Of late years many owners of the very best material for saddle stock have given their whole attention to the development of speed, either at the lateral or diagonal motion, because it has been deemed more profitable. In thus selecting, breeding and developing for extreme speed, the adaptation to saddle purposes has been lost or bred out. While it is true that some colts come into the world endowed with all the saddle gaits, it is also true that skill and patience are requisite in teaching the saddle horse good manners. There is no imaginable use to which the horse can be put where he will show his beautiful form and thorough education to so great advantage as under the saddle.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE WILD HORSES OF AMERICA.
The romances of fifty years ago—Was the horse indigenous to this country?—The theories of the paleontologists not satisfactory—Pedigrees of over two millions of years too long—Outlines of horses on prehistoric ruins evidently modern—The linguistic test among the oldest tribes of Indians fails to discover any word for “Horse”—The horses abandoned west of the Mississippi by the followers of De Soto about 1541 were the progenitors of the wild horses of the plains.
Fifty years ago there was much that was romantic and mysterious in our conceptions of the real character and origin of the vast herds of wild horses that abounded on our Western plains, and the same remark applies to their congeners on the pampas of South America. The wild horse and the Indian opened up a most inviting field for the writers of romance, and current literature was flooded with “Wild Western” stories, with the horse and the Indian as the leading characters. We are now one generation, at least, this side of the time when stories of this kind are either sought or read, but we are not past the period when the origin or introduction of the horse on this continent may be considered with interest and profit. Before touching upon the wild horse, as known in our early history, however, it may be well to consider, briefly, the question as to whether he may not have been indigenous to this continent.
In our generation the spade has become a wonderful developer of the truths of ancient history. The buried and forgotten cities of the old world are being unearthed in Europe, Asia and Africa, and thousands of works of art and learning that had vanished from the face of the earth are again restored to the knowledge of the human race. In a kindred branch of investigation the geologists and paleontologists have been delving into the bowels of the earth—not to find what previous generations of men had left behind them, but to find what life was myriads of ages before man was placed on the earth. Out of the rocks they have, literally, quarried many strange examples of animal life that lave been buried millions of years, and hundreds of feet below the present surface. Among these strange petrefactions that were thus buried when the earth was young, there is one that has been widely exploited as the “Primal Horse,” that is, the animal from which our present horse was finally evolved. There are three or four specimens of this petrefaction now on exhibition in this country, the first having been discovered by Professor Marsh, of Yale College, and now in the museum of that institution. Nearly twenty years ago Professor Huxley, the great English naturalist, delivered a lecture in this city on the Marsh petrefaction as his text, in which he told us that the “Primal Horse” had, originally, five toes on each foot, that after an indeterminate geological period he lost the two outside toes on the hind feet, and after another million years, more or less, he lost the outside toes of the fore feet, thus leaving him ready to go on developing the middle toe into the foot and hoof of the horse while the outside toes disappeared. In proof of this he offered the fact that horses of this day have splint bones on each side of the leg, under the knee, and these bones are the remnants of the outside toes. This was the explanation which the learned professor gave in disposing of the outside toes when there were but three toes on each foot, but he failed to explain what had become of the outside toes when there were five on each foot, and there his whole explanation toppled to the ground.
In the American Museum of Natural History, in this city, there is a very fine representative of this particular type of petrefactions. It is about fifteen inches high, with a head that is disproportionately large, and a tail that is long and slender, suggesting that of a leopard. On each fore foot this animal has four toes, or claws, as we might call them, and on each hind foot three claws. With these claws this little animal might dig in the ground, or he might climb a tree when necessary for either safety or food. Each one of these toes has its own distinct column of joints and bone extending to the knee, and there is no material difference in the size and strength of these different columns. Now, with three toes and three columns only, we can accept or reject, as we please, Professor Huxley’s method of getting the two superfluous ones out of sight by pointing to the splint bones on the leg of a modern horse and saying these are the remnants of the outside toes. But, in the meantime, neither Mr. Huxley nor anybody else has told us what became of the outside toes and their columns in cases where there were five toes. It will not do to chuck these out of sight and say nothing about them; they must be accounted for or the theory fails. In the specimen now under examination the fore feet are each supplied with four toes, and each toe is supported by its own distinct column of bone. Here we meet with the same difficulty as in the case of five toes, for we have more material than the Huxley theory is able to provide for. This theory has been generally accepted among specialists, in this line of investigation, and they all point to the splint bones, as already stated, as the remnants of the two toes, adhering to the main column. This leaves the one superfluous toe wholly unprovided for, and thus the theory discredits itself and leaves the question in a shape that is entirely unsatisfactory and unacceptable to the understanding.
