North American Tree Rings, Climatic Extremes, and Social Disasters - Dendroclimatology - page 310

The Arapaho and Cheyenne adopted the horse culture and bison hunting in the
eighteenth century and migrated from the Great Lakes region into the central High
Plains by 1800. They participated in trade with Spanish outposts at Santa Fe and
Taos during a time of generally favorable climate, including the early nineteenth-
century pluvial. Vivid descriptions by Henry Dodge and other explorers describe
scenes of incredible abundance on the central High Plains, including vast herds of
bison (West 1995 ) . However, West argues that the Arapaho and Cheyenne became
victims of their own technological innovation and ultimately came into competition
with the very animal upon which they depended, the bison. The riparian corridors
of the Platte, Republican, Smoky Hill, Arkansas, and Cimarron Rivers were key
to the High Plains adaptation of the bison, providing water, nutritious winter for-
age, and shelter from winter storms. But the Native Americans and their ponies
required these same resources, as did the stock animals of the Euroamerican overlan-
ders. West ( 1995 ) chronicles the increasing use of the riparian resources during the
1840s and 1850s, the same period when the prolonged wet conditions of the early
nineteenth-century pluvial were shifting into the persistent drought regime of the
mid-nineteenth century. He argues that it was the convergence of Native American
bison hunting, human utilization and degradation of the riparian 'habitat islands' of
the High Plains, and the onset of multidecadal drought that led to the extirpation of
the bison from the central High Plains by 1860, long before the rapacious market
hunting of bison following the Civil War. The catastrophic winters of 1842-1845
must have contributed to the bison decline as well (Brunstein 1996 ) .
El Año del Hambre, the year of hunger, described by Gibson ( 1964 ) as the 'most
disastrous single event in colonial maize agriculture' in Mexico, occurred in 1786
after the August frost of 1785 in highland Mexico and during the severe 3-year
drought of 1785-1787 (Therrell 2005 ) . The gridded PDSI reconstructions indicate
moderate drought (or worse) for this 3-year average extending from central Mexico
into Texas (Fig. 10.9 ) . Some 300,000 people are reported to have perished in the
famine and epidemic disease that followed the frost, drought, and crop failures
(Florescano 1980 ; Garcia Acosta 1995 ) . The value of tithes paid to the Church
inflated during the drought and frost of 1785-1787 due to the crop failures and
increased cost of grain (Therrell 2005 ) . Before El Año del Hambre, substantial
droughts in Sonora were accompanied by crop failures, famine, disease outbreaks,
and insurrections among the Yaqui, Pimas Bajos, and Seri Indians in 1740, 1737,
and 1729, respectively (Brenneman 2004 ) .
A severe 6-year drought occurred across the Southwest and into the central Plains
from 1666 through 1671 (Fig. 10.10 ) . A series of disasters among the Pueblo soci-
eties of New Mexico in the seventeenth century—including Apache raids, drought,
famine, and disease—led to great population loss and submission to Spanish mis-
sionary control (Sauer 1980 ; Barrett 2002 ) . As the drought progressed to 1670,
the Pueblos and Spaniards were both reduced to eating 'hides and straps boiled
with herbs and roots,' and 950 inhabitants of the Jumanos Pueblos died of starva-
tion (Sauer 1980 , p. 66). A great pestilence broke out in 1671 among the Pueblos
and their cattle, and more than 400 people perished in one village. Documentary
information on crop production during the Spanish occupation of the region is cor-
related with regional tree-ring estimates of precipitation (Barrett 2002 ; Parks et al.