The History of the Old American West – 4 Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Emerson Hough
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turned loose upon the plains of the Southwest some numbers of horses in order to stock the country with that animal The common supposition is that the wild stock of America began in the stray and runaway horses which were lost by the Spaniards. Be that as it may, the horse of the Spaniards soon had a better hold on American soil than the Spaniard himself. By the year 1700 the Northern Indians had not yet become generally possessed of horses, and many of them used dogs as beasts of burden, while their hunting was all done on foot. Yet at this time the Southern Indians had horses, and had learned to use them extremely well. The natural course of horse trading and horse stealing soon spread the animal all over the vast country of the West. The advent of the horse upon t continent changed the entire manner of life of the native tribes. It only perpetuated the manners and customs of the people that had brought the horse. So strong, so virile were these customs that the type of the horse itself has changed more in three centuries than that wild industry of which it has always been and must always be a central figure.
If we should have a look at the continent of Europe at the time of the wars of the Moors and Spaniards, we should see there a state of matters much as we may see upon our own cattle range. In the north of Europe the cattle and the horses, as well as the men, were bulky, powerful, and large of frame. In the south of Europe the cattle, the men, and the horses, reared in a hot and dry country, were smaller, and were lean, sinewy, and active rather than big and bulky The Moors were always horsemen, and they brought from northern Africa with them into Spam the horse of a hot, dry land, a waterless land, where the horse was alike a necessity and a treasure. The Moor prized his horse, and so developed of him a creature of worth and serviceableness, one which could carry an armed man all day under a tropic sun and subsist upon such food as the desert offered.
The horse of the Moor became the horse of the Spaniard, and the horse of the Spaniard became the horse of the Spanish-Indian or Mexican, which in turn became the horse of the cattle trade which was handed down along with it. The animal certainly found an environment to its liking, one indeed similar to that which had produced its type in northern Africa. The suns of the great Southwest were burning, the lands were parched and dry, and small shade ever offered. Water was rare and precious, and to be reached only by long journeys. These journeys, this dry and unfattening food of the short grasses of the hot plains, took off every particle of useless flesh from the frame of the horse. It needs moisture to furnish fat to a people, and a fat person must always be drinking water. The Spanish pony had no more water than would keep it alive, and soon came to learn how to do without it in great measure. For generation after generation it lost flesh and gained angles, lost beauty and gained "wind" and stomach and bottom and speed, until at the time of the first American cowboy's meeting with it it was a small, hardy, wiry, untamed brute, as wild as a hawk, as fleet as a deer, as strong as an ox. It had not the first line of beauty. Its outline of neck was gone forever, merged into a hopeless ewe neck which looked weak, though it was not. Its head was devoid of beauty of outline, often Roman nosed, but still showing fineness and quality in the front and the muzzle. Its head was very poorly let on. Its ribs seemed a bit flat and its hips weak. Its back was reached up forward of the "coupling" in a pathetic way, as though the arch were in sympathy with a stomach perpetually tucked up from hunger or from cold. Its eye was not good to look upon, and its fore legs not always what one would ask of his favourite saddler. But suppose the stripping of Nature had been followed out until the bony framework of this plains horse had been laid quite bare, and the skeleton alone left in evidence, this skeleton would be worth a study. The quality of the bone of this forearm would be found dense and ivorylike, not spongy as the bone of a big dray horse. The hoofs and feet would be found durable and sound. The cat-hammed hips would be seen to supplement that despised roach in the back, and we should have offered that grayhound configuration which is seen in all the speedy animals where the arch of the back is marked and the hind legs set under and forward easily in running. Such an animal "reaches from behind" well in running, and turns quickly. Moreover, these flat-bladed shoulders would be seen to be set on obliquely, which again one asks of his speedy dog or racing horse, if he knows the anatomy of speed. The shoulders play easily and freely, and the hind legs reach well forward, and the chest, though deep enough to give the lungs and heart plenty of room, is not too deep to interfere with a full extension of the animal and a free and pliant play of the limbs. In short, the pony of the range as first seen by the American cowboy was not a bad sort of running machine. It had, moreover, the lungs built upon generations of rare pure air, the heart of long years of freedom, and the stomach of centuries of dry feed. It stood less than fourteen hands high, and weighed not more than six hundred pounds, but it could run all day and then kick off the hat of his rider at night. In form it was not what we call a thoroughbred, but in disposition it was as truly a thoroughbred as ever stood on two or four feet. Jim, the foreman of the Circle Arrow outfit, down near the line of old Mexico, would have told you long ago that such a horse had "plenty sand." It was very well it did have.
