264 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



(about the size of a small Western broncho originally found 

 near Natchez and now traced all over the Southern States 

 from the isles of the Gulf of Mexico to South Carolina), 

 E. pectinatus (a large horse with very elaborate grinders found 

 in the North-Eastern and Middle States), E. pacijicus (found on 

 the coast of California and Oregon, perhaps the closest of all 

 fossil horses to E. caballus), and E. excelsus (Nebraska), there 

 is as yet no evidence that the indigenous horses had survived 

 down to the first arrival of man in that continent. But it 

 would be rash to dogmatise on this point since in a part of a 

 quarry in Nebraska where Prof Osborn and his associates on 

 the Whitney expedition obtained the remains of hundreds of 

 E. excelsus, " all the large limb bones were found broken in 

 two." 'This,' says Prof Osborn i, "suggested to me the possi- 

 bility that these large bones, the only ones known to have 

 contained marrow, had been broken by man, who was primi- 

 tively a great marrow-eater, but we searched in vain for any 

 collateral evidence of this hypothesis. To my knowledge, no 

 human remains have been found associated with those of the 

 fossil horse in North America ; but I confidently expect that 

 such association will be discovered, as it has been in South 

 America." 



It is therefore absolutely certain that there were no horses 

 in North America at the time of its discovery by Columbus. 

 Indeed it seems likely that the Indians would have domesticated 

 the indigenous horses, if any such still survived, since they 

 were so quick to tame and utilise at a later date the feral 

 horses of the western prairies. It is with the latter horses 

 and their origin that we are now concerned. It seems certain 

 that the thousands of wild horses that down to sixty years ago 

 roamed the western prairies, were all descended from the 

 horses introduced by the Spaniards, and that accordingly their 

 history is very much the same as that of the baguals of the 

 Pampas. But, whilst we know definitely that the Pampas 

 horses are all sprung from a dozen Andalusian horses, we have 

 no such explicit statements respecting the ancestry of the wild 



^ The Century Magazine, November, 1904, p. 12. 



