In my previous post, Castle McLauglin discussed how she got involved in the preservation of wild horses in North Dakota. Here, our conversation turns toward the historical significance of horses like these, and the place they might play in a broader consideration of repatriation.
PR: What about repatriation?
CM: Well, the point I want to get to has to do with that. The first year they brought those horses home, almost all the pregnant mares aborted from the stress of the roundup. But the next year, when the foals were born, there was a lot of color—a lot of Overo paints, with maybe one blue eye, or a big white spot on the side of the body. The main colors were roans, blue roans and red roans, and a few paints, very few Chestnuts, Bays—the common colors of Quarter Horses.
M.de Mores standing next to a roan horse ridden by his wife the Marquise, probably one of the Lakota horses acquired from Ft. Buford. Item No. 00042-080 (De Mores Collection Mss 10036). State Historical Society of North Dakota.
They matched the historical photos [of the Marquis de More’s horses] that I included with my report to the Park Service. Those photos show all greys and blacks and roans.
So I started trying to get the Park Service to reverse their policy. I was young and idealistic and I was just stunned that they weren’t interested in the horses as historic resources. And also, the horses were so wild that visitors to the parks loved to see them because seeing them was a real feat—most people were lucky to catch a glimpse of the calmest band. It was a special experience people could have.They were the very horses that were descendants of the horses that were there in the days of Roosevelt and Marquis de More.
The other thing is that they had been there for over one hundred years and had survived countless attempts to eradicate them. North Dakota is brutally cold, thirty and forty below, sometimes for months at a time, and these horses had adapted to that really harsh environment and survived, so I felt that there was a biological basis for their being in the park, there was a historical and a behavioral basis for keeping them there. Not some quarter horses, which visitors can see on any ranch.
PR: So, your report did not convince the officials?
CM: Nope, they couldn’t care less. I thought this was a terrible injustice—I still do—but we’ve never been able to get the park to change their mind.
PR: And this had been going on a long time before you arrived on the scene?
CM: Yes, they never consulted any experts. They could have brought in biologists who worked for the BLM or other people who were working with wild horse issues and knew a little about management. They chose not to do that. When the Wild Horse and Free Roaming Burro Act was passed (1971), the Park Service went to court to get an exception so that they would not be subject to the federal regulations that were written to protect wild horses and burros on federal land.
Shaded areas represent “Herd Areas” protected by the Wild Horse and Free Roaming Burrow Act. Animals living outside these areas are not protected. Note that South Dakota lies outside the boundaries of this map.
PR: Why would they do that?
CM: They argued that that wasn’t their mission, because then the NPS was focused on biology and preserving pre-contact landscapes. They reintroduced bison and elk and considered the horses “exotics” and unwelcome competition for those native species. Also, I think that in part they just didn’t want to be bothered to try to manage the herd. So Frank and Leo and I were not making a lot of headway. We did attract some and supporters, and in 1999 we decided to start a non-profit organization to protect and preserve at least the horses that Frank and Leo had bought. After the first roundup, every few years there were more roundups, and we would go back and buy as many horses as we could afford to save from slaughter. That’s how Frank and Leo ended up gradually taking on this burden of these horses until they were numbering in the hundreds and they took over their lives. That has been thirty years ago. Those guys often didn’t have enough money to buy a new pair of socks, but they kept the horses alive. So in ’99 we founded The Nokota® Horse Conservancy.
PR: Why that name?
CM: It is not because of the Nakoda Sioux nation, but a contraction Leo thought up that would indicate the horses were from North Dakota. We did find some allies. The western historian, Bob Utley, became our great champion. Leo Frank and I were invited to attend a history conference where I could describe my historical research, and we brought some of the horses to show. Many western historians were there, and some became interested and began writing letters to the park service and so forth.
PR: And?
CM: It had absolutely no effect. Years before that, we had managed-—with the help of some Native people, and some ranchers from other parts of the state—to get the state legislature to name these horses the “State Honorary Equine.”
PR: I wonder if you can help me understand the bigger picture here. Can you look across the Great Plains and find other bands of wild horses in similar situations?
CM: No, and that is the interesting thing about these North Dakota horses. They kind of fall between classificatory categories. The mainstream understanding is that when horses were introduced to the Americas by the Spanish that those were the first horses that Native people acquired. That was in the southwest, and those were colonial Spanish horses. It is also known that some ranchers in the southwest used some of those Spanish horses to develop the Quarter Horse. And, during the open range ranching period on the Plains (1860s-1880s), they brought some of these horses with them to the northern plains, so we know that the Spanish colonial horse had some influence on how the wild horses in North Dakota came to be there and also how they influenced early Indian horses.
