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Some eighteen years ago I first used email. I was a little late to the party.
Of course, as happens to us all, I would be sent a group email from time to time. I found it cumbersome and time consuming to copy all of the email addresses, one by one, into my response.
After approximately eighteen months of this (yes, I'm not kidding, eighteen months) I noticed a little button at the top of my email page. It said "Reply All." Wow, did that make life easier!
So typical of me to not have the patience to explore a new technology to see how I could fully make it work for me.
What I'm saying is that I should probably be the last one to write this article. On the other hand my hypocrisy doesn't change the truth...
Being a lover of history for the lessons it teaches, I've had a nagging curiosity. When the American colonies were forming in the 18th century where were the Spanish?
I mean, they were the first Europeans to make hay in the Americas, you know, that Columbus guy. (Yes, Columbus was Italian, but, as we know, sailed the Spanish galleons.)
And yet as America was forming and expanding, the Spanish could only be seen on the periphery.
We rebelled against and fought the British a lot. The French helped us in that fight and sold us Louisiana. The two of them sort of carved up what would become Canada.
The Spanish were primarily in South America, of course. But their imperialistic ideals would drive them north. Seems to me as they headed north out of Mexico and America expanded west across the great planes that that'd be a colossal collision waiting to happen.
Oh we had a couple of skirmishes with the Spanish in Florida and there was the Alamo. I haven't forgotten the Mexican/American War that funneled through Texas for two years and established boundaries. There was a rock fight or two in California, also.
But why no headlong full boat clash of Spaniards and Americans?
It was a curiosity to me until I read S.C. Gwynne's first-rate 2010 book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.
So much to comment on from this book, a finalist for the Pulitzer, but only a small piece that fits here.
The Comanches ruled the roost in the territory that was to become Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Colorado.
Westward moving Americans encounter with them was inevitable. As was crossing paths with the northerly aggressive Spanish. The Comanches had fought the latter off for almost two centuries.
Then in the first half of the 19th century, there the Comanches stood, between a rock (Mexico) and a hard place (the United States). They were the barrier between expanding America and the ambitious Spanish.
There is no doubt that Gwynne is correct; the Comanches were the most powerful Indian tribe in American history.
That fact is interesting to me. What is even more fascinating is why.
The single reason that they were as powerful as they were, dominating all other Indian tribes, holding off the Spanish and irritating the United States was because of how they embraced, studied and mastered the new technology of their day and made it their own.
And that new technology was the horse.
The Spanish had these mobile, fast, resilient mustangs to themselves initially. And when they road them into battle it gave them a thunderous and insurmountable advantage.
And then thousands of these horses escaped, were stolen, wandered off, whatever, and ultimately got into the hands of American Indian tribes. Many of them.
Indeed, many tribes got them, but only one got the most out of them.
Some tribes used them as glorified pack mules to carry goods from place to place on their many sojourns. Some rode them, but simply as transportation. They would even ride them to the battle against the mounted Comanches, but then dismount, fight from their feet and get slaughtered because of the power imbalance.
They did not see, as the Comanches did, the horse's full potential. The horse gave the Comanches an enormous advantage as warriors as well as hunters.
"The Comanches adapted to the horse earlier and more completely than any other plains tribe," Gwynne writes. "No one could outride them or outshoot them from the back of a horse."
No tribe other than the Comanches ever learned to breed horses either. And their method of breaking them was just astonishing.
As Gwynne puts it, they simply "understood the horse so much better than everyone else did."
It was their understanding and application of this new technology that allowed them to dominate all other tribes in their region.
It was this mastery of the horse that allowed them to ward off the Spanish. Gwynne writes that that they were "an impenetrable obstacle to Spanish expansion."
And for decades their horse brilliance allowed them to frustrate the Americans.
As a matter fact, Americans were slow learners. We too used to ride our horses to battle, dismount and get routed. It took until the 1850s, but we finally let the lessons of the Comanche sink in. That knowledge, and our sheer numbers, eventually gave us dominance over the natives.
I will say this for myself, that for all of my stumblings, I've gotten a bit more proficient with new technologies. My problem hasn't been as much the stubbornness to change as it has been the patience to learn. It's been admittedly a slow go, but as I've adjusted it has undoubtedly helped my business grow.
I'm still not as adaptive as the Comanches, though.
No, I'm quite sure they would have found "Reply All" well before I did.
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