The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

When one thinks of the history of North America, it often invokes images of Native Americans and cowboys riding on horseback.

However, horses weren't in the Western Hemisphere when Europeans arrived.

There was a time if Native people had to move from one place to another,

they had to do so on foot.

But while this is true, the truth is more complex, because if you go back far enough, there

was a time when horses were in North America.

Learn more about the complicated history of horses in North America

and how they unleashed a revolution on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. When I began this podcast almost two years ago, I started by creating a list of a hundred ideas for episodes.

The topic of this episode was one of the very first ideas I came up with.

The reason why is because the story of horses in North America is fascinating.

The story lies at the intersection of history, politics, technology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology.

I'm going to start the story somewhere in the middle, which is the point where we have firsthand

information that we can verify, which is when Europeans arrived in the new world.

When Columbus landed in what we know today as the Bahamas in 1492, he did not have any horses with him.

However, he found that the local people didn't have horses either. On his next trip in 1493 he had with him about two dozen Andalusian horses.

When these horses landed, they were the only horses to be found in the entire Western Hemisphere.

The Taino people of the Caribbean

were terrified at the sight of men riding on horses.

At first, they thought they were some sort of monstrous manbeast.

Not only had they never seen horses, but they had never seen anyone riding any sort of animal.

In Cuba, the Spanish found that there was enough land where they could begin breeding horses and they actually thrived there.

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