Product Description
by Mabel Dipper Brislawn (Author)
Do horse-lovers actually love horses? Would they rush to rescue a horse-breed facing extinction? One such breed was the descendents of the horses Columbus took on his second voyage in 1493: Indigenous Iberian horses - the most natural and hardy horses in the world. From Hispaniola, in a few years, the Spaniards had been furnished with their best instrument for the occupation of America. The campaigns of Cortez in Mexico and Yucatan; those of DeSoto in Florida; those of Darien; those of Pizarro in Peru; Valdivia in Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, all were the result of the endurance, the rusticity, and the acclimatization ability of these horses from the Peninsula. With the settlement of the Americas, these Spanish horses of the most rustic kind were spread from the snows of the Andes to the tropical heat of Panama, Columbia, and Venezuela; from the altitudes of 19,680 feet in Ecuador and Peru; in the cold of Patagonia and the dirt of Fogo; in the frozen plains of North America and in the deserts of Arizona and Sonora. For the people in the US West, far, far away from the old home grounds, in wild, open country where it was necessary for one to make their own, new, home ground, there was plenty of need for good horses. Good Horses, that is, because anyone that wasn't on horseback had horses pulling whatever they were riding in. They quickly found that in this wide, rough country they needed tougher horses than they already had - horses that would not go lame, break a leg, or play out. The larger breeds weren't holding up. Small horses could whip like fury through the rocks, trees, or sagebrush where it was hard for bigger horses to go. Small horses were needed on the stagecoaches, too, because a draft team of larger horses could not stand the strain when traveling fast. And as chance would have it, there were Good Horses available right at hand that had been brought in by the Spanish explorers. These small, intelligent, quick as lightning, almost uncrushable horses had been found to be the ideal horse for the frontier and pioneering conditions of what became the Western United States. These were, then, the Cayuse, the Chevaux (au) Pelouse, the Texas Pony, the Indian Pony, the Cowpony, the New World Spanish Barb, the Cavallo, the Spanish Pony, and the Spanish Mustang that roamed free throughout the West. At the same time, these horses were as beautiful as they were stalwart and strong. Put a Spanish Don and his accouterments on one of these horses and you would see appear before your startled eyes a magnificent Spanish fancy riding horse. And what did horse-lovers do? This book tells of a long, hard trail ...
