Horses
A Cheyenne man named Yellow Horse captures a herd of mules (about 1870).
In South America, the Spanish kept this advantage, and kept all the horses. Any horses that got away generally died, because the hot, wet climate wasn't good for horses.
But in North America, on the Great Plains, horses that got away lived just fine in the wild, and pretty soon people in North America had gotten hold of some horses for themselves, and learned to ride them. This brought about a whole new way of life for these people, who included the Sioux, the Cree, the Blackfoot, the Ute, and other groups. Instead of being mainly settled people who sometimes hunted buffalo on foot, many people abandoned their farms and took to hunting buffalo full-time now that the horses had made it so much easier.
Utes on horses
People soon found there were a lot of advantages to having horses. With horses to carry their stuff around, people could have bigger tipis, and keep more tools and clothing in them. They could carry sick and disabled and old people with them, instead of having to abandon anyone who couldn't keep up walking.
But there turned out to be disadvantages to the horses too. The horses competed with the buffalo for water, and for shelter in the winter. The more horses there were, the fewer buffalo there were. Soon there were not really enough buffalo for everyone.
The biggest disadvantage was that horses made the Plains people totally dependent on hunting buffalo. When the United States army saw this, they were able to kill all the buffalo and force the Sioux and other people to surrender and move on to reservations.
For more about horses, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Eyewitness: Horse, by Juliet Clutton-Brock (2000). For kids, with lots of pictures.
The Horse in the Ancient World, by Ann Hyland (2003). Mostly Greece and Rome.
Imperial China: The Art of the Horse in Chinese History, by Bill Cooke (2000). This is the catalogue of an art exhibit, so it has lovely pictures of everything to do with horses in imperial China. It has a lot of information about the history of horses in China, too.
