In September 1874, the great Comanche equestrian empire fell into an ugly and sad ending in the long strip of Texas.
The incident heralds profound changes in the Great Plains, as the Comanche is one of the first tribes to adopt the horse and one of the most successful.
They have become skilled, expert, fierce, and even noble riding fighters, intimidating their Indian neighbors, launching angry attacks to stop the trend of white settlement and buffalo slaughter, and eventually troubled the United States. S. Army.
Then, in September 28, 1874, the biggest remaining Comanche fighters (
As well as some allies of Kiowa and Cheyenne)
In the tent, they and their families were found in a place called Palo Alto Canyon, in a camp without defense.
The attack was carried out by the Fourth Cavalry under the colonel.
Leonard Slade McKenzie serves in Fort Concho, West Texas.
After taking Comanche and others by surprise and driving them out of the camp, McKenzie's men burned the tent, destroyed the stored food and blankets, and with thousands on the edge of the canyon
The Indians fled on foot.
Mackenzie led his troops back to the camp 20 miles away, and the next morning he ordered all the horses to shoot except for hundreds of spare horses.
According to S according, the infantry tied up the crazy horses and led them into the shooting range. C.
The book "Comanche, summer moon Empire" by Gwen.
The record shows that the result is a pile of dead hands, 048.
They rot there, and their bones have been bleached for years, a bizarre monument that marks the end of the horse tribe rule on the plain.
Some of the remnants of the Comanche, led by their great war leader, Quanna Parker, walked 200 miles east to reach the then-Indian territory of sirburg and surrendered.
Nearly a century and a half later, Towana Spivey, a historian of the Comanche family, sat in the front yard of his home in Duncan, oclach state and told me about these events.
He said the backbone of the resistance movement was shattered with the slaughter of horses.
All their buffalo robes, all their food, their means of survival, their means of transport, war, and nomadic movements disappeared.
Quanah himself was detained.
It was a dramatic blow to Comanche.
Spivi explained that this is the famous tragic story of Palo Alto, but the reality is even worse.
We heard about the huge killing.
Spivi said it had an impact on the Palo Alto Canyon.
What we did not hear, he added, was that by June 1875 the army had gathered another 6,000 to 7,000 Comanche horses in Hillburg.
Colonel McKenzie is now the commander there, following the direction of the general.
Philip Sheridan, based on the logic that these animals are too expensive to feed or release, ordered them to be killed as well.
His men took the horse to a place called mackinzi Mountain and began shooting with a single man.
Springfield rifle, sharp rifle and seven-
Shooting the Spencer Repeater
Spivey said the post-horse shooting became a major problem.
It's wasteful, clumsy, ridiculous.
Finally, an auction was held to save manpower and ammunition.
The Comanche pony went to the white bidders.
The shooting started again when that didn't completely clear the villals.
The two killings on 1874 and 1875 shattered the komanche resistance movement, but did not end the story of the horse between the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
They are just the end of the beginning.
Other tribes started.
From the plains of the South, this new animal, this new technology, this new way of hunting, fighting and traveling, has spread north, from Comanche, Jumano, Apache, Navajo to Boni, Cheyenne, Lakota, Crows and more.
Not every tribe fully accepts it.
Mandan exchanged horses through their farming village in Upper Missouri, but never personally experienced equestrian life.
Is that one of the reasons why Mandan was actually wiped out by smallpox? Smallpox is a more devastating disease for settlement communities than for nomadic peoples.
Some historians think so.
The horse opened up a new possibility.
They allow people to hunt buffalo more effectively than ever before, with a longer range and devastating attacks on other tribes.
They removed some of the heavy work of women, such as dragging property from the camp to the camp.
They have broken the balance between hunting tribes and farming tribes in terms of population growth and territorial expansion, supporting the former.
They also replaced the only animal in North America that had been domesticated before-the dog, which was smaller and weaker and had to eat meat.
A horse can live on land and eat what people and dogs don't want: grass.
When dry or winter snow keeps the grass from growing, it can even survive on the bark of cotton.
These new animals are so cherished that they begin to play a more abstract cultural role: as accumulated wealth.
If a man is smart, ambitious, and lucky, he can gather a large group of people;
His spare horse can then be sold, traded or given away (
In exchange for higher prestige)
Or he will be stolen if he relaxes his guard.
The accumulation of wealth brought about social stratification, and for the first time, rich Indians and poor Indians appeared on the plain.
On top of that, there's another novelty: buying guns from white businessmen, usually for the exchange of beaver fur, buffalo robes, or horses.
These are huge changes that bring a brilliant climax and disgraceful side effects, including overharvesting Buffalo before the arrival of market hunters.
