UNTIL A COUPLE of years ago, I had no idea that wild horses had ever roamed in Canada. A button on the shirt of a grocery store clerk, urging Save the Wild Horses, was my first inkling that they existed -- and the prospect of perhaps seeing some of them was exciting.
An old rancher assured me that wild horses, called mustangs (a corruption of the Spanish mesteno, meaning ownerless), did indeed roam in the mountains west of Calgary, but they were difficult to find. I had high hopes, nonetheless, as I set out in the first blush of a December dawn by small plane for the eastern fringe of the Rockies, the same mountains that figured so prominently, millions of years ago, in the early history of the horse.
It all began in the Miocene epoch, about 20 million years ago. During this period, which lasted for 18 million years, the global climate became cooler and drier, and the Rocky Mountains were developing. As they thrust upward, they intercepted the weather systems drifting in from the Pacific and leached out the moisture from the clouds, leaving little rain for the lands farther east. This drying effect combined with the climatic cooling resulted in a gradual disappearance of the forests east of the mountains and the growth of grasslands in their place. New groups of animals evolved to take advantage of this new open environment and new source of food. One of these groups was the horses.
The earliest ancestor of the horse was Hyracotherium (also called Eohippus), a creature that looked more like a dog or a cat than a hoofed animal. Dr. Bruce Naylor, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, describes Hyracotherium as "a small forest animal less than half a metre tall. It had four toes on its front legs and three on the back. Its foot may have looked like that of a dog's, with soft pads. From the shape of its teeth I would guess that it was a browser and fed on leaves and fruits."
With the emergence of the grasslands, North America became the centre of horse evolution. Over millions of years, and through a series of stages, the horse slowly changed to resemble the animal we know today. Removed from the constraints of a dense forest, the open-country descendants of Hyracotherium developed larger bodies. In the wide open spaces of the grasslands, they could no longer rely on concealment to protect them from predators, so flight became their defence. To run faster, their legs got longer and they gradually lost all their toes except the middle one, which evolved into a hoof.
But grass is a much tougher, more fibrous material than leaves. It contains silica which is abrasive and wears down teeth rapidly. Also, at certain times of the year, its nutritional value is low, so it must be eaten in great quantities. The small, low-crowned teeth of Hyracotherium were quite unsuited to this food. Thus, early horses also needed a change in dentition if they were to survive. Hence, the emergence of wide, strong front teeth to clip off the grass, and large, high-crowned molars to chew it up. To accommodate the large cheek teeth, the horse's face grew longer.
During each of the evolutionary stages, North American horses (represented by dozens of different species) migrated to Asia, at first by a land bridge that connected Greenland, Iceland and Europe, and later by one that linked Alaska to Siberia. The Alaska-Siberian land bridge was used by many migrating animals. Camels, which also originated in North America, migrated west with the horses. Moving in the opposite direction were immigrants from Asia and Africa: bison, deer, mammoths and mastodons, and with them their predators, the lions, bears, wolves, sabre-tooth tigers and Stone Age man. Most of the horse species that migrated to Asia became extinct, but a few survived and their descendants diversified and became the present-day zebras, asses and horses.
Worldwide, the horse family is represented today by seven species: three of zebra (mountain, plains and Grevy's); three of wild ass (African, Asiatic and Tibetan); and Przewalski's horse.
Przewalski's horse (pronounced shev-all-ski) is the only truly wild relative of the domestic horse alive today. It is a handsome sandy-brown animal standing 1.5 metres tall at the shoulder, with an erect black mane, a long black tail and a dark stripe down the middle of its back. Native to the steppes of central Russia, Przewalski's horse was last seen in the wild in Mongolia in 1968. It survives today only in zoos.
If Przewalski's horse is the only living forbear of the modern horse, can we assume then that it is also the predecessor of the modern horse? Some authorities say yes, but most are uncertain. The modern horse may have evolved from a species similar to Przewalski's horse, or from several different species domesticated in separate areas at about the same time.
Although the origin of the modern horse remains an enigma, there is less mystery about when the horse was first tamed. Sometime around 2500 BC, the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes domesticated the wild horse. Initially the animal was used as a beast of burden and to pull chariots in warfare. In the 5th Century AD, the Chinese invented the stirrup, increasing the horseman's hold on his mount, and so cavalry began. Breeders then concentrated on producing huge, strong battle horses that could bear the weight of heavy armour as well as armour-clad warriors on their backs.
When primitive man first arrived in North America 25,000 years ago (some authorities say 60,000), he encountered numerous different large animals, including several dozen species of horse. Many of these large animals started to disappear as the last glaciers began to wane, a little over 12,000 years ago. Over a period of 5,000 years (a relatively short time in geological reckoning), nine families of large land mammals vanished from North America, among them giant armadillos, giant ground sloths, camels, mastodons, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, long-horned bison and all of the horses. Although some scientists argue that the warming of the climate produced the extinctions, it is tempting to suggest that man, the hunter, was responsible. Charred skeletal remains of horses from the campfires of early man attest to his predation on these animals. The most recent fossil horse in North America comes from two sites in Alberta dated at 6000 BC. Thus, by the time the horse was domesticated in Europe it had been extinct in North America for several thousand years.
