Mr. Charles McLoyd, a very intelligent gentleman of Durango, Colorado, who has made a special study of the Cliff Dwellers and kindred subjects, in that part of the world, writing under date of January 10, 1895, says:
“I am unable to inform you in regard to the pictures on those particular ruins, but can say that in no other locality have I found pictures of horses or anything to indicate that these prehistoric races had any knowledge of the animal. If such pictures existed we would be unable to determine anything definite from them; or in other words, it would not show that the horse was on this continent before the Spaniards brought him, but rather that the people who constructed the buildings lived here after the Spaniards came. I have often seen pictures of horses on the walls of cañons, but there is no question but they were the work of the present Indians. We often find associated with them pictures of railroad trains, etc., that indicate that some of them are of very recent date. To sum the matter up, would say that, so far, there is no evidence that these races had any knowledge of the horse, or had ever seen the Spaniards.”
Mr. John A. Koontz, of Aztec, New Mexico, writes under date of January 24, 1895. He knows all about the ruins in question, for he owns the land on which they are situated, and puts the whole matter very clearly, as follows:
“I know nothing of the drawings of horses and other animals on the walls of the ‘Aztec Ruins’ here that Mr. Wallace speaks of. I think the drawings were all in the imagination of the correspondent to whom Mr. Wallace refers. I have been familiar with the ruins for fourteen years and this is the first time I have ever heard of any drawings of horses on any of the walls. There are drawings on some rocks some miles from the ruins, but from their nature I have considered them the work of the modern Indians. These ruins were visited by a party of archeologists two years ago, who spent several weeks here, and made a survey, with maps and general drawings of the same. They decided that the main building had, originally, over seven hundred rooms.”
These letters are conclusive, so far as the region of the Las Animas is concerned, and with that region knocked out there is not enough left to justify further search for evidence that the prehistoric races had any knowledge of the horse. Nothing remained then but the linguistic test, and in 1885 I had such an opportunity for applying this test as may never occur again. This test formulated itself in my mind, in this shape: “Did any of the nations or tribes of the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent have a word in their language indicating a horse?” When in California I applied to Mr. Bancroft, the compiler and publisher of the great documentary history of the Pacific coast, who then had a large corps of skilled translators at work on his famous compilation, and submitted my question. He introduced me to his principal linguist, who knew not only Spanish, English and other modern languages, but also the language of the Indians of the coast, the mountains and the plains, of the period covered by the question. The question did not seem to be new to him, and he answered with the candor and conscientiousness of a man who knew what he was saying, that there was no word in any of the Indian tongues, ancient or modern, that represented the horse. This settled the question of the supposed prehistoric character and rank of the horse, and we are thus driven to accept the infinitesimally small number left behind by Cortez, Nunez and De Soto as the seed from which sprang the countless thousands of wild horses that for generations roamed the Western plains.
The story of the Conquest of Mexico is full of blood and cruelty, but as we have nothing to do with any part of the story except so much of it as relates to the introduction of the horse to the continent of North America, it will require but small space to tell it. Cortez sailed from Cuba for Yucatan, February, 1519, with an army of six hundred and sixty-three men, two hundred Indians and sixteen horses. This wholly inadequate supply of cavalry was the weak place in his venture, but the horses could not be had in Cuba, without paying an incredible price. Those he was able to secure cost from four to five hundred pesos de oro each. The peso was the Spanish dollar. The expedition was nominally fitted out for Yucatan, but its real aim was the heart of Mexico. In his first fight with the Indians near the coast, men mounted on horses were feared by the natives as monstrous apparitions. This overwhelming fear of the horse may seem to some of my readers as overdone by the historian, but it seems to have been the common experience of all the different nations and tribes of Indians wherever the horse made his first appearance in battle. In the first battle two of the horses were killed, and in the second another was killed, and all that remained were more or less severely wounded. Cortez was afterward joined by Alvarado, at Vera Cruz, with twenty horses and one hundred and fifty men. In making his official reports directly to the home government in Spain instead of the governor of Cuba, Cortez gave mortal offense to that dignitary, and he sent out an armada under Narvaez to supersede Cortez and return him in chains to Cuba. This armada consisted of eighteen vessels, carrying nine hundred men, eighty of whom were cavalry. After some diplomacy, Cortez, feeling that with his little handful of men he was wholly unable to meet Narvaez, he did all he could to avoid a conflict. Each party knew the exact strength of the other, and as Narvaez began to threaten, Cortez determined to fight for his rights and his liberty. He then had but five men mounted, but he took advantage of the carelessness of his adversary, made a night attack in the midst of a tempest, and captured Narvaez and his whole army. The private soldiers of that day, like their commanders, had no idea or principle to fight for except for plunder, and they were always ready to attach themselves to the most successful robber. Cortez was their ideal leader, and at once he had a new army of devoted followers. He then had eighty-five mounted men, and he felt strong enough to hold and rule the great country he had conquered. Mexico was conquered in 1521, and the news of the vast amount of treasure captured brought a great crowd of emigrants from Spain and from all her dominions. The Spaniards, like other nations of Southern Europe, kept their horses entire and whenever representatives of both sexes strayed away, reproduction would follow. As the country became more tranquil, and as the tide of European settlers kept pouring in, we can easily understand how the little bands of estrays should grow into larger bands and soon become as wild as though they had never seen a human being except to flee from him.
