CORONADO

Remember what a surprise it was when I told you that first time we met that when Columbus came along, there was no wheel or horse transportation in America. That was a surprise because you think of the old days and you think of those western movies with the Indians chasing covered wagons and everything, but the fact is there wouldn’t have been any stage coaches or cowboy and Indian fights like you’ve seen in the movies without the wheel and the horse. And why would the Indians have invented the wheel when all they had to pull anything was dogs. Here’s what I found about this:

Herman J. Viola, Carolyn Margolis, eds., Seeds of Change:a quincentennial commemoration, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p.107:

"Horses were first brought to Mexico for purposes of breeding by Antonio de Mendoza in 1535, and due to this importation and to the northward expansion of the colony into the grasslands of Sonora, by 1550 mounts were plentiful. Fifty years later, countless herds of mustangs were running 250 miles to the northwest, in Durango.

"The colonization of New Mexico brought more horses north, beginning with the expedition of Agustín Rodríguez in 1581, followed by the larger one of Juan de Oñate in 1598. During the next three centuries, Santa Fe became the point from which most horses were disseminated by Spanish settlement, by trade, by Indians escaping from slavery, and by capture by unconquered tribes. By 1690, herds of feral horses already roamed the Liano Estacado of New Mexico and Texas. They had reached the central Great Plains by 1720, the Great Basin and the upper reaches of the Missouri by 1730, and the northern Great Plains in the United States and Canada by 1750.

"Starting about 1685, extensive Spanish settlements began to be established in California, Arizona, and eastern Texas. Ranching there began with the Catholic missions, and during practically the entire Spanish colonial occupation, the largest herds were of mission cattle. The Texas longhorns were first developed on these missions as selected strains of the old Spanish-Mexican stock. [As with the horse,] ... many cattle became feral, beginning in south-central Mexico in the sixteenth century and spreading over the next hundred years to Texas and New Mexico."

Talk about population, huh?

The era of cattle driving on the Great Plains began shortly after the Civil War, but the range remained open for only another forty years. Prior to 1884, no purebred cattle, barbed wire fences, or windmills existed in northern Mexico. While Mormon colonists in Mexico probably were the first to use windmills and barbed wire, their widespread acceptance was promoted in the region by large landowners ...

So that’s what it took to get us to cowboys and Indians, the stagecoach, and Dodge City.

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