WORKING HORSES OF THE WEST

The first great westward migration from the newly minted United States of America occurred between the Revolutionary War at the end of the 18th century and the Civil War in the middle of the 19th. People who came over the Appalachian Mountains brought thousands of horses into country where horses had not lived since their extinction in North America 10,000 years ago. In the last several installments of this series, we have studied in detail how horses that escaped or were set loose became landraces—populations of domestic horses having distinctive conformation and way of going, which are traditionally bred by rural people, and which exist both as farm-kept animals and often also as feral herds.

Two landraces developed east of the Mississippi: a more northern population which can be called the Morgan landrace, and a more southern population which is called the Mountain Horse. From the Morgan landrace during the 1880s Joseph Battell chose about 400 animals to found his Morgan horse registry, which is the origin of the Morgan horse breed as a formal entity.

Beginning in the late 1950s, from the Mountain Horse landrace a number of breeders in mid-South states likewise chose “foundational” individuals, in this case to suit the particular purposes of a half-dozen breeds including the Rocky Mountain, Mountain Pleasure, Missouri Fox Trotter, Kentucky Saddler, Racking Horse and Spotted Saddle Horse. The roots of the much larger American Saddlebred and American Quarter Horse breeds also lie in the Mountain Horse population. Exactly as with the Morgan, the animals themselves existed for more than a century, but registries were not established until much later. Only when there is a registry can we begin speaking of a given type of horse as a “breed.”

The second great American expansion, which began in earnest in the decades leading up to the Civil War, carried pioneers and settlers across the Mississippi. When the pioneers arrived on the plains, one of the first things they bumped into was the Colonial Spanish horse—the Mustang—an equine landrace already well established, one that developed from Spanish exploration and conquest. But the pioneers themselves would soon help in establishing another equine population, which we will call the Plains Cayuse Landrace. The term “Cayuse” originally pertained to a type found in Washington and Oregon, but I use the term in its extended sense here, to mean “Indian ponies” and “horses with mixed Spanish ancestry.” They are the horses who deserve