The horse transformed life for American Indians, bringing not just a new mode of transportation but a new way of life as it spread north from Spanish settlements in the seventeenth century and helped make the Great Plains a region of complex cultures based on the buffalo hunt. With horses, Indians were better able to secure food, defend territory, fight, and trade, becoming more prosperous and powerful, and Plains warriors gained renown as formidable combatants and among the world’s finest light cavalry fighters. Largely because of the horse, Plains Indian nations resisted white conquest until the eve of the twentieth century. Among the first native peoples in North America to acquire the horse, the Utes may have obtained their first animals near here, and by A.D. 1700, after rounding up strays from Spanish settlements, they had built sizable herds. The horse became a powerful asset in trade and combat, transforming the Utes from a scattered people into a dominant nation whose realm stretched from the high prairies to the Green River and from the Rio Grande basin to the steppes of Wyoming, and they protected their homeland successfully until the last third of the nineteenth century.