This was the cow horse of the Southwest, and the type remained constant in that region until the middle of this century. All the horses of the North and the East on the plains came up from Mexico and Texas on the eastern side of the Rockies, where much the same sort of climatic conditions prevailed. Meanwhile there had been another line of migration of the horse, also from Mexico, but up along the California coast west of the Kockies. There was heat and dry air and little water for a long way to the North, but at length the wet climate of Oregon was reached. Here the way of Nature went on again, and the type began to change. The horse became a trifle stockier and heavier, not quite so lean and rangy in build. The cow horses of the early trade in Montana came in part from Oregon across the upper mountain passes by the route over which the Northern horse Indians who lived close to the Rockies first got their horses. On the northern range the cow horse was called a "cayuse," a name, of course, unknown upon the southern range, where the horse was simply a "cow horse," or, if a Very wild and bad horse, was called a "broncho," that being the Spanish word for "wild." The term "broncho" has spread all over the cattle country and all over the country until its original and accurate meaning is quite lost. There never was any very great difference between the horses of the North and those of the South, for they came of the same stock, bred in the same unregulated way, and lived the same sort of life. Either cayuse or broncho would buck in the most crazy and pyrotechnic style when first ridden, plunging, biting, bawling, and squealing in an ecstasy of rage, and either would rear and throw itself over backward with its rider if it got a chance, or would lie down and roll over on him. The colour of either was as it happened, perhaps with a bit greater tendency to solid colours in the Northern horse. Bay, sorrel, black, gray, "buckskin," roan, or "calico" were the usual colours of the cow horses. In the South a piebald horse was always called a "pinto," from the Spanish word meaning "paint." In the upper parts of Texas one often hears such a horse called a "paint horse." In the South a horse does not buck, but "pitches," which comes to the same thing with a tenderfoot. A "wall-eyed pinto that pitches" is an adjunct to be found upon almost any Southern ranch even to-day. Both in the South and- in the North the horses are now generally bred up by crosses of "American horses," though this is much a misnomer, for the cow horse is the American horse per se and par excellence.
In the "States" we pen our cattle and house our horses, and have both horse and cow always at hand and under control. Not so fortunate is the cowboy with his mount. The latter is a wild animal loose upon the range. From year's end to year's end it has no care but the hand of mastery and no food but that afforded by Nature. This we shall say for the cow horse proper, and as applying to the days of ranching in the old times, before modern methods had come in. On the upper ranges, where the snows of winter are on the ground for long months and the weather is often very cold, it has long been the custom to make all the hay possible and to keep a little feed on hand for use in winter. Even in the country of the middle range, as in the Indian Nations, baled hay and oats are used in the winter for the saddle band. This, however, is not that typical ranching of the old times which will offer us most of picturesqueness and of interest. In those loose, wild times the cow horse was treated the same as the cow, with only such differences in the handling as a different nature required or necessity of the business made desirable. Both were wild, there is not any doubt of that. Jim, the cowboy who handled both, was as wild as they. Upon that time let us rather linger than upon a more degenerate day. There is no more interesting time in which to study the business of horse ranching than just at the beginning of the great drives to the North which marked the sudden expansion of the cattle