The Spanish brought the horse back to its home in North America, completing the animal's westerly migration all around the world. The horse may have arrived in the West Indies as early as 1493, when Columbus made his second voyage. Certainly, by the early 1500s, Spanish soldiers were mounted during their campaigns through Mexico and the American southwest. The horse they brought to the New World was the Andalusian, a crossbreed between the heavy battle horses of Europe and the light, agile Barb horses of the Moors of North Africa. Within a few years, the Spanish had established horse breeding centres in the larger West Indian islands of Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica. Horses reared in these subtropical environments, they discovered, endured the climate of the Americas better than animals imported from Europe. These would become the horses of the North American Indians.
It is said that when the Indians first saw horses they were terrified, believing the mounted Spaniards to be monsters with the heads and trunks of men and the bodies of four-legged animals. This attitude quickly changed, and within a few years, horses were revered by Indians as sacred, gifts from the gods. The Spaniards used Indians as stable workers and grooms, and despite a royal edict prohibiting Indians from riding horses, they inevitably learned to mount the animals they tended.
By 1600, whether by trading or theft, the Comanche, Kiowa and Apache of the American southwest had acquired the horse. Now it spread north and west like a prairie fire, and by 1730 the horse was again grazing on the Canadian plains, after an absence of 9,000 years or so.
The impact of the horse upon the Indian was described by James Mooney, a 19th-Century ethnologist: "Without the horse the Indian was a half-starved skulker in the timber, creeping up on foot towards unwary deer or building a brush corral with infinite labour to surround a herd of antelope, and seldom venturing more than a few days journey from home. With the horse he was transformed into the daring buffalo hunter, able to procure in a single day enough food to supply his family for a year, leaving him free to sweep the plains with his war parties along a range of a thousand miles."
In Canada, all the Plains Indians (Cree, Assiniboine, Piegan, Blood and Blackfoot) acquired the horse, but it was the Blackfoot tribe that became the consummate equestrians, and the horse pervaded every part of their culture. Not only was it used in hunting, warfare and as a beast of burden, the horse was a measure of one's wealth and became a medium of exchange. Horses were traded for weapons and medicine pipes, and shamans (medicine men) were paid one or more horses for their services. Horses were also exchanged for slaves and wives; among the Blackfoot, 20 horses was a common price for a wife. The horse also frequently played a role in the settlement of marital disagreements. An early chronicler remarked that in cases of unfaithfulness, the most common revenge taken by an enraged husband was to kill or take the horses "of the wife's galant (sic), besides unmercifully beating her." Among the Cree, the gift of a horse from an adulterer generally placated the aggrieved husband.
The horse, like the buffalo, figured prominently in the religious life of the Plains Indians as well, in some Blackfoot funeral rites, a warrior's horses were slain so he could ride them to the world of the spirits. After the death of one important Blackfoot chief, 150 horses were slaughtered. The Assiniboine, on the other hand, turned a man's horses loose when he died.
By 1885 the buffalo had been eliminated from the Canadian Prairies and the Plains Indians were soon confined to reservations. This spelled the demise of the Indian horse culture. Along with the Tartars and the Arabs, the North American Plains Indians had been one of the few truly equestrian cultures.
From the beginning of the horse's reintroduction into North America by the Spaniards, some animals escaped and became wild. Strictly speaking, these horses should be called feral, not wild, since they came from domestic stock. But after three or four generations on their own, the horses were wild in every sense of the word. The wild horse population gradually increased by natural reproduction and the addition of domestic stock that escaped or was deliberately turned loose. By the end of the 18th Century, wild horses in North America numbered between two and six million and ranged over much of the continent west of the Mississippi, from the Rio Grande in the south to the Athabasca River in the north.
Settlers coming to Western Canada in the early 1800s found herds of wild horses from Saskatchewan to British Columbia. These herds were gradually pushed into remote areas as settlement advanced, but their numbers continued to grow, supplemented by strays from ranching, mining and logging operations.
Wild horses have long been regarded by ranchers as range robbers, competing with livestock and wild game for grazing land and luring away domestic mares. So the mustangs were shot, poisoned and rounded up, either to be domesticated once again or rendered into pet food or canned meat that was shipped to Europe for human consumption. Through most of this century, however, all these activities, which were sporadic at best, had little effect on the population.
Then in the 1960s and early '70s it became apparent that the mustang's survival was in jeopardy as more and more of its habitat was added to man's expanding domain. People in both Canada and the United States began calling for the protection of the wild horse, claiming that it symbolized the spirit of the "Old West". Three refuge areas for mustangs were established in the United States -- in Nevada, Colorado and Montana. Currently, there are some 50,000 wild horses in the United States, spread throughout 10 western states. In Canada, there are few, if any, wild horses left in Saskatchewan, and only about 1,000 animals in each of Alberta and British Columbia. Nearly 70 percent of Alberta's mustangs are found in the Bow-Crow Forest, which was where my plane was headed.
I spotted the first group of horses in a forest meadow. Eight animals, black and dark brown, were pawing the snow in a clearing beside a small stream. Mustangs are well adapted to feeding during the winter, digging holes in the snow, as do caribou and bison, to uncover forage plants. A few kilometres up the stream was another group of four. The old rancher had been right, wild horses still roamed in the Rockies.
Current government policy concerning wild horses in Alberta and British Columbia is to tolerate the animals as long as they stay in remote areas. Recent studies have confirmed some of the claims that ranchers have made for decades. Wild horses do compete for forage with free-ranging cattle and with wild game, particularly elk during the winter months. However, the last time the Alberta government tried to round up the horses, in 1983, there was such a public outcry that the roundup was quickly cancelled.
Clearly, unless and until public opinion changes, Canada's wild horses are assured a home on the range.
