the stationary Pueblos of the Rockies. The men that
later conquered and corralled these wild-riding Plains Indians were
plainsmen on horses and cavalrymen. The earliest American explorers and
trappers of both Plains and Rocky Mountains went out in the saddle. The
first industrial link between the East and the West was a mounted pack
train beating out the Santa Fe Trail. On west beyond the end of this
trail, in Spanish California, even the drivers of oxen rode horseback.
The first transcontinental express was the Pony Express.

Outlaws and bad men were called "long riders." The Texas Ranger who
followed them was, according to his own proverb, "no better than his
horse." Booted sheriffs from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to the Hole
in the Wall in the Big Horn Mountains lived in the saddle. Climactic of
all the riders rode the cowboy, who lived with horse and herd.

In the Old West the phrase "left afoot" meant nothing short of being
left flat on your back. "A man on foot is no man at all," the saying
went. If an enemy could not take a man's life, the next best thing was
to take his horse. Where cow thieves went scot free, horse thieves were
hanged, and to say that a man was "as common as a horse thief" was to
express the nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who
slept with a six-shooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the horn
was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel Colt" made all
men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in swiftness and
mobility.

The proudest names of civilized languages when literally translated mean
"horseman": eques, caballero, chevalier, cavalier. Until just yesterday
the Man on Horseback had been for centuries the symbol of power and
pride. The advent of the horse, from Spanish sources, so changed the
ways and psychology of the Plains Indians that they entered into what
historians call the Age of Horse Culture. Almost until the automobile
came, the whole West and Southwest were dominated by a Horse Culture.

Material on range horses is scattered through the books listed under
"Range Life," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Pony Express."

No thorough comprehension of the Spanish horse of the Americas is
possible without consideration of this horse's antecedents, and that
involves a good deal of the horse history of the world.

BROWN, WILLIAM ROBINSON. _The Horse of the Desert_ (no publisher or
place on title page), 1936; reprinted by Macmillan, New York. A