Publisher's Synopsis
The first to link the individual pursuit of social status through military activities to the communal economics of Plains life, Mishkin demonstrates that the key to this connection was the horse, which the Spanish had introduced about the beginning of the seventeenth century. The extent to which the horse transformed native society becomes clear in this Bison Book reprint of Mishkin's book, first published in 1940. A student of anthropology at Columbia University who came under the influence of Ruth Benedict, Bernard Mishkin did field work among the Kiowa Indians and taught at Brandeis University.