Americans who took to the horse “like ducks to water”
played a big role in the quadruped's spread. He wrote
that raiding Indians often stole the horses, which in turn
escaped to proliferate on the grasslands of Texas and other
areas to the north on the Great Plains.
JUNE 2015
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
“J. Frank Dobie estimated that at one time there was
approximately one million Mustangs in Texas and another
million scattered elsewhere in the West,” Gard wrote.
Scientists say it actually was something of a reclamation,
a return of the horse to the continent. About a million years
ago, they say, “...an array of small pony-sized animals
galloped across ancient plains around the world in large
herds... . Less than 10,000 years ago, however, many of
those horse-like species became extinct, along with other
browsing animals such as mammoths. Climate changes
and over-hunting by humans may have been to blame,
but no one knows for sure. The only survivors were horses
in Asia and several zebras. In North America, however,
horses were wiped out.”
Of course the symbiotic relationship that developed
between some Indian groups and the horse is legendary. A
great horse culture sprang up on the plains. Once mounted
these Native Americans became formidable foes, particularly the Comanches, who have subsequently been referred
to as the “Lords of the Plains.”
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A former senior editor of Texas Monthly, Stephen Harri-
gan, writing in Comanche Midnight, described the transformation the Comanches underwent with the horse.
“Long before, when they first filtered down out of the
eastern Rockies onto the plains, the Comanches had been
just another wandering tribe of bandy-legged pedestrians.
But when they encountered the shaggy mustangs that the
Spanish brought to the New World, it was as if they had
found some long-missing component of their own identity. The Comanche adapted to the horse with breathtaking commitment. They understood better than any other
Indians what a powerful new technology this creature
represented.”
The horse empowered the Comanche, enabling them to
control a large swath of territory referred to as “Comancheria,” the borders of which were roughly the Balcones Fault
on the south (north of San Antonio), the Cross Timbers
(Parker and Palo Pinto counties included) to the east, the
Pecos River out west, and on north up past Santa Fe and
along the eastern Rockies.
Parker County history is flush with stories (some true,
some not) of swift-riding Comanches on fleet-footed ponies
committing atrocities against white settlers popping up on
the frontier. Many are tales of horrifying savagery.
“Settlers who encountered the mutilated bodies of their
loved ones — the scalps taken, the genitals ripped off, the
entrails baking in the sun — were understandably eager to