The Great Santa Fe Trail
Horse Race Endurance Ride
August 31 through September 13, 2008
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Kaw Nation RVing the Race News Join the Ride 2008 Spring Ride |
The History of the Horse on the Santa Fe TrailWritten by Rob Phillips Ever since I was a very young boy, I was in love with horses and admired the people who rode or worked with them. At the age of five, I went about trying to make money so I could buy my first horse. I raised young chickens on our farm to sell to the city folks. In the spring of 1950, a farm family across the county was selling out. They had a paint horse named "Mickey". "Mickey" had to be mine! Thank goodness my mother and father thought so too. As the years went by, it almost became a game to me to find out what part horses and mules played in the building of country roads, highways, etc. I wanted to know how the freight was hauled and where did all the horses come from. I also was amazed at what people accomplished by working with horses prior to the development of powerful earth-moving equipment. In the 1940's, my father hauled gravel from the Verdigris River bed to the Virgil township roads in southern Kansas. The gravel was loaded by hand, hauled by horses, and spread on the road by pulling the wagon floor boards out and letting the gravel fall to the road below. The wagon was pulled by Ladd and Belle, my father's draft horses. My father purchased his first tractor in 1943, one year before I was born. 
Not to get carried away with my love of horses, but to set the stage for my story "The History of the Horse on the Santa Fe Trail". It came as a real surprise to me as a fourth or fifth grader, learning Kansas history that horses were not always on this continent. We learned Francisco Vasquez de Coronado traveled to Kansas looking for the "Seven Cities of Gold" and the Native Americans were surprised to see men riding 'big dogs' and thinking that man and horse were one. (How could that be, I thought, horses had been around forever.) How could it be that there were horses in other parts of the world and not in America? After some reading, I found that horses had been on the North American continent 10,000-12,000 years ago. This horse was the pre-historic Eohippus. It is believed that the horse originated in North America and none survived the pre-historic times, except those that migrated to Asia over the land bridge, which connected Alaska to Siberia. It is still unknown what caused the annihilation of the horse in North America during pre-historic times. When Cortez brought horses to what is now Vera Cruz in 1519, it was the first time horses had been in North America for 10,000 years. The horses brought over by Cortez and other Conquistadors carried the bloodlines of the Spanish Barb, Arabian, Lipizzaner, and some other European breeds. So, how did the first horses get to the Santa Fe Trail? They came with Coronado in 1540-1542, just about twenty years after the horse returned to North America. Coronado's records show that he had 1000 horses and 500 pack animals - what a sight! A Timeline of Horses on the Santa Fe Trail
*U.S. Mexican War |
