THE \VILD HORSES OF AMERICA. 199 



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 sur- 

 face, 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 dis- 

 position 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 

 poriod 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 mys- 

 terious people seem to have been driven out by the fierce and 

 warlike savages who occuplied the country at the time of its dis- 

 covery, 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," be- 

 cause bhey 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 de- 

 fenses for their protection against their enemies. When we go 

 further West and South, into the fertile valleys among the moun 

 tains, 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 corre- 

 spondent of a Colorado newspaper, who seemed to write intelli- 

 gently and candidly, described some of those ruins which he 