Equestrian also led to the new seriousness of the inter-tribal war, as well as the resistance of the white settlers and the army, which eventually led to the tragic ending of places such as the Palo Alto Canyon, Mount bear's paw in Montana (
Chief Joseph nice Perez was attacked when he tried to flee to Canada)
Knee injury in South Dakota
The negative aspects of the horse revolution have become history, but the horse is still very important to many Native Americans, especially the Plains tribe, as the object of pride, as a symbol of tradition, for the values of ancient times, they help lead to a difficult gift: Pomp, discipline, strength, focus on other creatures, and the transmission of skills between generations.
Round Pendleton-Up is a big-league, all-
Comers rodeo is held every September in Pendleton, Oregon, not far from the umatila Indian Reserve.
It includes a war dance competition and several Indian relay races, as well as a night show called Happy Canyon.
It begins with a grand parade through the town to show Indian riders in full regalia, and ride-
Under the leadership of the local chiefs, the young girls of the Indian court took to the stage.
In the trailer behind the villals, a 50-
A British woman named Tony Mingtong, the official guardian of the court, who, while describing her sense of mission to me, stitched up on the soft deer skin cover of the ceremonial saddle
"My goal is to get the princess back on the horse," she said . ".
Toney's mother was a happy Canyon Princess in 1955, and Toney herself in 1978.
Prior to that, she had grown into an equestrian tomboy, skiing on a sledge behind the horse at home, competing with the iron spear, and riding with her brother and three sisters.
Where did her riding come from?
I had it when I was born.
Tony continues to multitasking while speaking, sewing the saddle, giving style and makeup advice to this or that girl, and posting further instructions via Bluetooth.
In her childhood, her home was in a small place called Spring Hollow, which included modern comforts or children's toys, despite a lot of venison and elk.
Little Tony has no dolls.
When her classmates at school heard the news, they sympathized with her.
Don't you have a doll?
I think I am the poorest child on Earth.
What are you doing? they asked. We ride.
Do you have horses at home?
Yeah, she told them, 47 heads.
You have 47 horses?
You must be rich!
I don't feel very poor anymore.
Another important secret meeting is the Crow meeting held in the middle.
Crow Agency in Montana in August attracted competitors from Songling, South Dakota, Fort Hall, Idaho and elsewhere.
On the hot afternoon I arrived, the organizers were bustling, the crowd was large and happy.
A baritone announcer welcomed us to the Ravens country this year.
Rodeo ro, India and its camp are proud to be called the tent capital of the world.
The program will include five track and field races, sprint races, bull riding, saddle brown, team building, women's separation (
Women's leg rope)
There is also a very crazy business, the Indian relay race, which was touted as the most exciting five minutes in India.
On a certain day, the five minutes may only be three minutes, not counting the time spent capturing the fleeing horse and collecting the fallen contestants from the dirt.
The Indian relay race is a team race, each of which consists of a rider, three horses and three brave comrades, controlling the other two horses when the rider jumps from one horse to the other, make a track right away at each horse.
There is no saddle for all horses.
Since at least five teams in each heat are performing these light back transfers, preventing horses from running at full speed and starting other races, all within the crowded track range, the Indian Relay May
But it is sublime when it is not messy.
The Adroit Relay rider can pull a horse, slide it down, run a few steps, swing to the next horse, grab the reins and run away.
No matter who owns the fastest horse, a team that makes two such transfers smoothly may win the relay in ten lengths.
But it's an ideal game.
In the first hot game I saw at the Crow's fair, two riders stumbled over the back stretch, one passenger still fell, and the announcer called the ambulance out.
It was a tough thing, he said, and his gentle voice sounded unapologetic.
Only the toughest Indians are involved.
Choirboys would have done it if it was easy.
Then I talked to Thornton.
They call him "thank you Tee)
Thick hair, thick but gentle
A young and promising young man who worked as a racing commissioner at the Crow's fair that year.
He wore a blue T-shirt.
Won shirts, straw hat cowboy hats and India relay world champion belt buckles in Sheridan, Wyoming.
Tee is too big to be a rider, he is the current world champion catcher, he gently boasted, knocked down by the arriving horse aw, and he knows how many times.
Now he is full of energy.
And, I doubt, rest assured)
How well the day was going and he assured me that both fallen riders were fine.
The horse race ran really well in the blood of Tee Big hair and I learned from a few days of conversation with him and his family.
His uncle Henry riding a horse.
For example, horse racing is trained across the state.
His uncle Byron bad bear raised Sorrell paint.
Dennis's father, big hair, 71. year-
Old patriarch with short hair
Under his white resistance, his considerable belly reveals his early history as a thin young driver.
I sat with him in the biscuit area near the stable. and-
The gravy his wife runs.
At 14, Dennis told me that he won the oldest crow India Derby in the traditional Crow race.
