98 INDIAN PONIES. 



quite common, and it is difficult to trace its source, unless we accept the 

 common belief that it is derived from horses inhabiting the mountainous 

 parts of Persia and adjoining countries, through the Spanish and French 

 ancestry. 



Indian Ponies are, as a rule, kind and gentle, enduring as much in 

 the colder regions of the Northwest as do their Mustang relations in the 

 Southwest. There is very little ill-temper observed among northern 

 Indian Ponies: a simple fact whether due to different treatment or to 

 modification by Canadian crosses, we do not pretend to say. 



DESCRIPTION AND CHARACTERISTICS. 



Color, dark bay, brown and spotted (bay and white and brown and 

 white), with almost always darker points. Some of these ponies are a 

 most beautiful blood-bay, with black points, and, when they can be 

 obtained, make excellent saddle ponies. (As a rule the better class of 

 Indians are loth to part with their ponies, and even when a sale has 

 been completed, it is no uncommon thing for the Indian to become sick 

 of his bargain before the pony is out of sight, and insist on buying it 

 back again.) 



In height they stand about 12 to 13 or 14 hands, weighing from 650 

 to 850 pounds; they are rather more blockily built than Mustangs, the 

 cannons are wider, and the pasterns more on the upright order. 



The illustration was engraved from a photograph taken in the 

 Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, and we take this occasion to return 

 thanks to Mr. E. J. Smith, of Woodford, I. T. (now of Denison, Texas), 

 for his kind assistance in securing it. The ponies represented weigh 

 about 700 pounds each, and are said by the Indians to be purely Indian 

 bred as far back as their ancestry is known. The boy holding them is 

 a i /-year-old full-blooded Chickasaw, by name John Turnbull. 



