How did that happen?
Were there herds of wild horses sired by horses that escaped from Europeans?
Yep. The Spanish were in Central America and Mexico about 100 years prior to the French and English in North America.
Cortez in Mexico: 1518.
Pilgrims at Plymouth: 1620.
Horses got from Mexico to the Dakotas in 100 years? :dubious:
Hmm, they sure as hell couldn’t get across the Mississippi river, come to think of it.
There were French running about on the Western side in Louisiana, for example.
The Pilgrims didn’t settle in the Dakotas. 
But the Spanish also settled in the Southwest of what is not he US.
Some horses escaped or were stolen from the Spanish by Indians. Feral herds soon became established. Indian tribes traded horses among themselves, or maybe more commonly stole them from their neighbors. Such a useful animal spread very rapidly.
From here
*Actually in 1493, on Columbus’s second voyage.
Stealing from someone doesn’t count as contact?
Tell it to the Judge. 
BTW, I don’t see any problem with horses migrating from Mexico/New Mexico to the Dakotas in 100 years. They evolved in the Americas, and so they would easily re-adapt to that environment.
The stealing would have been done by Indians further south, so the Plains Indians (like the Lakota) could have acquired horses from wild herds or from trading/stealing from other Indians tribes-- not directly from Europeans. Colibri was specifically talking about the Plains Indians.
As John says, the first horses were stolen (or escaped) from the Spanish in Mexico (or perhaps in what is now the US southwest). They were then stolen from or traded by those Indians to others who were not in direct contact with the Spanish. In a fairly short time they had spread to other tribes who were quite distant from the areas which the Spanish or any other Europeans had reached. Many tribes had horses long before they saw their first European.
Southern Indian: “I’ll give you thirty ponies for you daughter.”
Northern Indian: “WTF is a pony?”
Sothern Indian: “I’ll give you ten ponies for your daughter.”
sorry for the kludge, but the quote function didn’t work again.
Yes or under the saddle, though I heard of that more for raw unprocessed meat - the friction of the riding seemed to cook it.
You should try to get hold of some bstirma, it really is tasty. I will see if I can get hold of some Bündnerfleisch - next summer we are supposed to be in London for the WorldCon and one of my German buddies is supposed to be joining us there, I will ask him if he can bring some along with him. In the US we have a form of dried heavily salted beef that has been mostly surplanted by ‘chipped’ beef which instead of a solid muscle is chopped and formed salted dried beef. It is effectively the same as the whole muscle dried and salted - it is rinsed several times to remove the salt and then cooked in rahmsosse, and served over noodles or toast. Frequently referred to as ‘shit on a shingle’ it was a common meal when my Dad was in the army in WW2 - he refused to eat it.
A propos of nothing, but because I’ve been doing some reading on the subject recently, apparently the word for horse in…a Native language (not sure which, I’m trying to dig back the cite but haven’t had much success so far. My Google-fu is weak tonight) can be transliterated as “dog of wonder” or “amazing dog”.
The snarky among us might deduce from this that this particular group of Natives were pretty rubbish at cladistics and leave it at that, but I would posit it implies that before they came upon the horse they’d been using dogs as work or pack animals to help with the day to day tasks. Not to pull a plow maybe (did they even have plows ?), however a sleigh or tarp laden with various sundries ? Could be, no ?
Which, to bring us back to the OP and the notion that bringing all that meat and bone and grease back to the village would have been a PITA, could suggest a possible method by which paleolithic tribes did it - we do know the first traces of domesticated wolf have been dated to -30k years or so, whereas the Mastodon was hunted to extinction a mere 10-11k back.
It’s a joke. A friend of mine who lives with Indians in Oklahoma says they go to bars, check out women and rate her in the number of ponies. It is certainly a translation error.
My wire haired dauschand, however one spells it, would stop and eat the mammoth. Perhaps Indians eating dogs and horses as the need arose would improve her demeanor.
My point being, if Northern Indian had never seen a horse, Southern Indian could have had all his daughters for one.
Lakota. Shunka-wakan. Can be translated loosely as “mystery dog”.
Watch A Man Called Horse, and you’ll hear this all the time.
Tangent: For South America, what major species may have been impacted? Assuming people were part of this, when did S America become infested with humans compared to N America?
One would be the Megatherium.
And it appears that S America was settled very rapidly after N America. In fact, one of the oldest know human fossil sites is in South America-- Monte Verde, Chile.
As John says, people spread through the isthmus of Panama to South America not long after they reached North America. There are sites in South America, including mastodon kill sites, nearly as old as those in the north. (Actually, because dating is not precise, we don’t have good evidence of the exact time course of the peopling of the Americas.)
Megafauna that disappeared from South America around the time of the arrival by humans included many forms indigenous to that continent (some of which had previously migrated to North America, and also disappeared there), including a variety of ground sloths (some the size of an elephant),toxodonts, glyptodonts, and Macrauchenia (in back with the long neck and trunk). There were also animals that had migrated to South America from the north, including several species of mastodonts, horses, sabertooth cats, the American lion, dire wolves, and giant short-faced bears.
[QUOTE=John Mace;16931293And it appears that S America was settled very rapidly after N America. In fact, one of the oldest know human fossil sites is in South America-- [Monte Verde, Chile]
(Monte Verde - Wikipedia).
[/QUOTE]
That should have read “one of the oldest known human fossil sites in the Americas”…
For years, archeologists thought humans migrated south only after the ice sheets parted enough for there to be an in inland passage leading from the north to the south in North America. An alternative hypothesis is that humans migrated along coastal routes, and therefore were not subject to inland glacial barriers.
Interesting stuff - thank you.
I would love to see a Pleistocene Park.
Well, the San used poison arrows to hunt. Not sure if they ever took down elephant though.