My horse,
Take dauntless courage.
My horse,
The tribes depend on you.
Hence, my horse,
Run.
--Sitting Bull to his favorite horse, Bloated Jaw
The first thing I remember about Elliott West is his asking a small gathering of students to imagine the past in "worm time." He'd just told us that Charles Darwin had discovered the reason that tombstones in England tended to sink into the ground over time: constant churning of the soil by worms. The process of churning and sinking is so gradual that it's invisible to humans; the process is invisible, but the result eventually is evident.
We were in a seminar room near the north tower of Old Main, sitting on and surrounded by the great eroded Ozark plateau, whose first mineral and animal sediments sank some 540 million years ago to the bottom of a great dark sea. That much time is almost impossible to comprehend, but thinking about the centuries that worms require to sink a tombstone a few centimeters helps the mind reach out to wrap around the immensity of geological time.
West has stayed true to form. In "Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion," he brings his poetic imagination to processes of change--geological, biological, and cultural--and weaves in stories drawn from reams of government documents and some 1,300 books and articles to offer a book worth reading whether your idea of the American West comes from Wallace Stegner or John Wayne. West has worked with the diligence of an earthworm to offer us a book as thrilling and complicated as a Comanche raid.
Consider a main character in the story of the American West: Equus ferus caballus, the modern horse, which originated over 50 million years ago in the southern Great Plains and almost a million years ago crossed the Bering land bridge into Asia, just as bison were heading into North America.
Horses spread all over Asia and into Europe and Africa, but went extinct in North America. Thus their re-introduction to the Great Plains, begun in 1541 by the expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, meant, in West's words, that after "a million-year circumnavigation of the globe, the horse had come home."
Grass takes energy from the sun and offers it to grazing animals. Humans can eat some grass seeds (wheat, corn, rice) but can't extract enough calories from grass itself to live, so we hunt or raise animals (deer, bison, cattle) that can. In especially bad times, we've eaten horses, but doing so is wasteful.
Harnessed, horses offer us the power to raise larger quantities of crops far more caloric than wild grasses; mounted and ridden with skill, they offer us the power to hunt or round up far more deer, more bison, more cattle than we can alone; mounted and ridden, they offer us the power to expand our trade networks as well as our range of conquest and plunder.
In 1680, the Pueblo revolt "drove the Spanish out of New Mexico and let loose their horses, through trade and raid, into the American interior." (In Arkansas, through contact with French explorers, horses would have been familiar to the Quapaw no later than 1687.)
During the century after the Pueblo revolt, any Indian group that had adopted the horse would have an interest in the grass-rich Great Plains; the tribes that had become horse cultures competed to dominate them. ("Horse culture" means a society "that has adapted its essential means of living to the many advantages horses offer," as opposed to societies in which people sometimes ride horses.)
The tribes most famous for their horse cultures (Comanches, Lakotas, Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Blackfeet, Crows) were, West points out, relative latecomers to the Great Plains, which attracted them after their adoption of the horse. As with the emergence of earlier horse cultures, the expansion of trade meant riches: "Horseback tribes filled their larger lodges with New England carpets, African coffee, sugar from Haiti, and English knives from Sheffield."
The rise of Great Plains horse cultures also meant more violence: "Two great coalitions--Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakotas north of the Arkansas River and Comanches and Kiowas south of it--clashed bitterly until making peace in 1840, then both preyed on sedentary peoples on the fringes."
The massive expansion of the United States' territory between 1845 and 1854 (thanks to the the annexation of Texas, the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the Gadsen Purchase) brought the great horse cultures of the West into violent conflict with the U.S. Army as well as English- and German-speaking settlers.
While the conflicts are the most familiar part of the history of the interior West, the greatest outrage (among many) is the cultural effort by the U.S. government to unhorse the American Indian--to get native people out of the saddle and behind the plow, to turn roaming hunters into sedentary farmers. (The American bison was nearly extinct by the 1890s, so hunting culture was doomed anyway, but a transition to ranching, which some Indians made, might have been more suitable to many than farming.)
"Continental Reckoning," as its title suggests, is too immense for a comprehensive review. I've not touched on California, on West's take on the West as a vast laboratory for geology, paleontology, archeology, and epidemiology as those fields emerged, or on his take on the West as a driver of modern co-operation between the U.S. government and corporate capital. If you've ever wondered about what lies beyond Fort Smith, it's worth a read.