Well, they actually had horses long before that. But the natives ate them into extinction rather than riding them.
IIRC someone brought in a bunch of camels too.
Notice the language in the excerpt. “Native Americans” “CARE” for horses.
Evil white Europeans “use” and “exploit” them. Those are the terms I’m used to in writings about animals. But mention any other group - they care for them.
Yup, I’m cynical.
As for this, regardless, I have to wonder how Indians took advantage (another term) of horses. Are they implying Indians figured it all out themselves? Which they could, but I have to think much came from seeing the white man. Never mind whites gave them horses at all. Thanks, whites!
What did Indians get around on before we brought over horses?
Iberian horses, of course, suggests a strong Arabian influence introduced by the Moors that bore the wonderful traits of those horses, endurance, density of bone, bottom, and intelligence. There is scarcely a breed in the world that is not improved by introduction of Arabian blood. By the 18th and 19th century the British horses referred to already had Arabian genes already bread into many.
“as much as a century before records from Europeans had suggested”
Which were probably records from the French and English who came into those areas around that time. The Spanish had been exploring North America for a century already, and it was from the Spanish that the natives got the horses.
In C.S. Gwynne’s “Empire of the Summer Moon” (probably the best-researched historical account of the Comanche Indians), he theorizes that the first Indians to get their hands on horses probably were Athapaskan Apaches, stealing horses from a herd of desert-bred Iberian mustangs brought to New Mexico in 1598.
There is no record of how it came to pass (because no White man ever saw an Indian on horseback until settlers moved into central Texas in the early 1800s) but the Indians — and particularly the Comanche — very soon became skilled at selective breeding. The Apache viewed the horse as more of a 4-legged grocery store but the Comanche’s entire lifestyle revolved around them. They lived on the move and — much to the chagrin of the Spanish — would stage raids on horseback from several hundred miles away ... and then vanish back into the desert.
It wasn’t uncommon for a Comanche chief to keep a string of more than 1000 ponies, and every brave would have dozens to a few hundreds. Young boys would be trained as horse-mounted warriors, and by age five or six they were expected to be competent in the Indian equivalent of the modern horse-mounted “pick-up” race (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceOAC6lhyiM).
Every plains tribe lived in fear of the Comanche. By the time Whites settled in Texas, they ruled over a quarter of a million square miles, from central Texas to the Kansas panhandle, Tulsa to Santa Fe.
And contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, the Comanche where the only Indians who fought from horseback as a matter of course. Other tribes (including the Apache) fought as “dragoons,” riding to the battle but dismounting and fighting on foot.
Comanche lived like ghosts, here one day and gone the next. So much so that the Whites had never so much as heard mention of them until they got attacked by them in Texas. They were such a threat to western expansion that the Texas Rangers were founded specifically to live like and fight like the Comanche, and hopefully keep them at bay.
And the only thing the Comanche loved better than fighting from horses ... was betting on racing them. And from the perspective of a savvy horse-breeder, it would make sense that they would want to engage in horse-trading as far and wide as possible, in order to improve their herd.
Considering that they were both the most mobile and the least visible of all the Indians, and how their lives were built around refining their herds, it would seem to me to make sense that they would spread the animals far and wide. But at the same time, the only evidence that it was they who had done it might be in the DNA of the horses themselves.
If you are an Amazon Prime member, there's a 2014 documentary titled "Horse Tribe" that is excellent.
Legendary as one of America's greatest horse tribes, the 21st century Nez Perce decided to bring horses back to their land and lives with the unlikely help of a charismatic Navajo horseman, Rudy Shebala.