Equus – August 2019

80 EQUUS 498 AUTUMN 2019

Comanche leader

Quanah Parker

rides in a rodeo

parade in Lawton,

Oklahoma, about

1910. He carries
      his war lance
      upside down in
      a token of peace.
      His horse is a
      gray that his friend
      Burk Burnett of
      the 6666 may
      have given him.

THE OLD WEST

Erwin Smith posing on a JA horse. This

animal is a blue roan, as evidenced by

the dark head and the small dark spots

scattered over the skin. This horse, too, is

a Cayuse of mixed breeding.

A wonderful Erwin Smith image

of the young Tom Burnett dressed

in his Sunday best and all ready

to go rope some with a 60-

foot, handmade braided leather

reata. He is mounted on what is

obviously either a Thoroughbred

or an American Saddlebred.

Saddlebreds were once known

for soundness, toughness and

endurance capabilities and were

preferred by quite a number

of the more skillful old-time

cowmen, including Dale Wilkinson

and John Gorman.

An excellent panoramic view of the JA horse remuda taken

by Western photographer Erwin Smith in 1908. The image

shows the mixed juniper scrub, sagebrush and grass as

well as the crumbling formations of sedimentary rock

characteristic of the Palo Duro Canyon. The Prairie Dog

Town Fork of the Red River can be seen in the background.

to vast numbers of free-roaming

animals. Some were dangerous, such

as wolves, cougars and bears; others,

especially buffalo, trampled plantings.

Passenger pigeons, fl ocking by the

tens of millions, alighted on fi elds and

gobbled up every seed. Those settlers

who kept moving westward ultimately

to cross the Mississippi into the

shortgrass prairie eco-zone also had

to contend with numberless herds of

mustangs, which frequently enticed

settlers’ horses to break free from their

trammels and join the remuda of some

loud-colored feral stallion.

Enormous and irreversible change

began in 1837 with John Deere’s

invention of a plow featuring a curved

and polished steel share that could

slice through the deep, sticky, root-

bound soils of the native prairie. The

Deere “self-cleaning” plow allowed a

farmer with a team of horses or mules

to till a one-acre fi eld in less than 100

hours. Only two years after opening his

factory in Moline, Illinois, Deere was

selling 75 plows per week to farmers

on both sides of the Mississippi.

This was “the plow that broke the

plains,” a triumph for settlers but a

tragedy for North American wildlife.

Farmers in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska,

Missouri and Kansas could now

plant crops, but the exposed soil also

supported early-successional plants

not originally dominant in the prairie