He won the governor's hurdle at the same time and yes, he also took part in the Indian relay race.
Dennis recalled that at that time, he weighed about 99 pounds, and now he weighs about 250. His trick is to ride very close to the next horse and jump, take two big steps from the back to the next and get off the bus.
Like in a movie. It was fast.
No one has done so now, he said with a hint of arrogance.
And raids (
Stealing horses from other tribes)
Two fine old traditions have disappeared.
The frustrating part of the Ravens market background is that it is held just two miles from the little bighhorn battlefield, where the commemoration of the Indian fighters in that battle makes the last stop of the mountain
At the Indian memorial, there are paintings, lists of fallen people and inscriptions, including nostalgic quotes from "sitting on the cow": Lakota owns the world when I was a boy.
The sun rises and falls in their land.
They sent 10,000 soldiers to fight.
Before the project starts, or during the interval, you can sneak up and see where Colonel brash Custer was killed.
Once the events in the arena begin, the dark memories of little bighorne seem to have been forgotten.
But there are still some melancholy moments.
On the afternoon of the second day of my chat with Tee Big Hair, a descendant of a pure stallion named ollie Kumar broke his leg in shin, which was a pure effort, the distance to win the last stand was uploaded with a collective groaning of frustration.
Before 5,000 people, the horse must be shot and towed away by a tractor.
The next morning, he seemed shocked when I talked to Tee again.
This hurt my heart, he said.
His father advised him to look at it in a philosophical way as a Crow: when such a death occurs, the unfortunate horse will replace some.
Someone in the family needs help, and the death of the horse brings that person closer to finding what is needed.
But Tee told me it was hard to accept because of his feelings for these animals and what they did.
He clenched his fist on his chest.
This is true love, this is it.
You take care of your horse.
The Indian relay race is the only event that echoes the Rough Eventsand-
Native American skills in the past.
In the ormac stampede in Washington, near the Corville Indian Reserve, the nightly finals are famous (
Notorious in some circles)Suicide Race.
In 1935, a white public relations official dreamed that the suicide race originated from the ancient endurance race.
This equestrian melee is open to anyone crazy enough to ride down 62 on a steep plunge
For a horse, this could be a cliff into the Okanagan River.
Some riders pray in the sweat hut before the suicide race, or decorate their horses with eagle feathers.
Others just wear helmets and life jackets, hopefully the best.
More than a dozen horses hit the water almost at the same time, swam deep, climbed up the river bank in the distance, and sped towards the finish line under the lights, at least at this point, their passengers were the most skilled, and the Lukester Hotel was soaked but still on board.
Over the past few decades, more than 20 horses have died, which the human society regrets.
As I can see at the Crow's fair, the horse also died in traditional competitions.
The night I watched the suicide game, a horse and a rider were injured, but no one died.
Dan DeWeert, the official race vet, has his own opinion: it's a great game when I don't need to do anything.
The next afternoon, I spoke to an amiable gray man.
A hair woman named Matilda is on her beads --and-
Weaving booth in Indian camp.
With the drumming of drum in our ears, she told me something about her family.
They are Martians, at least dating back to her grandfather, keeper and distributor, Chief Louis timantva, who holds the head of 300.
Many of these horses are wild horses gathered from the surrounding mountains.
Tilly recalled that when her father was a young man, her grandfather, Louis, would send him out with such instructions: Don't ride home on the same horse.
She said he never did it.
Her father would hold a wild horse, blindfolded it, hobbled it, and put on a saddle.
He then released the toddler, jumped on the boat, took off the blindfold, grabbed the counter tightly, and finally rode the Mustang home.
His own horse will follow.
But horse skills are not limited to men in the family.
Tilly's daughter, Kathy, took part in the suicide contest that year when she was 18 and no longer needed the consent of her parents.
Tillie explained that she did not ride well: got hit from the back, the horse fell, Kathy broke her leg and the horse had to be put down.
Tillie won't let her play any more.
Another Guardian of cultural memory is Mary marchanne, a powerful post-80s female parent with 211 offspring, and an elder of the Colville United tribe.
Mary and one of her sons, a gentle man named Randy Lewis, visiting from Seattle in braids and turquoise, when we talked about the past, I sat in a folding chair and relaxed, overlooking the chute of the suicide contest.
After that, Mary died, and many mourned her, but on that day, she was sharp and lively in a blue splendid shirt, a bead necklace and carved elk horns, there is a sun visor in the lavender reading area of Harvard University.
According to her recollection, the old endurance race could run five miles in the mountains, and riders would jump horses over boulders and logs, downhill, and sometimes swimming.
The horses came down from the wild horses, Randy said, and were born and used to running on the rocks.
Mary explained that there was no bonus for such a competition.
The winner is first picked from a bucket of salmon.
