A Plains Indian spent almost all of his life on a horse.  As a child, when the camp was on the move, he shared his mother's saddle.  Later he rode to the hunt and into real battle.  Much later he might look forward to spending his remaining years as the rich and venerable owner of a large herd.

When explorers first came upon these mounted tribesmen, they were so impressed by their horsemanship that they called them the horse Indians.  These formidable riders had first seen horses in the late 17th Century after the Spaniards brought them from Europe into southwestern America.

The Western Native Americans got their first mounts by trading and stealing among the Spanish settlements of the Southwest.  By the middle of the 18th Century, tribes like the Comanches owned large herds of horses, and on them they ventured into the vastness of the Great Plains to hunt the buffalo.  Now many tribes abandoned their fixed abodes and became nomadic hunters, following the wanderings of the game herds, sleeping in movable lodges, and designing a whole new way of life based on mobility.

However, not all tribes looked on the horse as a gift from the great spirits.  The Pueblos, though they were among the first to learn the value of horses, continued their largely horseless life style.  Dwelling as they did in permanent communities with adequate supplies of food, they did not really need the horse and tended to use it primarily as a trade item.  To the Apaches, though, it meant much more.  They stole mounts from other Tribes and from the Spaniards, raided with them against more sedentary tribes, and battled with them against such stribes as the Comanche.  Yet their devotion to the new animal was never very deep.  In fact, most Apaches were as much inclined to eat a horse as to ride it. 

Other tribes - Blackfoot, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche - not only took to the horse as if to the saddle born, but seized the opportunity the horse afforded to acquire mastery of the Great Plains.  In fact, it would be accurate to say that the horse created the nomadic Plains Indians. 

With the horse, they could pursue game so efficiently as to ensure a surplus of meat and hides.  They could pack up and move entire villages.  They could trade conveniently with other tribes and white men hundreds of miles away.  They could plunder and raid rivals all over the plains.  In other ways, the horse also changed social structures within the tribes, making some people rich and powerful while others remained weak and poor.

So attached were the Native Americans to their war horses that they sang to their steeds and carved effigies to those killed in battle.  The following is a Sioux warrior's song to his horse:

My horse be swift in flight

Even like a bird

My horse be swift in flight

Bear me now in safety.

Far from the enemy's arrows,

And you shall be rewarded

With streamers and ribbons red.

The greatest breeders of horses among the Native Americans were the Nez Perces.  The explorer Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal in 1805 of the Nez Perce horses:  "They appear to be of excellent race, lofty, elegantly formed, active, and durable; many of them appear like fine English cousers; some of them are pied with large spots of white irregularly mixed with a dark brown bay."  The pied horses Lewis observed were first class Appaloosas.

The new mobility gained from the horse also increased trading over long distances.  Commerce bertween tribes had been carried on for ages, long before the coming of the white man or the horse.  Sea shells, salmon oil, and dried fish from the Northwest coast, for instance, passed through many hands and eventually found their way over the Rockies in exchange for such articles as eagle feathers and fine war bonnets made from them.  Below is a sample of trading values for a horse.

1 Ordinary riding horse

=8 buffalo hides

=1 gun and 100 loads of ammunition

=15 eagle feathers

=10 weasel skins

=5 tipi poles

1 Fine racing horse

=10 guns

1 Fine buffalo horse

=several pack animal

1 Buffalo robe

=3 metal knives

=25 loads of ammunition

3 dozen iron arrow points

5 Buffalo robes

=1 bear-claw necklace

30 Beaver pelts

=1 keg of rum