Revising Indian History

“The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures” by Pekka Hämäläinen, in The Journal of American History (Dec. 2003), 1215 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington, Ind. 47401–3703; “Virgin Soils Revisited” by David S. Jones, in William and Mary Quarterly (Oct. 2003), Box 8781, Williamsburg, Va. 23187–8781.

By introducing the horse to the New World, Europeans enabled the Indian tribes of the Great Plains to reinvent themselves as equestrian cultures, radically altering their way of life for the better. On the much heavier debit side, the Europeans (and Africans) brought deadly infectious diseases against which the Indians had almost no immune defenses. These statements both sum up mainstream historical views, but both seem to need thorough revision.

“Horses did bring new possibilities, prosperity, and power to Plains Indians” after the Spanish brought the animals to the Western Hemisphere in the 16th century, says Hämäläinen, a professor of early American history at Texas A&M University.

With horses, the Jumanos and Apaches—who “traded for, and stole, horses from New Mexico and Texas” and created in the 17th century the first distinct “horse culture” in the Great Plains—could hunt bison with ease and “travel farther to trade, raid, and wage war.”

But horses “also brought destabilization, dispossession, and destruction,” says Hämäläinen. In the southern plains, the Indian tribes’ vast herds of horses competed with bison for the limited riverine resources, helping to trigger a decline in the bison population in the 19th century. In the northern plains, the long, cold winters, which exposed the horses to starvation, kept most tribes chronically horse poor. The few owners of horses became rich. This scarcity, along with the expanding fur trade with Euro-Americans, says Hämäläinen, resulted in “constant warfare” among the northern tribes.

In the late 18th century, the Lakotas in the Mississippi Valley began to obtain horses and to expand westward across the Missouri River into the northern plains. The Lakotas’ aggressive movement and rise during the 19th century, says Hämäläinen, “supposedly encapsulates the full spectrum of Plains Indian experience from the adoption of horses to the exhilarating affluence of the buffalo days and from the fierce resistance against the American empire to the final, dreadful defeat.” In fact, he says, the Lakotas’ wholly successful experience with horses was the exception, not the rule, among the Plains Indians.

Also in error is the conventional notion that Indians had “no immunity” to the diseases the Europeans brought to North America, maintains Jones, a resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hos­pital. “With the exception of persons born with rare genetic immune diseases, all humans can mount a powerful defense against viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites.”

There’s no evidence of smallpox, measles, and influenza before Columbus, and In­dians might indeed have been genetically vulnerable to them, but throughout history the physical and social environments have also been important in the spread of disease. “Any factor that causes mental or physical stress—displacement, warfare, drought, destruction of crops, soil depletion, overwork, slavery, malnutrition, social and economic chaos—can increase susceptibility to disease,” Jones writes. And incursions by whites exacerbated many of these conditions.

The relative contributions of genetics and other factors to the decimation of the Indians will probably never be known, Jones concludes, but the simplistic “no immunity” thesis lets the Europeans off the hook much too easily.