Naturally the early west-bound traveler could not take with him food for his horse, and the latter must be quite independent of grain. Corn, exceedingly difficult to raise, was for the master alone. The horse must live on grass food, and find it where he stopped at night. During the day he must carry the traveler and his weapons, another horse perhaps serving as transportation for food or household goods; or, if there was a family with the traveler, perhaps one horse sufficed for the mother and a child or two. The weak might ride, the strong could trudge alongside. Many women have so traveled out into the West--women as sweet as any of to-day.
We have here, then, one more simple, economical and effective factor in the resources of the early American. Beauty, finish, elegance, were not imperative. Strength, stamina, hardihood, these things must be possessed. The horse must be durable; and so he was. The early settlers on the Atlantic coast brought from over the seas horses of good blood. Virginia was noted as a breeding ground before the yet more famous Blue Grass Region of Kentucky began to produce horses of great quality. The use of the horse in the New World went on as it did in the Old. The French in the North, the English at the mid-continent, the Spanish in the South, all brought over horses; and even to-day the types of the three sections are distinct.
The horse with which we are concerned was the hardy animal, able to find food in the forest glades or laurel thickets of the Appalachians; that served as pack-horse in the hunt near home, as baggage horse in the journey away from home. In those days the horse was rather a luxury than a necessity. All earlier or Eastern America was at short range. The rifle was short in range; the man himself was a footman, and did not travel very far in actual leagues.
For a generation he could walk, or at least travel by boat. But when he came to the edge of the open country of the plains, when he saw above him the vast bow of the great River of the West, across whose arc he needed to travel direct, then there stood waiting for him, as though by providential appointment, this humble creature, this coward, this hero of an animal, now afraid of its own shadow, now willing to face steel and powder-smoke, patient, dauntless, capable of great exertion and great accomplishment. So in the land of great distances the traveler became a mounted man; the horse became part of him, no longer a luxury, but a necessity.