[Granville-Hough] 9 Jun 2009 - Chickasaw Horses

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:42:37 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Chickasaw Horses - 9 June 2009

"Robert H. Thonhoff" wrote:

> Dear Granville: I just received notice and read your article re the
> 225th Anniversary in Somos Primos. Congratulation on this fine
> article, and THANKS for all you continue to produce! I have done much
> thinking about your "Guns for Horses" hypothesis and related it to a
> book review that I am submitting today to the East Texas Historical
> Association Journal.  It is a book that you might like to look at, for
> it reveals that Indian trade routes between Casas Grandes in northern
> New Spain and Cahokia, over which there were many exchanges, including
> guns and horses, existed as early as or earlier than 1682.  Written by
> William C. Foster, the book is titled The La Salle Expediton on the
> Mississippi River: A Lost Manuscript of Nicolas de La Salle (Texas
> State Historical Association, Austin, Texas, 2003). All goes well for
> me, and I hope the same goes for you. With kindest regards and much
> esteem, Robert Thonhoff

     Study of the introduction of horses into America is an interesting
pursuit, as that introduction changed so many lives and customs.  There
were parallel introductions to the Indians in the Southwest, to the
Indians in the Southeast, and by various colonial French and English
settlers.
	When the Spanish De Soto was exploring in North Central Mississippi, he
fought a desperate battle with the Chickasaw Indians and barely won,with
his mounted soldiers holding the advantage.  The Chickasaws were
impressed and gathered up all the stray and wounded horses and started
their own herd.  There is an area of prairie land from Starkville to
Columbus in North Mississippi which was still treeless even when I was a
college student at
Starkville (Mississippi State).  The Chickasaws made it their tribal
pasture and developed the Chickasaw horse, which was widely known before
the Revolutionary War.  The Chickasaws even had an area of land in
Western South Carolina where they moved their horses when marketing them
to the Creeks, frontier whites, and other SC tribes.  They became the
horse traders of the Southeast and their horses became known from
Florida to Pennsylvania.

     I'm working on the American sailors, mariners, and their supporters
for the Rev. War.  I will probably have a compiled list of some 50,000
to 100,000 names if I am able to finish it.  No one has ever done an
alphabetical list of all known mariners, and I now understand why.
There is a national project which started in 1960, and it does one
volume for each president.  So far, there are 11 volumes, and they are
only up to mid 1777, the first two years, with six years to go.  It will
take past year 2100 at the current rate.  I doubt it will ever be
completed.