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(^88) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
Throughout this whole range, the people who dwell nearby descend and live
upon them and distribute an incredible number of hides into the interior.
Cabeza de Vaca’s statement that the “cattle” came from “as far away as the
seacoast of Florida” was not an exaggeration. Bison lived in many parts of North
America, from Canada’s Northwest Territories to the Allegheny Mountains of
Pennsylvania. Most bison, however, roamed across the central plains and prairies.
When Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s awestruck expedition saw herds of
bison blanketing the Great Plains in 1541, North American Indians had already
been hunting and trading these animals’ products for thousands of years. The
Spaniards at first simply referred to them as cows, cattle, or “humpbacked
oxen,” but would later come to call them by the distinctive name of cíbolo.Sol-
dier Pedro de Casteñeda remembered howCoronado’s European horses were
terrified by their first encounter with bison:
Now that I wish to describe the appearance of the bulls, it is to be noticed first that
there was not one of the horses that did not take flight when he saw them first, for
they have a narrow, short face, the brow two palms across from eye to eye, the
eyes sticking out at the side, so that, when they are running, they can see who is
following them. They have very long beards, like goats, and when they are run-
ning they throwtheir heads back with the beard dragging on the ground.... They
have agreat hump, larger than a camel’s. The horns are short and thick, so that
they are not seen much above the hair.... They have a short tail, with a bunch of
haft at the end. When they run, they carry it erect like a scorpion.
Casteñeda’s account also reflects his wonder at the immense size of the bison
herds and the almost incomprehensible vastness of the Great Plains:
[T]he bulls traveled without cows in such large numbers that nobody could have
counted them, and so far away from the cows that it was more than 40 leagues
[about 100 miles] from where we began to see the bulls to the place where we began
to see the cows. The country they traveled over was so level and smooth that if one
looked at them the sky could be seen between their legs, so that if some of them
were at a distance they looked like smooth-trunked pines whose tops joined.
The plains tribes that Coronado’s expedition met hunted bison on foot with
spears and arrows. Some North American tribes organized buffalo drives, in
which the animals were stampeded over cliffs or driven toward confined areas
where they could more easily be killed. These stratagems and the Indian cul-
tures that employed them were transformed in the 1600s and 1700s, when Indi-
ans mastered the use of an animal imported from Spain—the horse.
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