THE continent whose history and progress have been the least influenced by horses probably is Northern America, for it seems beyond doubt that when Columbus discovered it horses were unknown there.
How then did they come to be there in such immense herds in later years?
This question has been asked many times, and the reply generally is that the horses subsequently introduced there by the Spaniards must have bred with great rapidity.
Other solutions to the problem that have been put forward are hardly worth considering seriously. So enormous did these herds become, however, that down to half-a-century or so ago horses in their thousands ran wild over the vast prairies of the western states. At the present day such herds are practically extinct.
We read that when, in 1519, the renowned Hernando Cortes set out from Cuba to conquer the empire of Montezuma, he took with him “sixteen strong and picked horses.” Bernal Diaz, who was Cortes' comrade, apparently was greatly devoted to horses, and in his famous account of the Conquest of Mexico he describes in detail each of these sixteen animals, and mentions in rather a quaint way the principal characteristic that each possessed.
Seeing that Cortes' force consisted of some 660 trained men and about 200 Indians, the sixteen horses of course in no way approached the number he would have liked to take, and the reason he took so few is made clear by Diaz when he tells us that owing to the smallness of the ships of that period and the limited amount of accommodation that could be found on board them, even in proportion to their size, the difficulty of transport was very great.
It was, indeed, owing chiefly to the difficulty of transporting horses to Cuba and Hispaniola from Spain that the prices demanded even for horses of inconsiderable value were so exorbitant. Even it seems possible that this scarcity of horses directly led to a campaign that was expected to last for only a few months being prolonged to approximately two years; for though Cortes set sail with his little army in February, 1519, the subjugation of Mexico was not completed until nearly two years had elapsed.
There seems to be no doubt but that the redoubtable Francisco Pizarro, who afterwards conquered so effectually the kingdom of the Incas, was in Hispaniola as early as the year 1510, and he may have been there even before that date. When, in 1524, he began to move southward from Panama on his famous expedition, he travelled without horses, and the attempt to reach the realm of gold proved futile.
His second expedition, however, was more successful, but then he had with him a number of horses that he had taken the precaution to buy before leaving Panama, and the expedition numbered, all told, about 160 men. The horses would appear to have been of the roughest, and some of them in poor condition, yet Pizarro positively refused to give leave for any of them to be destroyed, having apparently taken to heart the lesson he had received from the reverse which had overtaken him on his previous expedition when he was without horses.