Road, track, and stable by Merwin Henry Childs 1853-

Author:Merwin, Henry Childs, 1853- [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horses
Publisher: Boston, Little, Brown, and company
Published: 1892-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

wiry, nervous creature, always dancing about on her small feet, and arching her thin neck, but jjerfectly tractable. Pea Vine, like the other two horses just mentioned, goes well in harness.

We have one more breed, if not of saddle horses, at least of saddle ponies, namely, the broncos. The bronco, a rat of a horse, with ewe neck, a hammer head, a short hip, and an easy, loping gait, is supposed to have descended chiefly from Spanish horses brought to this continent in the seventeenth century. Privation and cold have reduced him in size, stripped him of all purely ornamental parts and qualities, and developed his capacity for endurance.

"The toughness and strength of the bronco," writes Colonel T. A. Dodge in an interesting paper,^ " can scarcely be exaggerated. He will live through a winter that will kill the hardiest cattle. He worries through the long months when the snow has covered up the bunch grass, on a diet of cottonwood boughs, which the Indian cuts down for him; and in the spring it takes but a few weeks for him to scour out into splendid condition."

Another writer. Colonel E. I. Dodge, relates that a pony carried the mail three hundred miles in three consecutive nights, and back over the same road the next week, and kept this up for six months without loss of condition.

" The absence of crest in the pony," Colonel T. A. Dodge continues, "suggests the curious query what has become of the proud, arching neck of liis ancestor, the Barb. There are two ways of accounting for this. The Indian's gag-bit, invariably applied with a jerk,

1 Harper's Magazine for May, 1891.

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