THE SPECTACULAR RISE IN THE POPULATION spectacular decline in the population of Native Americans. and disease and exploitation do not entirely explain that decline. The Indians were losing out in the biological corn- petition with the newly imported livestock. The peoples of the high civilizations lived chiefly on a vegetable diet, so anything radically affecting their croplands, radically af- fected them. The Spanish, anxious to establish their pastoral Iberian way of life in their colonies, set aside large sections of land for grazing, much of it land that had once been cultivated. And the livestock, in this new continent where fences and shepherds were so few, often strayed onto Indian fields, eating the plants atnd trampling them. As New Spain's first viceroy wrote to his king aboutthe state ofaffairs around Oaxaca: "May your Lordship realize that if cattle are al- lowed, the Indians will be destroyed." Many people went malnourished, weakening their resistance to disease; many fled to the hills and deserts to face hunger in solitude: some simply lay down and died within the sound of the ]owing of their rivals.* On the other hand. the impact of livestock on native peoples beyond the boundaries of European settlement often had a positive affect. These Indians were not as numerous as those ofMesoamerica and Peru, andtherewasplentyofroom fortheimmigrants. Many of them were already nomadic, and the new arrivals multiplied the rewards of such a life. They received the horses, cattle, sheep, and goats not as rivals but *The European animals doubtlessly transmitted to the native stock Sdevastating selection of animal diseases. The lama and alpaca populations diminished as spectacularly as the Indian population after the Conquest, and the reasons were largely the same: disease and brutal exploitation. as immensely valuable additions to their sources of food. clothing, and energy. T HE EUROPEANS WERE FULLY CONSCIOUS OF the advantage the horse gave them over their American subjects, and so tried to prohibit Indian ownership or use of horses. But the prohibition always failed: Native Americans were needed as cowboys; native allies were ineffective in war unless mounted; and, above all, horses reproduced so fast and strayed beyond European control in such numbers that soon acquiring mounts became as easy Ifor many Indians as for Spaniards. Both horses and diseases moved through the virgin lands of America faster than did the people who had brought them to the New World. The story is similar for all the peoples of the great grasslands, from Alberta to Patagonia. Before the horse came, the steppe land had few human inhabitants. The tough sod discouraged farming, and the plains animals were tooe fleet of foot to provide a dependable supply of food for large numbers of pedestrians. The horse gave people the speed and stamina needed to harvest the immense quantities of food represented by the buffalo herds of North America and the herds of wild cattle that propagated so rapidly in the grass- lands of both Americas. Indians stopped farming. finding nomadic life more comfortable and richerthan they had ever known before. Beyondevery line of Spanish settlements in grass Country were peoples who came to depend increasingly on the meat and hides of cattle. In New Spain, the cattle immensely enriched thed the Yaquis, Tarahumaras, Pueblos, and others, and-beyond the most northern frontier-the Athabascan people of which the Navaho and Apache are the best known. In the vast grasslands south and southeast of Peru, the Spanish steer seemed to be agift from the gods. Just after the opening of the seventeenth century, Vazquez de Espinosa wrote that the plains of the Santa Cruz de la Sierra region were "full of cattle which today have run wild and cover the fieldsforadistanceofover The potato traveled from the eighty leagues....These In- New World to the Old, but dians profit by the cattle, European conquest killed keepingthemclosetothemn off more American species and the poor Spaniards than a million years of who lost them, far away. evolution By 17 or 00 1750, the Charria of the Banda Ori- ental (Uruguay). the Pehuenches, Puelches, Aucas, Tchuelches. and Ranqueles of Rio de la Plata were all in the saddle and ranging the pampas, encouraged and pushed from behind by those Araucanians who had cast aside muchoftheirAndean culture to come down onto fl fl tl J t I ii it, herds. All these peoples of the Argentine pampas lived off cattle and made tools, clothing, and shelters of their hide, bones, and sinew. in the area of similar topography and climate in North America the impact of the horse came later but was similar. By the late eighteenth cent ry the Great Plains were full of native people on horseback: the Blackfoot, Arapaho, Chey- enne, Crow, Sioux, Comanche. The Indians of the Great Plains and the pampas, tempted into similar extreme special- ization by the horse, even grew to look alike. In the long view of history, the greatest effect of the horse on native peoples was to enhance their ability to resist the advance of Europeans into the interiors of North and South America. Not only did mounted Indians defend themselves effectively, but they were sometimes tempted and often forced by the needs of theirrapidly changing cultures to raid the rich herds of the whites.
