The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity

“a fascinating read that reveals the importance of horses in world history.”

At more than 450 pages of text, this “galloping history” sometimes slows to a trot and occasionally a plodding walk. An in-depth study of the relationship between humankind and horses, the relationship fades somewhat when the narrative strays into detailed accounts of related but distant cultural, political, and military developments. Still, it is a fascinating read that reveals the importance of horses in world history.

Thoroughly and widely researched, the author lists more than 20 pages of sources in a Selected Bibliography along with a few pages of chapter notes. Winegard names his sources within the text, saving footnotes for explanatory and tangential information.

“There are few instances in history where one isolated event transforms our planet forever and single-handedly leaves a deep and indelible imprint on humankind,” Winegard writes in the Introduction. That isolated event occurred some “5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Caspian Steppe,” when someone, likely at the urging of friends, approached “a wounded mare and jumped on its back.”

Prior to that conjectured event, horses at that time—and, in fact, throughout most of history right up to the present—were primarily a source of meat for mankind. And, without the domestication that followed that first horseback encounter, the author contends the species would have become extinct, as it had in its place of origin, the North American continent. When Columbus “discovered” the Western hemisphere and reintroduced horses, “The horse, not Homo sapiens, was the first animal to truly circumnavigate the globe.”

Over the thousands of years of the intertwined history of horses and humans, equestrian cultures followed one another in reshaping the world and civilizations, including the Indo-Europeans, Assyrians, Scythians, Xiongnu, Huns, Mongols, Comanche, and Lakota. Each culture selectively bred and improved horse herds to turn what was once a source of meat and milk into “the invisible hand driving human history.”

The stories recounted in the book include names made familiar to history owing to their use of horses: Alexander the Great, Atilla the Hun, Chinggas Kahn, Hanibal, Charles Martel, William the Conqueror, Hernán Cortés, Cochise, and others less familiar both before and since.

Outside of its use as a weapon of war, the horse changed agriculture, increasing productivity and efficiency, which led to the development of cities as fewer hands were required to produce food. The industrial revolution followed in time, which led to “the supremacy of the horse,” as vast numbers of the animals were required for transporting food, raw materials for manufacture, finished goods, and people.

This led to problems. The author uses New York City and the “Great Manure Crisis of 1894” as an example. “Instead of greenhouse gases and climate change, in 1894 the mounting pollution crisis took the shape of unimaginable piles of rancid manure produced by more than two hundred thousand urban horses and mules.”

Winegard writes, “The forty-five largest US cities had an average density of 426 horses per square mile. Milwaukee, home to 350,000 people, topped the list at 709. Its 12,500 horses produced 185 tons of feces a day. In 1894 the 8,500 equine Torontonians rendered 128 tons of excrement per day, while the 6 million residents of London were bombarded by a daily output of 4,500 tons from 300,000 horses. Urban English working horses were producing more than 10 million tons of manure every year.” The problem, and mostly ineffective solutions, remained until the horsepower of the internal combustion engine replaced the power of horses.

One item of note. In the book, Winegard effectively writes off mules and oxen as obsolete beasts of burden replaced by horses. However, history shows that in 19th century America, oxen—owing to their durability and ability to work day after day on grass alone—proved the preferred draft animals for the westbound emigration of tens of thousands of pioneers as well as countless trains of freight wagons. Mules, more hardy, less fragile, and stronger than horses, were the preferred pack animal in both civilian and military use.

Winegard concludes with a discussion of horses in today’s world, including the pesky problem of feral herds overrunning ranges in the US, Canada, and Australia. “The fate of feral Equus ferus caballus,” he writes, “is a polemic and inflammatory issue.”

The author concludes, “We still live among the galloping shadows of a world built by horses. We casually walk through that same world never thinking about the incomparable power of the horse in creating its social, cultural, economic, and political contours. Perhaps now, you’ll give these countless generations of unsung horses a passing thought and their rightful place in history. . . .”

Most readers of The Horse will likely do just that.