Modern archaeology looks to fossil remains
from sediments in Wyoming suggesting that Equus Caballus, the horse, was
native to North America 60 million years ago. The horse alternately
appears and disappears from the fossil record at about one million year
intervals. All trace of the horse is lost by about 25,000 years ago.
The species was unknown to the American continent when Columbus sailed
from Spain on his voyage of discovery.
But historians say that
Columbus , and even the subsequent Spanish explorers, Coronado and DeSoto,
couldn’t themselves have reintroduced the lost species to North America.
They argue that, although the earliest Spanish explorers did indeed bring
horses with them to the New World, they brought only limited numbers
of the animals, and very few of those were mares. Coronado, for example,
wrote in his diary that he had brought “five hundred and fifty-eight
horses, two of them mares.” Two mares could hardly have stocked the whole
continent, say historians.
More likely sources for the
North American population of ponies, say historians, were stock-raising
ranches established by the Spanish in the Santa Fe area between the 1550s
and the 1700s. The ranches furnished ideal conditions for the spread of
horses to the rest of the continent : friendly contact with the Indians
through trade, an ample supply of horses, and plenty of opportunities for
the Indians to study possible uses for the new creature.
Logically, the movement of
horses into the North Americas would have followed established inter-
tribal trade routes. From Spanish records we know that, beginning around
1600, southwest tribes such as the Utes, Comanches, Apaches and Kiowas
began raiding the Spanish ranches and stealing large numbers of horses.
From those tribes, the horses slowly spread across the continent.
La Verendrye reported that tribes living northeast of the Black Hills
in Montana had no horses when he visited them in 1738. Yet just 16 years
later in 1754 Anthony Henday, the Hudson’s Bay Company explorer, met Assiniboines
in the same area who had horses, though they used them only for packing,
not for riding. By 1766 Henday reported numerous Assiniboines now skillfully
riding the horses.
Several Indian tribes have
oral traditions chronicling their first acquisition of horses : Tetons
say they got theirs from the Arikaras; Shoshonis from Comanches, and Nez
Perces from Shoshonis.
In
1827 an American trader, Robert Meldrum, reported that old Crow people
told him their generation was the first generation of Crows to see
horses.
So it was that the hardy Spanish
ponies gradually populated the North American continent, as possessions
of the native peoples.
Wild herds of escapees were
reported by the late 1800s, though they were mostly ignored by the Indians,
as domestic ponies were plentiful and easier to handle.
Eventually horse- stealing
became the foremost means to acquire more horses, and full blown
“horse culture” was in full swing among the Indian tribes by the end of
the century. The “Indian pony” - small, squat and tough -
became the mainstay of Indian life, indispensable in transport, warfare,
leisure, hunting, religion and trade. So it was
practically inevitable that Indians began to measure wealth by the number
of horses a man owned. The number of horses owned by individual Indians
grew dramatically.
Ute father
and son riding their ponies ca.1870. Notice the mustang's "fox
ears" and heavier forequarters, typical mustang
conformation .
Among the Piegan people the horse-to-people
ratio grew from about 1-1 in 1860 to 3.5-1 by 1895. But a wealthy individual
might easily have as many as 500 horses in his personal herd. In the Indian
economy, if a man had a lot of horses, he had prestige, and could thus
attract more wives, have more children, produce more meat and produce more
trade goods. A man with a substantial herd was affluent.
The summer of 1886 was
a hot one on the prairies, just 22 years before Slim Davis’s birth in Carmangay,
Alberta. That year saw the last major horse-raiding party of the
Old West. Canadian Piegans rode down out of the Calgary area to the Pryor
Creek area of northern Montana. They made off with 60 horses stolen from
the Crows camped there. To this day a mysterious herd of wild horses is
known to exist in the Pryor Mountain area. Some Crows say these horses
must be descendants of the surviving stock of the Custer battle at
Bighorn, which took place just a few miles away.
*
Wild Horses spotted in the Chilcotin
District of British Columbia, where legal slaughters took place in the
1980s.
Maddeningly, it is the argument
over the bloodline of the wild horses that is used today by sport hunters
and commercial hunters to rationalize their slaughter.”What are you protecting
anyway?” asked Gerry Kemp, senior wildlife management biologist with the
Alberta lands and forests department in 1974. “So-called wild horses
are only the descendants of work animals from farms, or lumbering
or mining operations that have been turned into the wild and
survived.”The best thing
that could be done with wild horses would be to “shoot ‘em all” said
Kemp.
Mustangs have, accordingly,
been shot for target practice, bated with poison for predators, slaughtered
for dog food, chased and tormented - subjected to every kind of maltreatment
know to man. Objections have been raised on the grounds of cruelty,
but professional wild horse hunters shrug their critics off. “Round ‘em
up, and shoot a tranquilizer into them, and those horses don’t give a damn
whether they end up as dog food or rodeo buckers,” one big game hunter
remarked to a Calgary reporter.
