Wild Horses at Play

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Horses cavorting on the plains (Plate 3)."Next in importance to the buffalo, for the use of man, is the horse, which is found joint-occupant with the Indian and buffalo over most of the vast plains and prairies of America as yet unoccupied by cultivating Man. These, though not aborigines, may still have been, by the inscrutable design of Providence, placed in this country for the benefit of man, and we therefore find him in almost every part of North America mounted upon their backs, his faithful and attached friends and companions in deadly war and in the excitements of the chase.By several times forcing myself into close company with these bands on the prairie, on a fleet horse; and by often deliberately reconnoitering them with a good glass, as well as from the many thousands of them I have seen in the use of the Indians, I have found them to be generally small and delicate of limb, but tolerably fleet and a band together, completely and most pleasingly mottled; often presenting as many varieties of colors and forms of marks as a kennel of hounds. They are certainly animals capable of performing wonderful feats and of enduring great fatigue and like the buffalo, subsist entirely on the grass of the prairies and that in very cold as well cold as well as in southern latitudes."