I asked, how far are these races going? âx80x9cOh, boy. . .
She said, temporarily drifting in time and memory.
So Randy said: since the horse.
Customs may be tribal, but there is an extra passion for these animals that seem to flow through certain families like the lifeblood.
Tee Big hair's extended clan is an example.
The other was a young black-footed woman named Johnna Laplant who caught my attention.
She is a racing driver from Browning, Montana, tall and elegant enough to become a basketball star.
The first time I saw her was in the Pendleton Round. Up.
Dressed in blue, she rode a dark brown stallion to the women's race, a bare Indian raceLeading events.
She rode very hard and won.
Then trouble came.
A fallen rider, a horse without a rider, a group of people chasing it, lariats spinning, all of which makes it hard for her and a few others
With the chase of outriders, the horses of johnna Kumar were confused and just kept playing.
At the same time, another young woman, small, purebred in the Bay immediately, let her horse turn back and start running around the track.
To make matters worse, she sits on the rails, not outside where the horse should fall.
We can all see what's going to happen next, and thousands of us are in the stands thinking, don't stop it until things happen.
The Bay dodged an oncoming horse and ran wild --
Enter the gelding of Johanna.
She is flying in the air.
Both the horse and the other woman fell.
Johanna stayed down.
The Gscrambled climbed up, but it was clumsy and its right front leg did not have weight and seemed to be broken.
They pulled John Nana down on a stretcher.
A few months later, I met Johanna in misurah, Montana, and she told me that Brown gayder survived.
After all, his leg was broken.
It was only a muscle injury that he recovered slowly.
As for her: Concussion and scalp injury, under the hair in the back, a horse stepped on her head, and a lot of blood.
But now she is very good and has been playing for the last summer.
She won the women's match again in Pendleton.
She has been the holder of a relay race for her cousin, a man named Narsis Reevis.
The 30-year-old Narsis, another skinny equestrian athlete, is a key part of the entire story of johnna Sharma.
He was there when she fell down at Pendleton, one of the first to contact her.
When he knew that she was not seriously injured, he had got rid of the situation and personally won the victory of the Indian relay race by bike.
He is an excellent Relay rider and his height allows him to use the same technique as old Dennis Gross: Jump to the new Hill at the back.
Johnna and Narsis grew up in the same family and he was more like a brother than a cousin who taught her to ride a bike.
Narsis is always nearby, she said.
If not for him, I know nothing about horses.
I visited Narsis up in Browning, a pre-order town east of Glacier National Park.
He told me about his grandfather, an old working cowboy named Lloyd Curley Revis, and when he was a child, he welcomed Nasse in the corral.
Corey has been a rodeo in his time, especially as an athlete.
This is all I grew up with, says Narnarsis, and is a good rope horse.
The speed is fast and they have good control over them.
His uncles Steve and Tim Revis have also been there, and they are excellent riders who help small children learn.
Steve later did a stunt show in the movie "dancing with wolves," and Tim worked for nine years in the Western Wild Show at Disney, Europe.
But his grandfather rolled his hair and combined all sorts of influences.
Juan ravis is a 79-year-
The day I saw him, he was strong, wearing a black cowboy hat, wearing a black jacket, deep wrinkles, long ears, and a sly wit flashing through his eyes.
He took off his hat and leaned down elbows elbow on a cluttered table, telling me a little bit about the history of the Reevis family.
The first thing to know is that the blood is half a French (
Maybe â x80 x9c riveaux â x80 waste)
There are half black feet in the South.
The second thing to know: Ma.
When he talked about his childhood, he said, we have horses everywhere.
The horse is in the corral, the horse is running;
Go up the hill, look around, you see the horse.
Curly's grandfather has a passel.
His father and uncles rode the buc horse to a simple local event and you showed up on Sunday trying to ride the Mustang.
He said it was our life when booking.
This is their life: family and horses.
It echoes what Tony Mingtong said in Pendleton about this poor little girl who had no dolls but 47 horses.
It gives the background of time and it's a great thing
My granddaughter, Johnna, told me.
Just like Narsis taught Johnna to ride, Uncle Tim and Uncle Steve also taught Narsis, someone taught Curly, or at least allowed him to teach himself, so Johanna is now teaching her young cousins.
Book Girl 6 and 8 years old, older boy, showing new confidence and blooming talent on horseback and getting a guide from a native hero-tall girl
A cousin who won twice in Pendleton.
It may not be an eternal chain of connections, but it is a precious one.
You embrace the skills and passion that came down from your ancestors;
You learn skills from your elders and make passion your own;
You become proficient, then expert, and then generous with your expertise;
You take care of your animals intelligently and lovingly;
You passed on this to a young relative.
You make your family proud and complete.
This is the ultimate relay race in India.