Some American Riders by Colonel Theodore Ayrault Dodge

American Riders - Page 4

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Horsemanship is a broader term than mere riding. It, of necessity, comprises the latter to a certain extent. A good horseman must be a good rider, though he may not be a perfect one, from age or disability. But the best rider may be a very poor horseman. The best wild rider never spares his horse. A good horseman’s first though is for his beast. But the horseman may by no means be able to equal the rider’s feats of daring, endurance, skill, or agility. In short, we city folks, compared to the saddle-bred man whose life work is astride a horse, are and remain tenderfoots.

Now the Mexican gentleman, like most Southern men, is a good rider within his limits. He is the very reverse of the Englishman, who, with his reductio ad simplicitatem [reduced to simplicity] of everything, to the bone. With his tweed suits and his brusque manners, with his disregard of everything which lends a touch of charm to daily life, he has driven out much that is beautiful and more that is gallant in social and equestrian pleasures alike.

The Range Rider by W. Herbert Dunton, 1913

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With lace ruffles and buckled shoes have quite disappeared not only the beauties of equitation, but the graceful outward courtesies to the other sex; and the place of the latter has not been filled by the acknowledgment conveyed in the cavalier manner now in vogue that women have grown in wisdom to the point of taking care of themselves. Women are glad, no doubt, of some emancipation, but does she whom we love and admire as a the real woman of today want to be left to her own resources any more than did her grandmother? Has she tired of the willing ministrations of the other sex? We have by no means lost our heart courtesies, but whither has the old-fashioned polish taken its flight? We are indebted for much to the Old Country; do not let us borrow too largely. Despite our ante bellum accusation that the South affiliated with the British aristocracy, the Southern has retained his gallantry to women, as we of the Eastern States, to our serious detriment, have not. The best rule in equitation, as in other arts, is first the useful, then the ornamental. But having the useful, by no means let the ornamental elude you, unless the twain be compatible.

Our artist has drawn the typical rider on the Paseo de la Reforma, the Rotten Row or Harlem Lane of the city of Mexico. In this style ride both the statesman and the swell, the banker and (when he can afford it) his clerk. And very much so rode the Englishman of half a century ago. I have heard excellent English horsemen brush aside all reference to the high-school of equitation as worthy only of a snob. But there were some very decent "snobs” in England back in the thirties, when celebrated members of both Houses, the leaders of fashion, the most noted generals – the very men, indeed, who had beaten Boney – and every one pretending to be in the social swim would go prancing up and down the Row, passaging, piaffing, traversing, to the admiration of all beholders. Evan the M.F.H. fell into the trick of it in the Park. They were not called snobs then; the initial letter was dropped; and when a Briton slurs at the better education of the horse today, he casts a stone at his own ancestry over the shoulder of the lover of the high school.

The first thing in our Mexican friend which strikes us is his horse. This is not the bronco of the Plains. He is evidently imported from Spain, or lately bred from Spanish stock, without that long struggle for existence which has given the pony his wonderful endurance and robbed him of every mark of external beauty. Here we revert to the original Moorish type. The high and long-maned crest, arched with pride, the full red nostril, large and docile eye, rounded barrel, high croup, tail set on and carried to match the head, clean legs, high action, and perfect poise. How he fills our artistic eye! how we dwell upon him! until we remember that performance comes first, beauty after, and that the English thorough-bred, which can give a distance to the best of this exquisite creatures family and beat him handily, has developed from the same blood far other lines than these; or, indeed, that the meanest runt of a Plains pony, on a ride of a hundred miles across the Bad Lands, would leave the beautiful animal dead in his tracks full two score miles behind!

The Mexican swell rides on a saddle worth a fortune. It is loaded with silver trimmings, and hanging over it is an expensive serape, or Spanish blanket, which adds to the magnificence of the whole. His queer-shaped stirrups are redolent of the old mines. His bridle is in like manner adorned with metal in the shape of half a dozen big silver plates, and to his bit is attached a pair of knotted red-cord reins, which he holds high up and loose.

Mexican Gentleman, Frederic Remington,

Harper's Weekly, July, 1891.

He is dressed in a black velvet jacket fringed and embroidered with silver; and a huge and expensive hat, perched on his head, is tilted over one ear. His legs are encased in dark tight-fitting breeches, with silver trimming down the side seams, but cut so as, in summer weather, to unbutton from the knee down and flap aside. His spurs are silver, big and heavy and costly, and fitted to buckle round his high cut heel. Under his left leg is fastened a broad-bladed and beautiful curved sword, with a hilt worthy a prince of the blood.

The seat of this exquisite is the perfect pattern of a clothes-pin. Leaning against the cantle, he stretches his legs forward and outward, with heels depressed in a fashion which reminds one of Sydney Smith’s saying that he did not object to a clergyman riding, if only he rode very badly, and turned out his toes. It is the very converse of riding close to your horse. In what it originates it is hard to guess, unless bravado. The cowboy, with an equally short seat and long stirrups, keeps his legs where they belong, and if his leg is out of perpendicular, it will be so to the rear.

The rack rarely, the canter all but universally, is ridden by the Mexican. It is only the Englishman and those he has taught who ride what can be called a trot. With all others the trot is a mere jog, though a good open trot is one of the easiest gaits for a horse to go. Luckily, as the horses of the world gain in breeding by the use of English stock, so the world is learning the English habit of rising. When I was a school-boy in Prussia, I was fairly hooted out of rising to a trot. But now you see the Prussian and all other Continental officers riding a la’ Anglaise [in the English manner] in full uniform, and one may see a lancer or hussar trotting through the streets with a handful of dispatches, leaning over his horses neck and rising to the gait in a fashion which would have court-martialed him in the old ramrod Anglophobia days of Frederick William IV. For all they laugh at England for her military pretensions, they adopt many good things from her, not the least of which is the course of cross-country riding which all foreign officers are now required to take.

The canter of the Mexican is the old park canter, with a superabundant use of the curb to make the horse prance and play and show his action. But we must not look down upon him. He is doing nothing more than the men who used to go titupping down Rotten Row every fine afternoon of fifty years ago; and he may be a better rider than he looks.

This trot and canter controversy is not yet settled. The Englishman claims that his horse can go seven miles on a trot for six on a canter. Our cavalry officers on the Plains have arrived at a similar conclusion, and all long marches are made at alternate walk and trot, or walk alone. Most cavalry does this. But you cannot make a Southerner or a Plainsman adopt this theory. The Southern horse goes his so-called artificial gaits, or canters: you cannot give away a trotter for the saddle. The bronco canters all but exclusively. The matter seems to depend on inbred habit, and comparative statistics on the subject, however interesting, could scarcely be made accurate.

Compiled and edited by Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated June, 2010.

About the Author: Colonel Theodore Ayrault Dodge was a Union officer during the Civil War and a military historian. His primary writings were on the war and military history, but he also wrote this article, Some American Riders, which appeared in Harper's Magazine in July, 1891.

Also See:

The American Cowboy

The Cattle Trails

Cattle Trails of the Prairie

Cowboys on the American Frontier

List of Trail Blazers, Riders, & Cowboys

The Range of the American West

Tales & Trails of the American West

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