Not sure how this got started, but there was a hot disagreement during our lab meeting today. One engineer claimed the Indians saw horses for the first time when the Europeans showed up. Another engineer steadfastly claimed that the Indians already had horses. (He said they were brought up from South America.)
Anyone know?
Well the ones in South and Central America didn’t. Thats why they thought Spaniards were representatives of a diety that men on horseback resembled (that and armor and firearms all helped).
I would think that if North American natives had horses then they would have been traded south at some point.
No time to look for a cite, but I seem to recall that while there were prehistoric horses in the Americas, they died out and horses were reintroduced by the Spanish, as zen says.
There were prehistoric horses. The most modern (and most recent) native equine in the Americas was the Western Horse, which bore resemblance to (oh, Lord, how to spell this? my guess:) Pryzwalki’s Horse–an ancient, but current, breed.
There are scores of skeletons of Western Horses at the La Brea Tarpits. You can read up on them (and other mammal of the same area) at http://www.tarpits.org/.
Horses went extinct in the americas ~10,000 years ago.
I also seem to recall that horses were introduced by Europeans to North America and that it change the culture of the people of the Great Plains dramatically. In fact, IIRC, all the modern stereotypes of “Indians” in North America are all the result of very late cultural developments.
From the Encyclopedia Americana
First, let me second, third, or whatever, the claim that there were no modern horses in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. There had been a primitive horse, as opposed to a proto-horse (a three toed critter about the size of a medium size dog), but they disappeared at about the same time as mammoths/mastodons and about the time that humans appeared in the Americas. Some say that the horse was a prey animal for these early Indians and they were hunted out of existence. I have trouble buying that since the primitive horse survived in Central Asia where it would have been exposed to the same sort of predation by man and beast.
Second, there was a pretty elaborate system of horse trade into the Great Plains from Mexico and Texas during the Spanish Colonial Period. There was a similar trade system in cloth, iron goods and firearms into the Great Lakes and Great Plains from Quebec. The horse and the gun transformed the Plains Indians from a really marginal bunch like the Ute to the bully boys of the Missouri like the Sioux. The horse and gun gave the Plains Indians a reliable means to hunt buffalo; yes, buffalo, that’s what the plainsmen and everybody else called the animal until we got all politically correct with the names of animals, although I doubt if either the American Bison or the Asian Water Buffalo ever took any offense. Remember that the Sioux were in the Upper Mississippi Valley (Minnesota and Iowa) until the Great Lake Indians forced them out onto the prairies. They could not hold their own country in the East, but once they got horses and guns they became aggressive and expansionist in the West.
The horse revolutionized warfare and probably contributed to a whole host of warrior tribes. At least, they traveled a lot further with greater ease. There apparently was a tiny ‘horse’ that became extinct prior to the periods in question, nothing like the arabians and other horses the spanish brought to NA.
It’s just one of those stereotypical popular culture things – Indians ride horses w/ .30-30 winchesters and feathers. But, in reality they really were expert horse breeders and built a whole code of conduct around the horse. To steal a horse right from a sleeping brave, and escape undetected – that must have been a blast.
There were no native Americans when the Europeans came.
I’ve found it hard to find a site online for zen101’s remark about the Conquistador’s being interpreted as gods (maybe you can provide a better one?), but this comes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, Cambridge University Press (2000; c. 1973); pg. 22.
This site, inter alia, mentions the introduction of horses by the Spanish to Central America via staging posts/breeding stations in the Caribbean.
I think 'e meant there were only Americans, no arbitrary “Native” designation. In any event, the various peoples of North South, Centraal and all the sub-parts had little to do with each other.
At that time there was no “America”. But they had llamas which may look like horses if you are near sighted and at a sufficient distance.
I think the locals believing the Spanish and their horses to be one animal is UL. Maybe for a fraction of a minute someone did but come on.
Right. “Native American”, despite its PC intentions, does nothing but remind us of our conquerors. For references to our ethnicity (we are Americans, even those who live on reservations), if people won’t say Cherokee, Creek, or what have you, everyone I know prefers Indian to Native American, because that reminds us of how stupid our conquerors were! 
Right. They weren’t idiots, they were just seeing something new. Jared Diamond’s recent book Guns, Germs, and Steel recounts the destruction of Atahualpa’s empire rather neatly. I believe the description he gave was of men riding “giant deer.”
Wouldn’t “Indian” be more of an indicator of stupidity than, say, aboriginal? I mean, hasn’t it been pretty well established that this isn’t, in fact, India?
That’s the story according to the Spanish, you couldn’t speak the Aztecs language. We’ll never know what the Montezuma was really thinking.
Yes, that’s the point.