minimum of forty to fifty dollars each for twelve hundred horses.