Ft. Yates missionary Amos Beede captions this child’s drawing: “Native people of the west have vivid traditions of the ‘Spanyo,’ the first white people . . . in what is now New Mexico.” Courtesy the Newberry Library, Ayer Art Collection.
So, in the minds of many equine researchers and historians, in order for a horse to be a “real” Indian horse, they have to be a Spanish Mustang. And today those relationships are traced genetically. But, that assumption is just not accurate historically. The Indians on the northern plains liked larger horses. They called them “American horses.” They engaged in a lot of horse taking from the military and ranchers during the Plains Wars (1854-1890) and were happy to blend those American horses into their own herds.
This is one of the slippages with the Nakota® horses— this history vs. DNA thing, let’s say. Maybe if they were “pure” Spanish, the Park Service would have to capitulate.
PR: How did Native peoples on the plains go about raising these animals for war horses?
CM: Interestingly, they did not practice selective breeding in the way that we think of that today. Because their idea about animals is that they are separate “nations” with their own volition, who can make up their own minds about such things. Most didn’t geld horses. They didn’t cull horses. They ran their horses in large, community herds. And they valued very different attributes. They were less interested in conformation and more interested in things like stamina. When it came to appearance, many preferred parti-colored, unusual horses, like the paints, and blue eyes. It turns out that several of the allied Lakota and Northern Cheyenne war societies had a strong preference for blue roans, because they viewed the color as an indication of how to classify that horse in terms of the larger universe of entities and spirits. The Lakota idea of wiyohpiyata —the west—is an area of power that governs both storms and warfare. The colors of the west are both black and blue, and so they saw blue horses as part of this complex of entities and powers, so an ideal warhorse. Several of the war societies preferred the blue roan, a very rare color.
PR: Now here’s another question I have. As an equine person, when you look at illustrations of horses in the Lakota war books you’ve written about, what do you see? That is, what is the relationship between this species history and the images actual Plains warriors drew in recounting their battles?
CM: Joe Brings Plenty (Minneconjou), the former tribal chairman at Cheyenne River, wrote in the foreword to my book that very few Euro-Americans have ever put together the significance of the blue roan to the Lakota and to the artwork in those war books. That was very gratifying for me.
PR: Could you give our readers an example of what Joe Brings Plenty was talking about?
CM: Well Artist B, the “Blue Roan Warrior”—who I believe might have been Hump (High Backbone), Crazy Horse’s uncle—drew himself riding a real blue roan in all 22 of his pictures. It has a black neck and legs.
PR: So it looks like some of the horses you rescued?
CM: Yes, but a lot of time in “ledger art,” these men drew blue horses for a variety of reasons. They had limited colors.
Blue roans are drawn with black legs and often heads as is this horse, ridden by Artist B. Plain blue seems to have often been used for greys, or symbolically to denote a war horse. Artist B’s horse is a bona fide roan. Artist B, “Blue Roan Warrior.” MS Am 2337, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Sometimes they used a blue pencil to denote a grey horse. Sometimes they drew a blue horse because it was a war horse, and the color of war horses were blue. They were symbolic renderings. That’s what makes this tradition so complicated.
PR: In that case, we could look at those war books for historical evidence of your counter-narrative about the North Dakota horses. War books should be held up as historical evidence with a value similar to DNA evidence and the ranchers’ own stories.
CM: Yes, but historical evidence is obviously not given the same authority as DNA. And the other thing that has driven me to try to preserve this population has to do with the horses having been wild. In recent decades, the term “wild” has been deconstructed, written off as a projection of Euro-American culture. But having watched these horses for decades, I think that quality actually exists. There was something so different about the horses who would rather kill themselves than be captured.
The Nokota® Horse Conservancy is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of this breed. You can find it at http://www.nokotahorse.org
Castle McLaughlin and Butch Thunderhawk have co-curated an exhibit on the Lakota war book: Wiyohpiyata: Lakota Images of the Contested West.
The exhibit space for “Wiyohpiya” at Harvard’s Peabody museum.
The exhibit “uses ambient sound, motion, scent, and historic and contemporary Plains art to animate nineteenth century Lakota drawings from a warrior’s ledger collected at the Little Bighorn battlefield. This exhibit presents Lakota perspectives on westward expansion while exploring culturally-shaped relationships between words, objects, and images. https://www.peabody.harvard.edu
