Richard White, The Roots of Dependency, 1983; and "The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of American History, 65 (Sept. 1978), 319-43
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2009)
Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (1972); Ecological Imperialism (1986)
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, & Steel (1997); Collapse (2004)
John Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, (1955)
Robt Denhardt, Horse of the Americas (1947; 1975)
Epidemic diseases were critical to the "success" of Europeans in North America; this was in stark contrast with Asia and Africa, where disease environments more often than not contributed to European failures.
How do we evaluate different possible causes of European "success," here applying the very limited (and problematic) definition of "success" used by Alfred Crosby to describe their biological expansion more or less in Darwinian terms? Many reasons can and have been offered:
Alfred Crosby's thesis: European expansion was most "successful" in "Neo-Europes" of temperate latitudes where biological co-invaders enabled Europeans to reproduce their bio-cultural systems: US, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina, Australia. Where what Crosby calls the "co-invaders" of Europeans failed to thrive, so often did European efforts at colonization.
This argument raises important questions about how much we should embrace causal explanations relying on "biological determinism": how much does environment as opposed to human agency determine human history? Biological determinism would incline toward the view that biological elements of human and non-human groups affected the course of history without much need to examine intervening cultural variables.
Best-known recent example of this kind of biologically determinist argument is Jared Diamond's bestselling book Guns, Germs, & Steel (1997): geography and fortunate biological endowments determine cultural success of different peoples world-wide.
However we answer such questions, Crosby's insight about the linked histories of human beings and other organisms is central to environmental history: plants, animals, and microorganisms play vital roles in human history that are often overlooked by more traditional approaches to studying the past.
Central task of colonization: reproducing familiar landscapes in the midst of an alien world...and the features of those familiar landscapes were more often than not intimately tied to the the animals (and plants) that colonists brought with them.
Consider the elements that needed to be reproduced to bake in a colonial oven so simple a thing as a loaf of bread:
If any of these elements failed, so too could the colonists: not at all uncommon for early colonists to experience extreme hunger or even die of starvation during their first winters because these food systems had not yet been reproduced, often surviving only because of the generosity of Indian neighbors.
Recognizing these biological interconnections is central to environmental history; but that's different from saying that these biological actors determine by themselves the course of human history.
Each of our biological companions has its own unique story: there is no single narrative of that any particular human group and their fellow creatures share. It would be impossible (and misguided) to catalog their myriad stories as if they were homogeneous, all working together as a single team. Sometimes they supported each other and encouraged each other's spread; sometimes time. From apple trees to pigs, rats to mosquitoes, measles to malaria...each has made its own particular journey through history.
Among most important of the biological companions who accompanied Europeans in their colonizing efforts were large domesticated mammals:
The importance of such animals is suggested by the willingness of colonists to share so much space with them aboard ship for the long trans-Atlantic journey.
We can see these animals...
But: complicated modifications needed to be made in colonial environments in order to sustain these animals: meadows for hay, pastures for grazing, barns for storing winter fodder. With cattle came milk and cheese, leather and meat, grass and hay, plows and wagons, even cowpox and tuberculosis, each with complicated practices and technologies and craft skills linked to these cattle-related things.
I've saved one of the most interesting of these animal case studies for final part of today's lecture: the horse. I'll use it to question how much we can rely on biological determinism alone to explain the environmental and cultural historical role(s) of such animals.
Horses had significant advantages compared with cattle: they were not as useful for food (especially in European culinary traditions), but horses were better suited than cattle for human control, movement, speed, and certain forms of labor power.
Note the important role of horses in early military encounters: Spanish conquistadors first gained their skills as Iberian horse soldiers. Horse-based cavalry played vital roles in European military tactics as the "eyes of the army," gathering information about disposition of enemy forces and bringing it back to military commanders. (Robert E. Lee's defeat at Battle of Gettysburg is sometimes ascribed in part to his inability to communicate with his chief cavalry officer J. E. B. Stuart.)
Horses spread throughout the Spanish colonies: the underpinned an export trade in tallow and hides; the spread of rancheros; the emergence of a vaquero tradition (which became a source for the "cowboy" practices that became famously a part of the mythic American West on the Great Plains in North America), enabling people to her of cattle while riding on horseback.
Wild horses proliferated through South American grasslands, expanded from there into North America both as domesticated animals and as creatures that had escaped into the wild. They became important species on pampas of Argentina, and accompanied Spanish soldiers and missionaries into Alta California (modern-day California). Horses were so numerous by the time of California Gold Rush after 1848 that Anglo ranchers slaughtered many of them to protect rangeland for their cattle.
