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.

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.