Posted by:
randyj
(
)
Date: November 28, 2014 06:52PM
"...and though Cortez and his followers saw none alive, yet Admiral Sir Francis Drake did see large bands of wild horses on the Oregon Coast in 1579, far too early for any to have escaped from the Spaniards, grown wild, and traveled so vast a distance” (Reynolds and Sjodahl, Commentary on the Book of Mormon Vol. 6, p.236.)"
The assertion that Cortez saw no horses alive is just stupid, seeing as how Cortez was one of the early explorers who brought horses into Mexico in 1519. For the math-impaired, that's 60 years before the date for Drake cited above. Wild horses constantly migrate, and quickly multiply. In 60 years, they could have grown to great numbers and spread all over the west.
Also, Coronado made it to the Rio Grande with horses in 1540.
"Coronado moves his camp to the upper Rio Grande, where his soldiers confiscate one pueblo for winter quarters and loot the surrounding pueblos for supplies. During this operation, a Spaniard rapes an Indian woman, and when Coronado refuses to punish him, the Indians retaliate by stealing horses."
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/events/1500_1650.htmSo, Indians stole horses in 1540---39 years before Drake saw them in Oregon.
"The conquistadors brought with them the first horses Americans had ever seen.
"Inevitably, some escaped or were stolen by natives; such horses were traded
north through Mexico into the Great Plains where tribes like the Apache,
Comanche, Sioux and Blackfeet eventually made the horse the focal point of
their existence." (A People and a Nation, 1982, Houghton Mifflin, pp.8-9).
"Where did these mustangs come from? The first 'wild' horses were actually
tame horses. They were brought to the New World by Spanish
explorers.......The
explorers' horses were the first such animals that the Indians living in the
Southwest had ever seen. Soon the Indians began using the horse for hunting
and traveling. Eventually, some of the Indians' horses escaped and joined the
horses lost by the Spanish. In the 1840s, when wagon trains of settlers began
crossing the Great Plains, different breeds of horses broke loose from their
owners and ran with the wild horses. Other domestic horses were simply
abandoned to live on the prairies. All these horses, together with the
Spanish
horses, formed the great mustang herds."
("Voyages", Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1989, pp. 74-75).
"For centuries, the Plains Indians hunted the buffalo on foot. In the late
1700s, they started using horses, which had multiplied and spread northward
since the Spanish brought them to Mexico." ("America and Americans", Silver
Burdett, 1983, p. 24).
I cited most of those quotes in a post I wrote on alt.religion.mormon in February 2000, in a response to Mike "chicken and backpacks" Ash. It's disappointing that Mormon apologists are still citing those same discredited arguments 14 years later.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/28/2014 07:03PM by randyj.