When we reach the horses of the colonial period, we are in a field that never has been explored and cannot be expected to yield a very rich harvest. Here and there I have been able to pick up a detached paragraph from some contemporaneous writer, and occasionally a record, or an advertisement, from which, in most cases, I have been able to construct a fair and truthful outline and description of the horses of the different colonies, down to the Revolutionary war. The collection of the material has required great patience and great labor, but it has not been an irksome task, for many things have been brought to light of great interest to the student of horse history. The knowledge of the colonial horse in his character and action, that may be gathered from the chapters devoted to his description and history, I flatter myself, will not only be interesting as something new, but will throw a strong light on the lineage of the two-minute trotter and pacer.
The colonists of Virginia were subjected for a number of years to great suffering, privation, and want. They were badly selected and many of them were improvident and never trained to habits of industry and thrift. There were quite too many “penniless gentlemen’s sons” among them, who had been sent out with the hope that the change might improve their habits and their morals. They were too proud to work, and when they were driven to it by necessity they didn’t know how. After suffering untold hardships for a succession of years, those that survived learned to adapt themselves to their environment and to make their own way in the world. Their first supply of domestic animals were all consumed as food, embracing horses, cattle, swine, and goats, and everything had thus been consumed except one venerable female swine, as reported by a board of examiners. Their second supply of horses, cattle, swine, and goats was more carefully guarded, and from them in greater part came the countless denizens of the barnyard.
There were several shipments of horses at different times, by the proprietors in London, down till about 1620 and possibly later, but they do not seem to have increased very rapidly, for in 1646 all the horses in the colony were estimated at about two hundred of both sexes. This estimate was probably too low, for ten years after this the exportation of mares was forbidden by legislative enactment, and eleven years later this restriction was removed, and both sexes could then be exported. From this legislation and from writers who visited the colony we learn that horses were very plenty, and they are described as of excellent quality, hardy and strong, but under size. It was the custom in Virginia, and indeed in all the other colonies at that period and for long afterward, to brand their young horses and turn them out to hustle for their own living. They increased with wonderful rapidity and great numbers became as wild and as wary of the habitation and sight of man as the deer of the forest. About the close of the seventeenth century the chasing and capture of wild horses in Virginia became a legitimate and not always an unprofitable sport, for an animal caught without a brand became the unquestioned property of his captor. It is a noteworthy fact that off the coast of Virginia the island of Chincoteague has been occupied for probably two hundred years by large bands of wild horses. They are still there, and not till within the last few decades have there been any efforts made to domesticate some selections from them. They are of all colors, but quite uniform in size, not averaging much over thirteen hands, with clean limbs, and many of them are pacers. There is only one way to account for them in that location, and that is, that they were originally a band of Virginia wild horses that wandered or was chased out onto this sandy peninsula, and while there some great storm set the mysterious ocean currents at work and cut off their retreat by converting a peninsula into an island, and there they have lived and multiplied ever since.
