This section of the exhibition features an introductory panel from the curators, as well as some horse-related history from the area’s Native American tribes. Additionally, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from 1899 are marked to show businesses related to horses in downtown Iowa City from that time. To learn more about the locations of these businesses in Iowa City in 1899, take a look at this article: Downtown Iowa City’s Horsey History.
Accessibility note: Text describing the maps is available by request. Contact Sara J. Pinkham at the Main Library Gallery by email to receive this information: sara-pinkham@uiowa.edu.
THE PULL OF HORSES ON NATIONAL AND LOCAL HISTORIES AND IDENTITIES
From the nation’s colonial beginnings, horses pulled and carried people into and eventually across what became the continental United States.
In the process, horses pulled people both physically and socially, as humans’ economic and cultural circumstances changed through their relationships with equines. As primary sources of motive power until the early decades of the twentieth century, horses transformed people’s capabilities and senses of themselves in the world and, hence, their identities.
Working with a horse pulling a carriage or plow or riding on a horse’s back demands a full-bodied connection with another species that is unique. As highly sensitive herd and prey animals, horses can be trained through physical contact to accept humans as their leaders. Awesome in presence and motion, swifter and more versatile than oxen, horses proved to be the animal best suited to human industrial, military, and leisure pursuits until the advent of the internal combustion engine. The proportions and ergonomic fit of the two species together, along with horses’ trusting and tractable natures, made the human-equine relationship especially dynamic and impactful.
Once as ubiquitous as cars and trucks, horses dwelled next to homes and businesses and were an integral part of people’s daily experience. Imagine what it was like to depend not on machines for power and mobility but on these huge sentient creatures with biological needs and personalities of their own. Imagine the capacities we humans needed to develop in our own bodies and sensibilities in order to coexist with and manage these non-human animals who were so vital to our everyday lives.
Through a variety of materials and modes of presentation, this exhibit brings to today’s audiences a sampling of the texture and embodied experience of what human-equine co-existence was like c. 1900 at the height of horsepower.
At the center of the exhibit is the original full-length documentary film The Pull of Horses in Urban American Performance, 1860-1920, created in partnership with the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio at the University of Iowa Libraries. The film projects life-sized figures on a 9’x16’ screen set at ground level in an immersive soundscape where viewers can stand on the same footing with the animals and feel their mass and power in terms of scale, proximity, and motion. Combining historical images, early cinema reality footage, and clips of present-day reiterations of nineteenth-century practices, a sequence of several 8-10-minute chapters plays on a loop. The aim is to show how horses shaped human identities and bodies across gender, racial, and class categories in and beyond the emerging U.S. cultural capital, New York City.
Although the film focuses on New York City, many of the human-horse interactions it illuminates represent those enacted elsewhere. Thus, the surrounding display cases include original and reproduction publications, photographs, artifacts, and ephemera from Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries, the State Historical Society of Iowa, and from private collections that tie into and illuminate the horsey past of Iowa City and environs. The displays extend the aims of the film by enabling viewers to engage with archival materials and antique horse equipment to add dimension to our historical knowledge of transformative human-equine relationships.
HORSES AND THE LAND
This exhibit about the pull of horses on national and local histories and identities begins with recognition of human use of horses as vehicles of both location and dislocation. Bringing horses with them from the Old Country, European immigrants used equines to carve settlements out of the prairie, fight battles, and remove Native inhabitants. Accounts of when and how Native Americans acquired horses vary, but by the early eighteenth century, numerous tribes were adapting them to their own transportation, hunting, and fighting needs. Different kinds of horses and horsemanship became part of diverse Native American cultural identities. In conflicts between tribes and between settler colonialists and Native Americans (and, later, U.S. troops and Native Americans), horses were stolen or killed to disempower rivals. Wars of domination were waged over horses as well as land.
MESKWAKI PONIES
The Sac and Fox Nation of the Mississippi is the only federally recognized Indian tribe in Iowa. Their tribal name is Meskwaki (“Red Earth People”). Johnathan L. Buffalo, Historic Preservation Director for the Meskwaki Nation, writes:
“The Meskwaki received the horse (standard and pony) after settling in Iowa in 1735. By the 1750s and early 1800s Meskwaki warriors traveled south to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and north to the Mandan villages in South Dakota to trade, raid, or buy horses.” Over the years, the Meskwaki bred certain ponies to suit the tribe’s purposes. “This breed of ponies, similar to Appaloosas, was unique to the tribe and different from the other lines of American Indian ponies.” (Meskwaki Anthology)
When many Meskwaki were forcibly removed to a Kansas reservation after the 1842 Treaty with the Sauk and Fox, they went on horseback and in horse-drawn wagons. And after 1857, when the tribe purchased 80 acres of land in Tama County, their ponies brought them back. Members began returning in wagons and saddles to Eastern Iowa. Through subsequent land purchases, they increased their property to almost 3,000 acres by 1900, and to more than 8,100 acres today in Tama, Marshall, and Palo Alto Counties.
As deeded land holders, the Meskwaki have had more autonomy from the U.S. government than tribes on federally owned reservations. In the late nineteenth century, they built their herd to 700 ponies; however, as Buffalo records: “By 1900, in an attempt to stop the tribe from roaming the state, the U.S. government shot and killed most of the herd.” (Meskwaki Anthology)
Currently, according to Meskwaki.org, the tribe’s website, “the Meskwaki have their own constitution, codified laws, 13 full-time police officers and a fully functioning court system. They have nearly 1,400 enrolled tribal members and are the largest employer in Tama County, employing more than 1,200 people.” But the Meskwaki have paid a heavy equine as well as human toll for their relative autonomy.