The teeth of this specimen, in their shape and arrangement, very strongly resemble the teeth of the horse. Upon this one fact is placed the chief reliance to sustain the claim that this was the “Primal Horse,” but this fact, when taken without the support of other facts, simply proves that the animal was herbivorous, subsisting on the same kind of food as the horse, but it does not prove that he was a horse. The teeth are an excellent starting point, and we admit their arrangement and resemblance to the teeth of the horse, but the rules of comparative anatomy, as well as common sense, require that at some other point or points there should be at least a suggestion of resemblance. In this case there is absolutely no resemblance, but a very marked and unmistakable divergence. The foot of this little animal, fifteen inches high, bears no more resemblance to the foot of the horse than the foot of the dog bears to the foot of the horse. Indeed, the foot of the specimen before us, whether provided with three, four or five claws, very strikingly resembles the foot of the dog. The arrangement of the different specimens of the feet, commencing with the smallest with four toes and ending with the perfect and full-grown foot of the horse as we know him, intended to illustrate the process of evolution, is a very interesting study, but when you have done with the last foot with claws and reach forward for the first foot with a hoof, you find there is an impassable gulf between them, over which the theory of Evolution has not been able to construct a bridge. But there is another consideration that is final and that cannot be overcome by any theory whatever. According to the chronology widely accepted among geologists, this little animal was buried in the sand more than two millions of years ago, and in a grave more than a hundred feet below the general surface of the country in which he was found. In some great upheaval or cataclysm of the earth’s surface, this little animal, with all his contemporaries, perished, and there perished with him all possibility of propagating his race. It is only a waste of time, therefore, to speculate upon what a certain race of animals might have produced in our day, when they were all cut off two millions of years ago. With this disposition of the little animal with the variety of toes, quarried from the rocks and by courtesy here called the “Primal Horse,” we reach another prehistoric epoch in our inquiry, but much less remote than the one just considered.
From the incredible numbers of wild horses on our Western plains and on the pampas of South America, at a very early period in history, it became a question of some interest with many thinking men as to whether the horse was not indigenous on this continent. It is within the knowledge of everybody that this continent was inhabited by a mysterious and unknown race of people long before it was visited by Europeans. These mysterious people seem to have been driven out by the fierce and warlike savages who occupied the country at the time of its discovery, and even they knew nothing about the people who had preceded them. In very many localities the vanished people left behind them marks, numerous and unmistakable, that they had made considerable progress in the arts of civilized life. Writers have generally designated them as “the Mound Builders,” because they heaped great tumuli of earth over the graves of their distinguished dead, but the real “Mound Builders” did far more than this, for with immense labor they built great, strong defenses for their protection against their enemies. When we go further West and South, into the fertile valleys among the mountains, we find still later traces of these unknown people in the ruins of buildings and dwellings erected, with infinite labor, traces of irrigating canals, etc., but we still fail to come up with them, or any trace of their history. In that region ruins of this type are designated as “Aztec Ruins,” but this title puts us no further on the way of who the builders were. In 1877 a correspondent of a Colorado newspaper, who seemed to write intelligently and candidly, described some of those ruins which he found in the valley of the Las Animas, in Southwestern Colorado. He speaks of a valley fifteen miles long and seven miles wide, on the Animas River, and says this valley was covered with dwellings built of stone, but he gives particular attention to a row of buildings built of sandstone laid in adobe mud. These buildings are about three hundred feet long and three hundred feet apart, as I understand the writer, and extend a distance of six thousand feet. The outside walls are four feet thick and the inside ones from one and a half to three feet thick; there are rooms still left and walls remaining that indicate a building four stories high. In some of the rooms there are writings that never have been deciphered, and in one of them there are drawings of tarantulas, centipedes, horses and men. The word “horses” riveted my attention, and connected with it there were several things to be considered. First, were the drawings really intended to represent horses? Second, if so might they not have been placed there long after the builders had disappeared and in recent years? Third, if placed there by the builders, what was their date, and were they before or after the introduction of the horse into Mexico by the Spaniards? The possibility of ever obtaining any satisfactory information about these drawings and their date seemed very remote, but after watching and waiting for about eighteen years, I have recently received two letters that settle the whole matter so far as these particular ruins are concerned.