CHAPTER IV
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.