THE AMERICAN HORSE
Observe here a creature, a dumb brute, that has saved some centuries of
time. Indeed, without this American horse, the American civilization
perhaps could never have been. Without the ax, the rifle, the boat and
the horse there could have been no West.
To-day we would in some measure dispense with the horse, but in the
early times no part of man’s possessions was more indispensable. This
animal was not then quite as we find him to-day in the older settled
portions of the country. In some of our wilder regions we can still see
him somewhat as he once was, rough, wiry, hardy, capable of great
endeavor, easily supported upon the country over which he passed.
Naturally the early west-bound traveler could not take with him food for
his horse, and the latter must be quite independent of grain. Corn,
exceedingly difficult to raise, was for the master alone. The horse must
live on grass food, and find it where he stopped at night. During the
day he must carry the traveler and his weapons, another horse perhaps
serving as transportation for food or household goods; or, if there was
a family with the traveler, perhaps one horse sufficed for the mother
and a child or two. The weak might ride, the strong could trudge
alongside. Many women have so traveled out into the West—women as sweet
as any of to-day.
We have here, then, one more simple, economical and effective factor in
the resources of the early American. Beauty, finish, elegance, were not
imperative. Strength, stamina, hardihood, these things must be
possessed. The horse must be durable; and so he was. The early settlers
on the Atlantic coast brought from over the seas horses of good blood.
Virginia was noted as a breeding ground before the yet more famous Blue
Grass Region of Kentucky began to produce horses of great quality. The
use of the horse in the New World went on as it did in the Old. The
French in the North, the English at the mid-continent, the Spanish in
the South, all brought over horses; and even to-day the types of the
three sections are distinct.
The horse with which we are concerned was the hardy animal, able to find
food in the forest glades or laurel thickets of the Appalachians; that
served as pack-horse in the hunt near home, as baggage horse in the
journey away from home. In those days the horse was rather a luxury than
a necessity. All earlier or Eastern America was at short range. The
rifle was short in range; the man himself was a footman, and did not
travel very far in actual leagues.
For a generation he could walk, or at least travel by boat. But when he
came to the edge of the open country of the plains, when he saw above
him the vast bow of the great River of the West, across whose arc he
needed to travel direct, then there stood waiting for him, as though by
providential appointment, this humble creature, this coward, this hero
of an animal, now afraid of its own shadow, now willing to face steel
and powder-smoke, patient, dauntless, capable of great exertion and
great accomplishment. So in the land of great distances the traveler
became a mounted man; the horse became part of him, no longer a luxury,
but a necessity.
The Spanish contributed most largely to the American holding of that
vast indefinite West of ours that they once claimed, when they allowed
to straggle northward across the plains, into the hand of Indian or
white man, this same lean and wiry horse, carrying to the deserts of
America the courage of his far-off Moorish blood, his African
adaptability to long journeys on short fare.[2] The man that followed
the Ohio and Missouri to the edge of the plains, the trapper, the
hunter, the adventurer of the fur trade, had been wholly helpless
without the horse. For a time the trading posts might cling to the
streams, but there was a call to a vast empire between the streams,
where one could not walk, where no boat could go, nor any wheeled
vehicle whatever. Here, then, came the horse, the thing needed.
The white adventurer may have brought his horse with him by certain slow
generations of advance, or he may have met him as he moved West; at
times he captured and tamed him for himself, again he bought him of the
Indian, or took him without purchase. Certainly in the great open
reaches of the farther West the horse became man’s most valuable
property, the unit of all recognized current values. The most serious,
the most unforgivable crime was that of horse stealing. To kill a man in
war, man to man, was a matter of man and man, and to be regarded at
times with philosophy; but to take away without quarrel and by stealth
what was most essential to man’s life or welfare was held equivalent to
murder unprovoked and of a despicable nature. To be “set afoot” was one
of the horrors long preserved in memory by the idiom of Western speech.
The food of this horse, then, was generally what he might gain by
forage. In furnishings, his bridle was sometimes a hide lariat, his
saddle the buckskin pad of the Indians. Stirrups the half-wild white man
sometimes discarded, after the fashion of the Indian, who rode by the
clinging of his legs turned back, or by purchase of his toes thrust in
between the foreleg and the body of his mount. A fleet horse, one much
valued in the chase or in war, might be his master’s pet, tied close to
his house of skin at night, or picketed near-by at the lonesome bivouac.
He might have braided in his forelock the eagle feather that his white
master himself would have disdained to wear as ornament. Of grooming the
horse knew nothing, neither did he ever know a day of shelter.
His stable was the heart of a willow thicket if the storm blew fierce.
In winter-time his hay was the bark of the cottonwood, under whose
gnarled arms the hunter had pitched his winter tepee or built his rough
war-house of crooked logs. When all the wide plain was a sheet of white,
covered again by the driven blinding snows of the prairie storm, then
this hardy animal must paw down through the snow and find his own food,
the dried grass curled close to the ground. Where the ox would perish
the horse could survive. He was simple, practicable, durable, even under
the hardest conditions. The horse of the American West ought to have
place on the American coat of arms.
The horse might be a riding animal, or at times a beast of burden. In
the earliest days he was packed simply, sometimes with hide pockets or
panniers after the Indian fashion, with a lash rope perhaps holding the
load together roughly. Later on in the story of the West there came a
day when it was necessary to utilize all energies more exactly, and then
the loading of the horse became an interesting and intricate science.
The carry-all or pannier was no longer essential, and the packs were
made up of all manner of things transported. The pack saddle, a pair of
X’s connected with side bars, the “saw buck” pack-saddle of the West,
which was an idea perhaps taken from the Indians, was the immediate aid
of the packer. The horse and the lash rope in combination were born of
necessity, the necessity of long trails across the mountains and the
plains.
Thus the horse trebled the independence of the Western man, made it
possible for him to travel as far as he liked across unknown lands, made
him soldier, settler, trader, merchant; enabled him indeed to build a
West that had grown into giant stature even before the day of steam.
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Footnote 2:
“Wherever pictographs of the horse appear the representations must
have been done subsequent to the advent of Coronado, or the
conquistadors of Florida. There are no horse portraits in Arizona and
vicinity, nor up the Pacific coast, but they are frequent in Texas and
in the trans-Mississippi region. The domestic horse (not Eohippus, the
diminutive quaternary animal which was indigenous) was introduced into
Florida from Santo Domingo by the Spaniards early in the 15th century,
as well as into South America, where it spread in fifteen years as far
south as Patagonia.”—Chas. Hallock, the “American Antiquarian,”
January, 1902.