Jessica Crabtree

One of my favorite horse portraits. From Wallcoo.net

The first time I saw a glimpse of Disney-Touchstone’s 2004 Hidalgo, the thing that stopped me in my tracks was the gorgeous paint pony that gives the film its name. Since I’m hard to displease with a movie about horses – and since, as I later learned, the film has a strong Native theme – I made it a point to see the whole thing.

Hidalgo is a quasi-historical production about Frank Hopkins, a Wild West rider who takes his mustang on a treacherous race through the Arabian desert. At face value, it’s fun and attractive and more of a family flick than a plausible historical epic. But once you’ve seen it (and the epilogue explaining that the whole thing was a true story) your first thought is to find out more about this amazing guy who used his outstanding feats on horseback as a catalyst for one of the greatest efforts of wild mustang preservation.

Aside from the mustang outreach, the film’s other attraction was its roots in Plains Indian culture. Hopkins isn’t just a cowboy; he’s a born-and raised Lakota struggling to come to terms with his mixed white heritage, serving as an army scout and finding himself involved in the fateful events at Wounded Knee. By movie’s end he is able to reconcile his purpose in life by embracing his Indian heritage and working to preserve the horse lifestyle.

It’s obvious to any objective viewer that the story line is a little far-fetched, slightly on the feel-good side of reality. The reinvented cowboy figure sanctified by his Indian heritage, making it more politically correct for a modern audience; damsels in distress (an Arabian princess, no less); a journey of self-discovery and redemption, and the impossible victory of the underdog in a typical Disney-ish fashion.

Add to this the faux pas of having a half-Lakota portrayed by a blond Nordic (you probably already know my feelings about Indians played by non-Indians), and some really deplorable geography (Damascus is nowhere near the sea, and a 3,000 mile race would take a rider far out of the range of the film’s setting). But that’s my more abrasive approach. You’d really have to see it to get that it really works. It’s good in a genuine, almost-but-not-really-believable sort of way.

The Hopkins Controversy

But back to my investigation. Unbeknownst to me, the movie had already stirred up a long-standing, long-winded debate about this marvelous legend of a man, Frank Hopkins. “Camp A” lauded Hopkins’s accomplishments as a champion endurance racer, and his landmark efforts of preserving the mustang and traditional Lakota knowledge of horsemanship. “Camp B” called him a hopeless huckster, and Hidalgo merely the cheap and devious sequel to his colossal fraud. Some of these even purport that he may never have ridden a horse in his life, and the whole legend was the pipe dream of a thwarted wannabe cowboy. Oddly enough, this time, the cry of stretched or embellished facts was not aimed directly at Hollywood.

I was interested in what first provoked such a vociferous debate. It seems that if Hopkins were half the man he was claimed to be – and did half the things he was claimed to have had accomplished – he should literally be the most famous man on earth. Excuse my ignorance but I had never heard of him before I saw the movie. Apparently, the historical record is none too familiar with him either. A quick read of his biography and you can easily sympathize with Hidalgo’s detractors:

“As well as spurring his mustang to victory in (to be exact) 452 endurance races around the globe, Frank Hopkins also has an impressive list of other achievements. He claimed to be the most famous dispatch rider in the West, an associate of Buffalo Bill Cody and one of the “cowboys” from the Congress of Rough Riders of the World performing in Buffalo Bill’s internationally famed Wild West Show. He says he was Chief Crazy Horse’s protégé, put on a two-hour equestrian performance before Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle and helped famed plainsman Buffalo Jones capture and tame the first buffalo.
 
Hopkins also said he served with the Pinkerton detective agency, was a secret agent of the US government during World War I, a guide in the Grand Canyon for big game hunters including novelist Zane Grey, and once charged up San Juan hill with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. All this, of course, was in addition to mentoring Billy the Kid.”
 
“Hidalgo: A Film or Flimflam?” by Peter Harrigan, Arab News

Please give me a break. Either he suffered from borderline personality disorder, senility, or the world’s worst midlife crisis – or someone was seriously messing with this man’s memoirs.

I am not about to get embroiled in the convoluted debate over whether Hopkins was the world’s greatest endurance racer, or which episodes of his exploits are plausible and which are merely spin; there’s far too much literature on the subject for me to add more (and almost nothing about the man is not in question, starting with his date of birth!) But the material points here are 1) what’s the best evidence for and against the legend of Frank Hopkins, and 2) what to make of Hidalgo the movie?

Supporters vs. skeptics (continue reading…)

PART 2: NEW WORLD, NEW HORSE

The Spanish horses brought to the Americas during the Age of Exploration represented the pinnacle of thousands of years’ worth of equine breeding from three continents. These large, hardy, spirited Iberian horses – like the Lusitano, Andalusian, and Barb – were the product of each successive civilization in the Iberian peninsula to leave its mark with a signature breed of horse.

Their illustrious ancestry traces through the region’s rugged native ponies; the prize horses introduced by the Romans; and desert stallions brought from North Africa by the Moors, which carried the bloodlines of still more distant Asian breeds like the Akhal Teke and the Arabian.

By the time they reached the Americas, the ancestors of the mustang had witnessed – and even participated in – the rise and fall of many of the world’s empires. Used as an instrument of conquest, it just as easily transformed into a weapon of revolt and an emblem of independence. It is altogether fitting that this remarkable shape-shifter became not only a potent spiritual symbol, but an emblem of the New World whose convoluted heritage it so closely mirrored.

