Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilization
by J. Edward Chamberlain
Summary
From the Ice Age to the industrial age, horses and humans have been joined in soul and flesh. A work of impeccable scholarship and astonishing originality, Horse masterfully combines a huge range of natural, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual sources to illuminate our extraordinary relationship throughout history. Written in lucid, vivacious prose full of wisdom, passion, and wonder, Horse is the utterly fascinating and marvelously enlightening story of horses and humans from the beginning of time to the present
Excerpt
It snowed every day from early December to late February, which was rare in the northern range of the Rockies, and the temperature went down to fifty below, which wasn’t. The winter of 1932-33 had been the worst that anyone could remember. Anyone except Big Bird.
Big Bird was a horse, her name drawn from an Indian legend. A big gray mare, almost pure white by now, she knew the stories of the old, old days. She remembered one about a winter thousands of years before which went on so long they forgot about everything but getting by. Back then, in a place where the ice hadn’t covered the land, wondering whether winter would ever end, humans and horses first made friends.
The place looked different then. The forests hadn’t yet covered the land, and the valleys hadn’t been carved out as deeply. There were animals everywhere, wooly mammoths and frumpy rhinoceroses and large bears and small camels, swift antelope and toothy tigers, mean wolves and shaggy buffalo and sleek beaver and sly fox. You could see farther then, and the horses could run when the big cats and dogs—the tigers and the wolves—came after them. Everyone was watching everyone else to see what they were doing and whether they were having trouble and how long it would be before they would eat or be eaten. They were all holding on by the skin of their teeth.
Then some of the horses left, traveling over the tundra across the Bering Land Bridge, the doorway to Asia. At its most extensive, Beringia covered over five hundred miles from north to south, and stretched from central Siberia to the western Yukon. Even in the coldest times, it was free of ice except high in the hills, and it nourished a large number of animals. The horses who left spread across Asia; some carried on beyond the steppes to Europe, while others went south to India and Africa. But wherever they went, they traveled between the mountains and the rivers on the savannah lands.
Those horses that stayed behind in the Americas died out. Nobody quite knows why. They didn’t die of the cold, because they survived worse in the places they went to. Maybe when the world became warmer they just wandered around as woodlands took over—like humans, horses are mostly at home on the range—and became easy prey. Maybe the shrubs and the grasses and the berries they ate became scarce. Maybe the humans, who must have been hard pressed to find enough food and were well outfitted with throwing sticks and fluted spear points, hunted them down. It doesn’t take long, as we know from the prairie buffalo and the Atlantic cod. Perhaps other things happened.
Whatever the case, for at least ten thousand years there were no horses in the Americas. But eventually they cane back home, suspended in slings in the Spanish caravels. And some say they came earlier, cross-tied in the Viking longboats….
Reviews
“[E]specially eloquent on...the horse as domestic animal that also represents wildness.”
“A labor of love and awe. ..a treasure trove of equinalia…bound to find many delighted fans.”—Los Angeles Times
“[A] wealth of unexpected—and entertaining—knowledge about the role of the horse in human history.”—Michael Korda, author of Hor
Author's Biography
J. EDWARD CHAMBERLIN is University Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at the University of Toronto. He was the Senior Research Associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, and has bred horses and collected stories about humans and horses for much of his life.