The Arуans were the War Bands—that simple. From this crucible of nomadic warfare supported by the domestication of the horse and the invention of the chariot, the “noble,” which simply means conquer descendents of these folk, spread around the world, even developing sophisticated sailing ships to transport themselves and their horses and hounds. According to Aztec sources, it was the hounds and the horses that awed them the most when the Iberian War Bands came. Among the Inca, in the open highlands of Peru, the horse counted for that much more in war.

I recall as a boy two things that impressed me about American history, that it supposedly cost the U.S. Government a million dollars for every plains warrior killed in combat. There was also a documentary about a Spanish horse wandering the Great plains with a saddle and Morion upon it, which is caught and ridden by a warrior and served as the basis for the mustang herds of the men who have often been named, “the best light cavalry the world has ever known.”

“Best” among the races of men who had embraced technology and largely discarded the animals they had partnered with in war for 4,000 years, but among the ancient war bands, the plains Indians would have been just another badass collection of stone age biker gangs.

In reading Philip Duffield Strong’s Horses and Americans from 1939, the fantasy of some Iberian horse getting loose on the Great Plains and siring a herd of mustangs seems beyond ridiculous. The war horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish and Portuguese [an entire 6o man horse troop serving with Soto out of Elvas] required care in everything, even breeding. Strong details at length why the Arуan horse—more Arуan in blood than any man and lacking only the language—could not have been accidentally introduced to the natives. He tracked down every head of horse present among the conquistadors and traces the probable introduction of the horse to the Native people of North America [Incas were riding them from the 1570s] to escaped Indian slaves working as stable hands sometime between 1599 and 1699.

In this light, we shall follow one of the greatest war bands of the American plains, the Sacred Ravens, who won their own Thermopolye in 1862 and served as scouts for the U.S. Army against their numerous native foes.

 

The Chronology of Joseph Medicine Crow adapted from his book, From the Heart of the Crow Country: the Crow Indians’ Own Stories, the Library of the American Indian, 1992

Ca. 1500: ancestors lived east of the Mississippi

Ca. 1580: ancestral tribe of Sacred Ravens and Hidatsa were driven from the Great Lakes region by unknown forces

Ca. 1600: tribe settles at the Missouri and Knife rivers junction

1600s: the band of Chief No Vitals journeyed extensively for decades

1700: South-Central Montana becomes new Homeland

1700-35: Indians near Great Salt Lake provide horses and the tribe became more warlike, established “a vast domain” and awaited migrating enemies

1743: Saw first “white men” the Canadian La Verendryes brothers

1805-6: Lewis and Clark and Francis Lorocque meet Crows in Montana

1825: Chief Long Hair and Major O’Fallon sign a treaty of friendship

1840-50: smallpox wipes out 7,000 of the 8,000 members of the tribe

1851: attend Fort Laramie Treaty

1862; the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho attempt to wipe out the tribe at Pryor Creek and the Sacred Ravens defeat them

Their allies, the U.S. Government, will soon take away80% of their land.

The Sacred Ravens, as an example of a primitive war band, will be reexamined in the final volume of this series, as they possessed matriarchal aspects to their culture very similar to the Arуan War Bands

Using the term Arуan War Bands is an approximation of what these folk known clinically as the indo-Europeans would have called themselves and been called by each other in general terms of relation, with Arуan best understood to mean “Conquering” for to meaningfully be a noble [a common interpretation of arya] is to be the conqueror. The very best example of the Conquering War Bands are the Conquistadors on the New World Entradas, men who cruelly granted a great legacy of war making to the plains Indians, the greatest of whom were the Comanche, who were in closest contact with the Spanish of all the Great Plains tribes.

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