Horse of the Americas

America's First True Horse
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Please join us in the celebration of North America's First True Horse, the Colonial Spanish Horse. HOA is a unified registry open to Original Indian Horses, Barbs, Spanish Barbs & Spanish Mustangs. CS type horses from the wild may be registered by inspection. These include (but are not limited to): Sulphur, Kiger, Pryor Mountain, Cerbat, Mt. Taylor and Florida Cracker.


From Charlie Russell's, Trails Plowed Under:

Charlie Russell on one of his horses

Charlie Russell ( 1864-1929) was the consumate cowboy artist, but in 1927, just two years before his death, he wrote a book of short stories entitled, Trails Plowed Under. These stories tell of a West that once was, and within these warm and often humourous stories is one entitled, 'The Ghost Horse.'

Charlie dates the story 45 years before his present, putting the tale at the end of the Horse Lords era on the Great Plains. A pinto colt is born to an old mare in a Crow Indian camp, and while only hours old, he is judged to be the best of the Crow horses, a buffalo runner. As a five year old, the colt is trained to run after the buffalo, but he is captured by the Piegan raiding party. When his rider dies from his wounds, his pinto prize is shot so he won't have to walk in the afterlife, but the game pinto does not die and follows the Piegans back to their camp. In time he is sold to a *greybeard* and boy.

This is the conclusion of the story:

Some years later two riders, one leading a pack horse, traveled between the Missouri River and the Highwood Mountains. One of them pointed to a heavy smoke that showed on the horizon, a little south of west. "There's where we camp to-night," said he. The name of this town was Great Falls, Montana.

It was dark when they reached the town which the smoke had led them to, and their ponies, which knew no lights but Nature's, jumped at the great shadows made by the arc lights at the street crossings. They passed rows of saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and after enquiring the way of a bystander, rode to the Park stables, where they unsaddled and stripped the pack horse of their bedding and grub.

Now, under the overhanging light of the stable, I will describe the riders and their mounts.

One rider was rather slender with black hair and eyes. The other was of medium height, with light hair worn rather long. Both men were dressed as cow hands, and the only difference in their clothes was a bright colored, French half-breed sash, worn by the light-haired man. The latter's mount was a rangy gray, branded Diamond G, one of the old Geddis herd. The pack horse which he led was a bay pinto. The darker man rode a brown, strongly-built bronco, which snorted at every strange thing he saw. The rider of the brown bronc was Henry Stough. The other, who rode the gray, was the writer of this story. The pinto pack horse was Paint, called Monty by his owner. When Paint died near Great Falls, he had been with his master twenty-five years.

Reference Source Link


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Updated on June 30, 2011
BK/GLP/VI