472 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1964 



The mention of the pastoralism of wild lands by wild animals 

 brings me back to a form of nomadism in the New World which has 

 several points of interesting comparison with the early development 

 of specialized nomadism in the Old World through use of the horse. 

 We may take it for granted that the late flowering of civilization in 

 the Americas was the result of having fewer and less convenient 

 domesticable plants, especially cereals, and certainly fewer and less 

 convenient domesticable animals. At the more primitive level, the 

 North American Indians were forest and forest-edge and river-valley 

 people. Their beast of burden was the dog, sometimes dragging a 

 travois — a sorry means indeed. They too were near a great central 

 steppe of prairie where the wild bison conducted its own seasonal 

 movements which took it away from the haunts of men. Hunting of 

 this animal meant enticement to newly burned grazing, and stalking 

 which even included wearing a bison mask — a most unenviable 

 method. Nevertheless, it would seem that from about the 16th century 

 man was increasing the range of the bison by burning at the forest 

 edge. 



The advent of the horse by way of Mexico and the Rio Grande far 

 into the Southwest was a major liberation for the American Indian. 

 Horses were stolen or went feral and the terrain was that dry steppe 

 phenologically perfect for this animal. Here man did not need to 

 wait for the mutation which produced the "horses of heaven," for it 

 was the less carefully bred examples of this type which so rapidly 

 colonized the American steppe. The Spaniards lost their advantage 

 when the horse went feral and spread northward and came into the 

 hands of the Indians, who immediately rode. 



There now occurred that specialization toward nomadism. The 

 Indian could leave the forest edge and follow the bison. Thus, from 

 the beginning of the 17th century until the middle of the 19th there 

 was a strong man-induced extension of the bison's range and there 

 was a rapid specialization by certain tribes to become horse nomads, 

 in effect pastoralizing the wild bison instead of domesticated stock. 

 Agriculture was minimal, carried on by the women, for the water 

 situation was generally easier than in the Old World steppe. 



This situation could have gone on indefinitely as a biological con- 

 tinuum, for the wild animal prevented overgrazing by its migratory 

 habits, and the enlargement of bison-inhabited country by Indian 

 fire seems merely to have been an enlargement of soil conserving 

 prairie grassland rather than extension of less biologically productive 

 savannah such as we see today in South America and Africa. It was 

 the white man overrunning the West with domesticated stock, pack- 

 ing it and going away with the proceeds that devastated millions of 

 acres at a much faster rate than the Old World nomads reduced the 

 productive potential of the Asian steppe with close-herded domesti- 



