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How did the Southern Ute and Eastern Shoshone help spread horses to the northern Plains?

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Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin Kaylei Weed (left) of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe with her two sons and mother, Elaine Ethel Weed, at the Wind River Indian Reservation in 2015.

The Southern Ute and Eastern Shoshone were among the first Indigenous groups north of the Spanish settlements in New Mexico to acquire horses, likely by the mid-1600s.1

Following this acquisition, these bands functioned as essential middlemen in the transmission of both horses and the associated horse culture from the Southwest to the northern Plains. By acting as intermediaries, they facilitated the spread of equestrian practices that fundamentally transformed the lives of many Indigenous peoples in North America, enabling more efficient bison hunting and influencing intertribal trade and warfare. By 1800, these groups, along with other Shoshone and Ute bands, maintained large horse herds and had increasingly oriented their societies toward the practices characteristic of the Plains Indians.12