History of the Spanish Mustang
The American Horse
By Callie Heacock
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On his second voyage, in 1493, Christopher Columbus landed 10 mares and 20 stallions of Spanish breeding at Hispaniola. Those horses were the ancestors jof the Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw herds that came down the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma in the 1830's. At Vera Cruz, in 1519, Hernando Cortez brought ashore 10 stallions and 6 mares along with a colt born on the journey. For almost 500 years, the descendants of these and other horses of Spanish origin have dwelt in the western reaches of the North American continent, a swirling kaleidoscope of bright color across the western landscape. They had few natural enemies and for centuries flourished and multiplied over the prairies and plains and in remote mountain areas.
J. Frank Dobie wrote in The Mustangs "...the wild ones, the coyote duns, the smokies, the blue roans, ...the shining blacks and thr rusty browns, the red roans, toasted sorrels and the stockinged bays, the splotched Appaloosas and the cream-maned palominos, and all the others in shadings of color as various as the hues that show and fade on the clouds at sunset-they are all gone now-gone as completely as the free grass they vivified." Dobie was mistaken.
In the early years of the twentieth century, a small number of horsemen, including Gilbert Jones and Bob and Ferdie Brislawn, saved the true Spanish Mustang from extinction. Born in the dying years of the old West, they loved the small, tough horses of their youth. They were men whose eyes saw farther than the horizon, into a future where the Spanish horses would be devalued and destroyed by the coming of the automobile, leasing of grazing rights in the West to ranchers who wanted no horses competing with their cattle for grass, and a public preference for more modern, larger breeds.
These westerners collected the purest Spanish horses to be found fromall over the West, and began breeding programs to preserve the unique characteristics of this first American horse. They were traded for or bought from various tribes who had over the centuries acquired them from the Spanish explorers and missionaries. They were selected from the wild herds, and from a few ranchers who had preserved their lines as cow ponies. There were pitifully few. Records were kept and registries founded to keep the blood pure. Bob Brislawn founded the Spanish Mustang Registry in 1957, after half a century of breeding true and recording the bloodlines. There is also the Southwest Spanish Mustang Association, begun by Gilbert Jones. There are perhaps 3,000 horses alive pure enoughto have been registered as Spanish Mustangs. They are often gaited, as were their Spanish ancestors. Their intelligence is as great as their heart and stamina. They are rare, and very beautiful.
These horses are living history-a history of the West, of iron-clad men with beards and pikes, or brown-robed missionaries, of Comanche and Choctaw, Shoshone and Sioux, Nez Perce and Cheyenne, the mounts of the Pony Express. Their ancestors ran with the wind in their coats of many colors. They have survived much as they have always been and, unlike other breeds, are alswya shown in their natural state, unclipped, unbraided, no leg wraps, no hoof paint. Spanish Mustangs need no special care, and are often ridden in 50 and 100 mile endurance races directly from their pasturage, unshod. On Black Jack Mountain in Oklahoma, where the 50 mile endurance races are run every year the the SSMA meetings, the winner usually finishes in less than 5 hours, over harsh, steep and rocky paths.
(Some feral horses still roam in the Western states under the management of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and are periodically rounded up and offered for adoption. Occasionally a Spanish Mustang type horse will be found there, but most have little incommon with the true Spanish Mustang, the raza pura).
