The Spanish contributed most largely to the American holding of that vast indefinite West of ours that they once claimed, when they allowed to straggle northward across the plains, into the hand of Indian or white man, this same lean and wiry horse, carrying to the deserts of America the courage of his far-off Moorish blood, his African adaptability to long journeys on short fare.[2] The man that followed the Ohio and Missouri to the edge of the plains, the trapper, the hunter, the adventurer of the fur trade, had been wholly helpless without the horse. For a time the trading posts might cling to the streams, but there was a call to a vast empire between the streams, where one could not walk, where no boat could go, nor any wheeled vehicle whatever. Here, then, came the horse, the thing needed.
The white adventurer may have brought his horse with him by certain slow generations of advance, or he may have met him as he moved West; at times he captured and tamed him for himself, again he bought him of the Indian, or took him without purchase. Certainly in the great open reaches of the farther West the horse became man's most valuable property, the unit of all recognized current values. The most serious, the most unforgivable crime was that of horse stealing. To kill a man in war, man to man, was a matter of man and man, and to be regarded at times with philosophy; but to take away without quarrel and by stealth what was most essential to man's life or welfare was held equivalent to murder unprovoked and of a despicable nature. To be "set afoot" was one of the horrors long preserved in memory by the idiom of Western speech.
The food of this horse, then, was generally what he might gain by forage. In furnishings, his bridle was sometimes a hide lariat, his saddle the buckskin pad of the Indians. Stirrups the half-wild white man sometimes discarded, after the fashion of the Indian, who rode by the clinging of his legs turned back, or by purchase of his toes thrust in between the foreleg and the body of his mount. A fleet horse, one much valued in the chase or in war, might be his master's pet, tied close to his house of skin at night, or picketed near-by at the lonesome bivouac. He might have braided in his forelock the eagle feather that his white master himself would have disdained to wear as ornament. Of grooming the horse knew nothing, neither did he ever know a day of shelter.