IB THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



beat all the others, so the breeder of the saddler will go to the 

 handsomest and best of all his tribe, and when we reach the horse 

 that is perfect in symmetry, style, quality, and disposition, he will 

 be a saddle horse and no questions will be asked about what par- 

 ticular combinations of blood he may possess. He will be strictly 

 eclectic, with the one exception of the inheritance of gait, and he 

 will be the result of wise choosing in his size and structure, and 

 of skillful handling in his disposition and manners. 



The Wild Horse of the plains and pampas of .North and South 

 America was at one time an object of great interest and curiosity 

 with all our people. No schoolboy of sixty or seventy years ago 

 knew any lesson in his geography so well as the one which pic- 

 tured and described the millions of wild horses that roamed over 

 the Western plains. In the field of imagination and exaggerated 

 fiction he was a fairly good second to the Arabian both arrant 

 humbugs, at least so far as their merits have been tested. In the 

 past, the question has sometimes been asked, tentatively, 

 whether the horse may not have been indigenous on this conti- 

 nent? The paleontologists have undertaken to answer this ques- 

 tion in the affirmative and have produced the bones of what they 

 call the horse to prove it. This ' 'horse' ' is scant fifteen inches 

 high and he has three, four or five toes on each foot. These toes 

 resemble "claws" more than anything else. They tell us these 

 little animals flourished over two millions of years before man was 

 placed on the earth, and that they are now found imbedded in 

 the solid rock, say two hundred feet below the general surface. 

 The outline drawing of horses on works supposed to have been 

 erected by a prehistoric and lost race, and also the linguistic ques- 

 tion as to whether any of the oldest Indian tribes had any word 

 representing the . horse, will be fully considered, with that pre- 

 sented by the paleontologists, in the chapter devoted to the Wild 

 Horse. Too much prominence has been given to the horses of 

 Cortez in his conquest of Mexico, as the progenitors of the Amer- 

 ican wild horse. He had very-few horses in his command, and it 

 is very doubtful whether any of them escaped the slaughter of 

 battle and found a home in the wilderness. The horses in the 

 army of the unfortunate Ferdinand De Soto, that were aban- 

 doned on the confines of Texas, after his death, became the pro- 

 genitors of all the wild horses of North America. 



The remarkable pre-eminence to which Messenger attained as 

 the founder of a great race of trotters, in his own right and by 



