Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations

by J. Frank Dobie

In the Old West the phrase "left afoot" meant nothing short of being left flat on your back. "A man on foot is no man at all," the saying went. If an enemy could not take a man's life, the next best thing was to take his horse. Where cow thieves went scot free, horse thieves were hanged, and to say that a man was "as common as a horse thief" was to express the nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who slept with a six-shooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the horn was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel Colt" made all men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in swiftness and mobility.

The proudest names of civilized languages when literally translated mean "horseman": eques, caballero, chevalier, cavalier. Until just yesterday the Man on Horseback had been for centuries the symbol of power and pride. The advent of the horse, from Spanish sources, so changed the ways and psychology of the Plains Indians that they entered into what historians call the Age of Horse Culture. Almost until the automobile came, the whole West and Southwest were dominated by a Horse Culture.

Material on range horses is scattered through the books listed under "Range Life," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Pony Express."

No thorough comprehension of the Spanish horse of the Americas is possible without consideration of this horse's antecedents, and that involves a good deal of the horse history of the world.

BROWN, WILLIAM ROBINSON. The Horse of the Desert (no publisher or place on title page), 1936; reprinted by Macmillan, New York. A noble, beautiful, and informing book.

CABRERA, ANGEL. Caballos de America, Buenos Aires, 1945. The authority on Argentine horses.

CARTER, WILLIAM H. The Horses of the World, National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C., 1923. A concentrated survey.

Cattleman. Published at Fort Worth, this monthly magazine of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association began in 1939 to issue, for September, a horse number. It has published a vast amount of material both scientific and popular on range horses. Another monthly magazine worth knowing about is the Western Horseman, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

DENHARDT, ROBERT MOORMAN. The Horse of the Americas, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947. This historical treatment of the Spanish horse could be better ordered; some sections of the book are little more than miscellanies.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Mustangs, illustrated by Charles Banks Wilson, Little, Brown, Boston, 1952. Before this handsome book arrives at the wild horses of North America, a third of it has been spent on the Arabian progenitors of the Spanish horse, the acquisition of the Spanish horse by western Indians, and the nature of Indian horses. There are many narratives of mustangs and mustangers and of Spanish-blooded horses under the saddle. The author has tried to compass the natural history of the animal and to blend vividness with learning. The book incorporates his Tales of the Mustang, a slight volume published in an edition of only three hundred copies in 1936. It also incorporates a large part of Mustangs and Cow Horses, edited by Dobie, Boatright, and Ransom, and issued by the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1940—a volume that went out of print not long after it was published.