By Roberta McKern
While venturing into the East Linn Museum, what we see among the artifacts can pique
associations.
This is true in the mezzanine, where ranching and stock-raising equipment is displayed along with logging, carpentry, blacksmithing, and other tools. We see branding irons, saddles, a hand-braided leather lariat made by Holley’s legendary blacksmith Justin Philpot, a pair of orange angora chaps, saddles including two side saddles for the ladies, bridles, and more horse tack.
For those of us who haven’t much ventured into days of the “old west” farther than Zane Grey novels and Saturday matinee movies back when we were young enough to play rustlers and
cowboys, the worn articles displayed inspire speculation abetted by Wikipedia and the
diaries of Lewis and Clark.
A large ox yoke located nearby brings thoughts of the Oregon Trail. Was that saddle used by young Bluford Moss or one of the Weddle boys riding as scouts for the wagon trains bringing them west? Was that lightweight McClellan saddle designed by the Civil War General George McClellan?
Why not check an old Sears Roebuck catalog? Accordingly, we discover this basic saddle could be had for $3.70 in 1893, but the general remained un-mentioned.
Visible stirrups bring thoughts of ancient history and Attila’s Huns, which lead to visions of horse and wagon migrations and the Oregon Trail and before its blazing, the journey from St. Louis to the Oregon Coast by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, which stimulated the idea of Manifest Destiny among the admirers of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.
At the core of these speculations stand the horse and a couple of lines from a lullaby,
“Blacks and Bays, Dapples and Grays, all the pretty little horses.” In reality, as we travel
around the museum we don’t see many pictures of horses.
By 1976, when the museum was founded, the horse was thoroughly replaced by the automobile. However, the story of the horse in America goes back farther than we might think, millions of years in fact, something many of us have forgotten about.
Modern scientists believe the horse actually evolved in America at one time, being about the size of a dog, with five toed feet. William Clark found an early fossil after his return from his Oregon journey when he visited a salt lick and recovered fossilized leg bones (possibly he recognized what they were from eating horses on his overland journey when rations got low). He sent what he found to Thomas Jefferson, who had encouraged Lewis and Clark to collect flora and fauna and other specimens they might encounter including information about native Americans, stimulating Clark’s scientific interests.
It took a little longer for scientists to get involved mainly because the knowledge regarding geology, paleobotany, and paleozoology had to be developed which it did rapidly in the 1800s spurred forward by Darwin and Wallace’s writings on evolution. The horse fossil record seemed to clearly support the theory of change over long periods of time.
At any rate, the horse evolved and left its bones on what became the Great Plains across which the Oregon Trail meandered according to supplies or water and grass needed by livestock imported from Europe; horses, cattle, and oxen. As a domesticate, the horse had made quite a journey.
Like American Indians, horses crossed the land bridge created in the Bering Strait when the Ice Age locked up so much water in glaciation that the sea levels dropped. It’s now thought horses, as well as humans and other animals, made several crossings over the land bridge.
Humans came to the New World. Horses went to the Old, leaving behind a decreasing population faced with extinction along with such megafaunas as mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, and other good-sized creatures.
Were they eaten by the human sojourners from Siberia who would populate the American north and south and in-between? Did they die of climate change? Or did meteorites create massive fires adding to volcanic destruction?
Whatever happened, the big critters succumbed.
Then about 5,000 years ago on the steppes of Mongolia, the horse was being domesticated and turned into a beast of burden. Other animals, like cattle, swine, sheep, and goats were also being moved more into the human orbit. With the invention of the wheel, humans harnessing horses and oxen to wagons increased their mobility and ability to maraud, murder, and migrate!
So, here come the Huns. Nomadic pastoralists, they traveled in wagons and drove their livestock along with them. They also terrorized their neighbors.
They have been credited with inventing the stirrup. It allowed them to develop a highly efficient cavalry because the Hun could ride a horse while using his knees to guide it, leaving both arms
to shoot arrows from a strong composite bow.
Their famous leader, Attila, managed to extort a pay-off when he attacked the Byzantines, but Pope Leo I talked him into removing his armies without sacking Rome. Possibly, there was disease in Rome.
The Huns went west, but pestilence stalked them. Attila died soon after and the Huns faded
into history, leaving the Germanic tribes, which had hustled to avoid the Huns behind them to sack Rome in 455 AD and hasten the end of the Roman Empire.
We don’t think of our pioneers as acting like the Huns as they pushed across the Great
Plains, but they sought a kind of plunder gained in “free land.” Horses, of course,
traveled along with them and they met opposition from horse-riding Indians.
How could this be if the horse had gone extinct in the new world during the Ice Age?
Europeans starting with Columbus introduced a lot of things into the Americas including
horses. As the first to set up colonies in the Americas, along with Portugal, the Spanish
re-introduced the horse along with sheep, goats, and cattle.
On the plains, escaping horses and cattle thrived. It did not take the plains Indians long to see the horse’s domestic value. Before the coming of the Spanish, Indians had depended on dogs and women to be pack animals and move camps, because they often lived near river
valleys in winter, moving to hunting camps to harvest game in the late spring.
From the time of Columbus and Spanish colonies, particularly in our Southwest, the horse was
thoroughly adopted by the plains Indians.
Hence, in around 300 years. many native Americans had changed their way of hunting and many aspects of their lives out of respect for the horse.
This enabled Lewis and Clark on the “Voyage of Discovery” to obtain horses from the
Shoshone, with the help of Sacajawea, when they needed help on their way to the
Pacific. Much of their travel was by boat, since it was expected that the Missouri River
might lead them to a Northwest sea route and the Pacific – which, of course, proved to
be untrue.
Fortunately at their hungriest, they contacted Indian tribes willing to trade roots like camas, salmon, and dogs and horses to them. Seeing horses as wealth, Indian groups could control herds numbering in the hundreds.
As settlers from the east discovered, native Americans often targeted running stock as a favorite way of marauding whether against other Indians, the Spanish, and other European settlers.
French, English, Dutch, and Swedish colonists who founded our country also introduced
European stock into the Americas as well as the Spanish.
Settlers on the Oregon Trail set off from Independence, Mo., in the spring when the
prairie grasses stretched green before them. One theory now holds that an especially
abundant supply of grass may have set off migratory urges of horse dependent
migrants like the Huns, too.
At our museum, the display of horse associated paraphernalia should remind us of what
better part of history we owe to the horse.
Thanks to humans, horses have had a world-wide impact respected for their utility and
companionship. Many of us talk to our cars as we would to a horse, although saying
“whoa” to a Tin Lizzie is not effective!