Many horses became wild, leaving their European masters altogether.
For the rest of the lecture, I want to consider the different ways in which Indians chose to integrate these wild horses into their cultural worlds.
My chief goal in the rest of this lecture will be to caution you against the danger of regarding horses as "European" organisms or as connected to technologies that inherently supported "European" empire. Again: always remember that each different organism has its own set of paths through history, its own set of narratives. The history of horses in the western hemisphere is very complicated indeed, and it is very far from being a simple story of "European" horses assisting in European colonists in the conquest of native peoples in the Americas.
For instance: notice the emergence of Great Plains cultures: many tribes acquired horses from Spanish and indigenous settlements to their south. As they became ever more skillful in the use of horses, some gradually moved farther onto Plains to become extraordinarily successful hunters of bison on horseback.
Here again we encounter the abstract question we've already encountered more than once in previous lectures: nature offers people a range of opportunities for how to subsist and make livings for themselves, but different people make very different choices in the face of those opportunities: why?
What are the reasons for the choices people make? What can we learn about people's ideas and values, their relationships with each other and with the natural world, by these choices? You can learn an enormous amount about history by never losing track of this question.
Diversity of Indian choices concerning horses was quite remarkable (note the work of Richard White here, especially his 1978 article on "The Winning of the West" and his 1983 book The Roots of Dependency).
The traditional story that has often been told about Great Plains bison hunting tribes is that horticulturalists of the eastern Plains abandoned raising crops in order to become hunters of bison on horseback. This apparently was not true: no horticulturalists entirely gave up the corn/squash/beans polyculture that typified most horticulture in eastern North America.
The Comanches of Texas lived in grasslands on the southern Plains, in lands whose mild winters meant that horses could reproduce relatively easily there. They became horse herders first, bison hunters second, ate horses and traded them north, becoming a formidable political and military force that effectively challenged European and American power for many decades. Pekka Hämäläinen's classic 2009 book The Comanche Empire suggests the extraordinary extent of their influence and political power as a result.
Tribes on the northern Plains faced harsher winters, and the shorter grasses were more easily covered with snow during the cold months of the year. This meant that fodder and other food for horses often ran short, forcing anyone trying to keep their horses alive to cut young cottonwood growth in the river valleys, thereby encouraging the depletion of these trees, eventually leading to a growing potential threat of winter starvation not just for horses but for people.
Winter horse deaths meant a perennial need to replace those animals, giving rise to the cycles of raiding and trading that were typical of many Plains tribes: the theft of horses from neighbors became a major activity for males, even a right of passage for boys. (Raiding your neighbors for horses also had the advantage that any horses you captured were likely already to be trained, making them easier to ride than wild horses.)
Starvation suggests the precariousness of this horse/bison economy: tribes like the Lakotas and Dakotas (Sioux) who adopted it were hunter-gatherers, not horticulturalists, who embraced horses because for them hunting and gathering were even less reliable forms of subsistence.
Horticultural Indians living long the the Missouri River on the eastern Plains, on the other hand, (Mandans, Hidatsas, and many others--you'll remember that we've already encountered the Mandans during the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1837) could grow and store crops that constituted a much more reliable food base, trading with the Sioux for other goods. For these horticultural peoples, hunting was comparatively less important.
As result, there were dense sedentary villages along the Missouri River, but their greater population densities and relative lack of mobility also made them more susceptible to epidemics than the more mobile, scattered populations of the bison-hunting Sioux.
By the time of the late 18th-century epidemics, the Mandans and others were declining in power while the bison-hunting Sioux were increasing, with more raiding by the latter of the former, with a gradual movement of the Sioux west toward bison herds and south toward areas where horses were being raised and traded, with gradually rising population pressures on other tribes.
Here it's worth contrasting this embrace of horses and bison hunting with the very different choices made by the Pawnees and other horticulturalists, who still chose not to abandon crops despite the obvious attractions of large-scale bison hunting. instead, the Pawnees integrated horseback bison hunting into their older horticultural cycles. keeping horses and crops separated, and providing winter fodder by burning grasslands near villages to promote pasture growth, with ritual integration of cropping and hunting in an annual seasonal cycle.
The point I want to leave you with is simply this: if the horse is in fact a co-invader with human beings (and I think it is), it nonetheless "invades" in very different ways depending on the human cultures that choose to live with that animal:
Think about all these different choices, all these different ways of looking at a horse and deciding what to do with it. One horse could be many things to different people.
If that's so, then whose empire are we describing when we speak with Alfred Crosby about "ecological imperialism"?