In the 1950s, the slaughter
reached high gear when hunters discovered that the horses could be panicked
by dive-bombing airplanes. Terrified horses were buzzed from above, and
raced cross-country until, at the point of exhaustion, they could
be driven into corals. Frantic, the horses were loaded into waiting
trucks for transport to auction or slaughterhouses. Many would arrive at
the slaughterhouse already dead, trampled to death in transit. It
was not an uncommon sight to see the trucks dripping blood on the
highways.
Some of the trampled
horses had simply dropped dead of fright.
Mustangs have this peculiar will to die - so sensitive and vulnerable
are they to pursuit and capture. Explorer David Thompson documented
this amazing vulnerability of mustangs as early as 1809. He wrote
in his diary while crossing the West that wild horses froze as if
paralyzed when his men merely “shouted a halloa” and dashed at them. He
was only the first of many horse runners to report the phenomenon.
Modern hunters still observe that stallions, in particular, commonly
seem unable to survive the ordeal of being captured and will
to die within hours or days of being deprived of their freedom. Whole
bands have collapsed in paroxysms of fear when subjected to the experience
of being rounded up and corralled.
Chief forester in 1959
, W.R. Hanson said, “They [protesters] talk about inhumane methods,
or protest emotionally to the government against the ‘extinction’
of one of the features of the old wild west...[but] there is nothing
cruel about the airplane roundup. The only part you might have doubt
about is the loading of the frightened animals onto trucks.”
Nevertheless, the dive-bombing bloodbaths were brought to an end
in 1959. Forest conservation officials felt pressured by public
cries for more compassionate treatment of the mustangs, and, magnanimously,
decreed that roundup by cattle horse, not by dive-bombers, was the
only humane way to go.
The
numbers of mustangs has been in dispute for more than a century.
A 1895 police census showed 42,257 wild horses on the range in Southern
Alberta. In 1958 a roundup expert said huge tracts of Alberta land carried
vast wild horse herds. “The whole place is a wild horse kingdom,” said
Chester Utter in a report in The Albertan newspaper in August, 1958. Utter
boasted that he alone had rounded up more than 40,000 horses. One year
later, in 1959, the Calgary Herald carried a front-page story saying the
horses were “facing extinction.” The next year, 1960, the Alberta Cattlemen’s
Association said there were some 3,000 still roaming at will. By 1977,
The Herald thought that about 1,000 head of wild horses roamed the foothills.
In 1991 Alberta Fish and Wildlife counted 300 mustangs roaming free in
Kananaskis Country.
In 1974, Calgary Socred MLA
Art Dixon agreed with the mid-70s figure of “about 1,000”, but argued
that if the annual hunt continued the horses would soon be wiped
out. Spurred on by Slim Davis and the thousands of names he had collected
on a petition, Dixon successfully lobbied the Alberta legislature to
stop the regular issuing of hunting permits for wild horses.
With this regulatory move
in 1974, horses roaming on Crown lands in Alberta could no longer
be legally hunted. But horses straying onto private lands were, and still
are, treated as fair game for hunters, in season year- round.
A private members’ bill passed
by the Klein government in 1993 making the capture of horses on public
land more than just a minor regulatory infraction merely re-jigs
the 1974 regulation. Mustangs that make the horrible mistake of straying
onto private property are still legal prey for hunters in Alberta.
In B.C., in 1988 the Vancouver Sun
reported three herds of mustangs ranging the Chilcotin district .
The largest of the herds, the Red Brush herd, numbered 150. Two smaller
herds, theBidwell
and Haines Creek herds, were legally massacred in 1988, reducing their
combined numbers from well over 100 to 35. Regional wildlife
officials authorized the 1988 roundup, claiming the horses were reducing
valuable grazing land during a severe drought.
Wild horse lovers passionately
challenge hunters’ claims that most mustangs are just feral rejects,
not living descendants of heritage stock.
American
wild horse advocate Hope Ryden attacked the “feral” argument in the
1970s. Ryden, who worked as features producer for ABC
News from 1966 to 1968, argued persuasively in her book America’s
Last Wild Horses that the very fact that these horses have prevailed
for so long against so many odds - hunters, bitter weather, rough
terrain, extensive grazing competition and high infant mortality
- suggests that they must come from exceptionally hardy stock, namely,
the Spanish stock of the original Indian ponies. Rejects from domestic
herds, she argues, would never have survived over the years under
such conditions.
“It was the animal that
was originally the most ‘Western’ that survived the harsh test of
the wild. The big, slow gentle farm horses and the high - strung,
grain-fed horses were not creatures that could easily adapt to bleak
habitats and rugged winters,” wrote Ryden.
Ryden further warranted the
purity of the mustang pedigree based on the fact that there has been no
genetic break in the continuity of the wild horse bloodline from
the last century to this century. Since the West was opened, she
pointed out, though the total number of wild horses has dwindled
drastically the wild horse population did not at any time vanish.
Therefore, she said, the mustang bloodline extends perfectly from
the 16th century to present day. From Columbus to Slim Davis’s mare - one
unbroken genetic heritage.
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