Image: Best-Horse-Photos.com

After several generations of living in the wild in the American Southwest, natural selection took its course, and the horse underwent an almost miraculously change as genetic reversion transformed it into an ancient, yet wholly new form. Later, as their populations expanded, horses originating from Northern Europe – including draft horses from England, Germany and the Netherlands – escaped from the Atlantic colonies and contributed to the gene pool. The moniker “mustang,” from the Spanish “mustengo,” meaning feral, came to apply to the heterogeneous free-ranging herds that roamed the West in masses of thousands.

Remnants of the original Spanish stock, however, are believed to have continued to the present in isolated populations of so-called Kiger mustangs. They have been the subject of extensive DNA research in an attempt to shed more light on the genetic journey of these incredible animals.

In similar fashion, island populations of colonial horses still exist in remote locations, where many of their characteristic traits have been preserved. (Example: The “wild” Spanish Barbs of Abaco in the Bahamas, and the Chincoteague ponies of the Chesapeake.)

Interestingly, North America does not lay claim to the only – or even the earliest – birthplace of the New World mustang. A century and a half before the Pueblo Revolt saw the release of America’s mustang ancestors into the wild, the Spanish founders of Buenos Aires imported 100 of Spain’s hardiest Andalusian stallions from Cadiz. Dozens of these were loosed into the wild during an Indian revolt in 1540 that left the city desolate for years. The rugged descendants of these animals are the “criollo horses” prized by gauchos for centuries for their unique agility and stamina in the rugged, arid terrain.

Like their North American counterparts, many of these horses bear an uncanny resemblance to their ancient wild ancestors; among mustang lineages, the distinction between the ancient and the modern become almost imperceptible.

Their bodies became smaller and stockier, their profiles more convex, their coats developed a dazzling diversity of patterns and colors combined with strange markings that harked back to their most primitive ancestors. The effects of man’s hand had combined with natural selection to ensure the survival of possibly the most resilient horse type ever seen.

Links:

Horse Show Central – Mustang facts & links to related horse breeds

EquiWorld.com – huge index of horse breeds and types with history and pictures; includes Kiger mustangs, the Sorraia horse, the Andalusian and Akhal Teke breeds mentioned above

Photo: Horse heads from the Chauvet Cave archaeological site – some of the world’s oldest art. (Wikimedia Commons – public domain)

PART 1: The Horse Emerges

The horse – second only to the dog – is possibly the most magical animal to capture the human imagination. It has enthralled artists ever since its first appearances in Paleolithic cave paintings. In its domesticated forms, as a laborer, a warrior, and a brother, it has had no parallel.

But its mystique is universal and goes far beyond its functional roles. As the mustang, or feral horse, it is a symbol of wild beauty and indomitable freedom – because in this persona it transcends the divide between the wild and the domesticated. In this state, the horse carries the heritage of both worlds, and a great deal more besides.

The American mustang conjures up a web of various symbols and emotions; for many it personifies the rugged spirit of the West, or the proud legacy of the Plains Indian. It’s an incredible irony of nature that the horses reintroduced into the Americas by the Spanish explorers were part of a diaspora returning to their original homeland after an absence of over 10,000 years.

The small hoofed mammals that gave rise to the first horses originated in prehistoric America. Small horses similar to the today’s true wild horses of the Asian steppes populated the North American grasslands up until late in the last Ice Age – an era that also witnessed the extinction of the mammoth, the sabre-toothed cats, and many other species.

The reason that horses disappeared from the Americas and not from the other continents to which it had spread is debated. There is strong evidence to suggest a massive comet that exploded over the Great Lakes region about that time was the culprit. The disaster devastated the continent and its aftermath created a bottleneck of plant, animal, and human populations, with the American horse likely being one of its casualties. The drastic climatic changes of a planet just leaving an ice age drastically reduced horse numbers across the board, but was not enough to extinguish the species completely.

In any case, it was to be millennia before the horse returned to the Americas – greatly changed in appearance, but still bearing deep within its DNA the genes of those early horse ancestors who first roamed American Plains.

In the words of the Native Americans – whose cultural memories preserved a remnant of the horse’s presence, and whose destinies became so closely intertwined – “The grass remembered them.”

For those who are interested, Texas A & M’s Center for the Study of the First Americans issues a quarterly publication called Mammoth Trumpet. The January 2008 edition covers the Clovis Impact theory in fascinating detail. (View the PDF)

See also:
The Talk Origins website’s “Horse history 101″ – a technical paper on the horse’s development and spread

BBC News: Origins of the domestic horse

The American Museum of Natural History has an excellent website for their exhibition on horses. It covers the development of the horse from prehistoric times & follows its involvement with humans through history. Lots of great reading, photos, videos, and interactives.

American Museum of Natural History: The Horse

3 Ironies about the Horse in the Americas

1. Although horses originated in the New World, they were non-existent here until they were reintroduced by the Spanish explorers in the 16th century, during the conquest of the Americas.

2. The ancestors of the first mustangs are believed to be the horses driven from Spanish colonial settlements and scattered across the Southwest during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. When the Pueblo revolutionaries turned loose livestock – including horses – corralled in the Spanish settlements, they unwittingly unleashed a new era in Native American history, and a new chapter in the genetic history of the horse.

3. The Plains Indian nations so closely associated with the horse, such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Comanche, never laid eyes on it until a few centuries ago. Their world-renowned horse cultures developed during the 1700s, when they first began to utilize horsepower to adopt a nomadic lifestyle on the Great Plains.

NEXT: Part 2 – New World, New Horse

National Geographic.

Courtesy of National Geographic.

Courtesy of National Geographic.