Mountain Horses: America’s hidden treasure
From backcountry Appalachia come the ancestors of both the American Quarter Horse and the American Saddlebred.
Many countries are home to herds of feral horses who descend from animals who escaped domestication or were deliberately let loose. These herds, which today are often considered historically important “rare breeds,” exist on offshore islands or in unpopulated “backcountry.” In North America, two types of feral horse are well-known: the mustang, with managed herds west of the Mississippi, and the Banker ponies which occur on islands (Assateague and Chincoteague, but also many others) lying off the Virginia and Carolina coasts.
Much less well-known are the feral and semi-feral herds of Appalachia. Since the Colonial period, these horses have lived in the backcountry of eastern Kentucky upon the rugged limestone plateau that buttresses the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountain chain. Today, hikers on the Appalachian Trail can observe feral herds in Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, part of Jefferson National Forest. This park is located in western Virginia near where the boundaries of Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia meet. For generations, people who live in the area have referred to these herds as “Mountain Horses.”
Since at least the 1770s, Mountain Horses have also existed in eastern Kentucky under more or less domesticated conditions. Some survive on the back acreages of farms, others on BLM land leased by upland farmers, and a scattering live in the fields, paddocks, stables and breeding sheds of local landowners. Mountain Horses were brought to the four-state area as part of America’s first great westward migration, which had already begun even before the end of the Revolutionary War and which continued unabated into the first half of the 19th century. Despite the acquisition in 1803 of the Louisiana Purchase, the first American westward push was largely confined to territory east of the Mississippi River.
The first settlement in Kentucky was Fort Boone (later Boonesborough),
founded in 1775. Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi River, had been established in 1703 by French explorers boating down the Mississippi on their way to New Orleans, while Vincennes (1732) was founded on the banks of the Wabash River by American pioneers who came from the east via the broad Buffalo Trace migrational pathway. By 1819, when Vandalia and Springfield were founded, thousands of settlers had already come to the Illinois country. In Indiana, the important Native American village at Kekionga attracted French and American traders from at least 1715 onward.
The Americans built forts that preceded towns, such as that at New Harmony (1814), which attracted not only rugged frontiersmen but the educated elite---geologists and natural historians who mapped the new country and studied and illustrated its wildlife and rapidly changing ecology. Indeed, in an astonishingly short period of time, colonists drastically changed the environment of eastern North America, decimating the forests by hewing down the tallest trees to build log homes and heat them, and to create open fields suitable for growing crops and keeping livestock. Livestock was an essential part of western migration since horses, cattle, hogs, tobacco, cotton and corn formed the core of the Anglo-American economy in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky.
Long-distance travellers during the Colonial period used the extensive network of trails established by Native Americans and roads built by pioneers. Of the latter, the two most important were the National Road, which by 1820 ran from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland, and thence all the way to Vandalia, Illinois. The earliest section of this route was Braddock’s
Road, a military road located along the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania that the young George Washington helped to survey in 1755. It was the first road built by Americans to traverse the successive ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains. Of equal importance was the Wilderness Road built under Daniel Boone’s guidance beginning in 1775. This route led through the Cumberland Gap, the only low pass in the Appalachian chain between Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Tens of thousands of immigrants poured into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, looking for land and the opportunity for a better life. For every person who came through the mountains, it is estimated that at least six horses also arrived.
Some of these animals came from New England and were of Morgan, Canadian or Narragansett Pacer heritage; others came from the quarterpaths of Virginia, redolent of Hobby or imported Thoroughbred blood. Some whose ancestry carried a distinctly Spanish accent came from the Carolinas or else had been traded northward from the Gulf states. In the last installment (“Mapping Milestones of America’s Horse Breeds,” EQUUS 488) I used pictorial icons to illustrate all the types and bloodlines that contributed to this uniquely American mixture. There was no lack of horses: Contemporary documents attest that before the Revolution, every one of the Colonies had to pass laws concerning owners’ responsibilities for escaped horses, and most also had to decide how to control feral horse herds whose numbers had burgeoned into the thousands. Once horses escaped or were let loose west of the Appalachians, their populations increased just as they had in the east.