The explorer De Soto sailed for Florida in 1539, in search of gold. He had in his command five hundred and thirteen men, exclusive of sailors, and two hundred and thirty-seven horses, besides some for the purpose of bearing burdens, the number not given. In all his weary journey of three years he found the Indians active, hostile, and courageous fighters. In one of his first battles he lost twelve horses, and had seventy wounded. He pursued many phantoms in search of gold, in different directions, but his general course was westward and northwestward. He was the first European to discover the Mississippi River, not far from the mouth of the Arkansas, and there he was buried in the middle of the river, to prevent the Indians from discovering he was dead and from desecrating his remains. His followers then determined to push on westward to Mexico, and reached as far as the borders of Texas, probably, when they became discouraged with the magnitude of the difficulties that surrounded them, and determined to return and seek an outlet from the wilderness by water. On this last journey, west of the Mississippi, they suffered their greatest loss of horses. They had not been shod for more than a year, and a great many were lame and unable to travel. When the Spaniards had completed their boats and were ready to leave the scenes of their sufferings and disasters, they turned loose upon the bank of the river their four or five remaining horses, which manifested great excitement, running up and down the bank neighing for their masters, as they sailed away. This alarmed the Indians and they ran into the water for safety.
The Indians were afraid of the horses and the horses were afraid of the Indians. It seems to be a fact, observed in all the early intercourse of the Spaniards with the Indians, that universally they had a kind of superstitious awe of the horse as a superior being, and it is probably due to this awe that the Indians did not utterly destroy every horse that fell out of the ranks or that escaped in the wilderness. As I understand the history of this terrible exploration, when the Spaniards crossed the Mississippi they had two hundred and fifty men and one hundred and fifty horses, and when they came back and were ready to sail they had but four or five horses left. It is fair, therefore, to conclude that the greater portion of these hundred and fifty head was scattered in the wilderness as they went out and as they returned. This provides a sufficient breeding basis for the countless multitudes of descendants, and places that nucleus in the right region to nourish them in a feral state.
While this exploration of De Soto seems to furnish a breeding basis of sufficient breadth to account for all the wild horses that have appeared on this continent, there is another consideration that we must not overlook, and that is the inborn tendency of the domestic horse to become wild when in wild associations. By turning to the chapter on the colony of Virginia you will see that there were many wild horses there at the beginning of the last century. On the frontiers, near the habitat of wild horses, they became a great nuisance to the settlers in “coaxing” away their domestic horses and making them as wild as the wildest. These accretions to their strength from the domestic horse have been going on for generations, and thus the wild horse became conglomerate in the elements of his blood, with the Spanish traits still predominant. Fifty or a hundred years ago the pens of many writers were employed in idealizing “The Wild Horse of the Desert.” He was made the leading figure in many a romance, and the hero of many a triumph. Tom Thumb, the great trotter that was taken to England, astonished all the world with his speed and his endurance, and, following the fashion of the day, he was represented to have been caught wild on the Western plains. For many years the wild horse was the “fad” of American writers, just as the Arabian was of English writers, and the writers on one side were just about as far from intelligence and truth as those on the other. When, forty years ago, great droves of the half-breeds, Mustangs, were brought from the plains to the border prairie States, seeking a market, the scales began to drop from the eyes of the worshipers of the wild horse. They were homely little brutes, and they were as tough as whit-leather. But the countless multitudes that roamed at will over their grazing grounds, making the earth tremble when they moved, have dwindled down to a few insignificant bands, and the whole glamour around the wild horse of the desert has vanished.