Page 51

STORIES OF THE OLD WEST
and buffalo hunter, told the story when he found his way into Borein's
studio.
   "It's a funny thing," he added, "but of the hundred or
more horses
left dead on the field, more than half were white. Now, an Indian
admires a white horse above all others, and as it was found out later,
the Government had just issued a lot of snow-white ones to the Chey-
ennes and the Kiowas as a reward for their being good Indians."
   "When did you first hear of the fight?" asked the host, an insati-
able hunter after Western lore.
   "Oh," Hathaway said simply, "I was in it."
E    VERYONE knows of the conquest of the West, but it takes Ed.
      Borein to tell what made the conquest possible. He is preemi-
      nently a painter of horses, and as such it incenses him to hear
the exploits of Western heroes wherein no mention is made of the
cayuse. The horse was brought into Mexico by Cortez and his follow-
ers. Those that escaped the Spaniards formed the nucleus of the herds
of wild horses which later roamed the West. The Northern Indian has
had the horse only upward of a hundred years. The Comanches were
the first tribe to use them, walking hundreds of miles down into old
or New Mexico to steal them. The Indian has not even a name for
the horse in his language, calling it "big dog;" for the red man,
like
the Esquimo, formerly used dogs. It was the coming of the horse
which made of him a traveler.
   If the horse proved useful to the Indian, it was an utter necessity
to the white man. Without its help the early Spanish explorers could
never have come into the country from the South, nor could the later
explorers and frontiersmen have reached the Far West, much less have
held it. Many a hunter and cow puncher owes his life to his horse.
Out on the open plains where there is no cover, a thrown horse makes
the only possible rampart. To shoot a horse and crouch behind it has
been the means of saving hundreds of lives in frontier warfare. If
hard pressed and held up for a long time, men have been known to eat
the meat of their own horses without leaving cover, a grim enough
procedure. "Eating the fort," it has been termed in racy Western
parlance. Mr. Borein would have considered his work incomplete
without a drawing of the cayuse which "served as a rampart when
dead."
    The heroes of the West were not merely "scrappers," they were
 also business men. There were the trader, the trapper and the
 hunter, who brought civilization to the wilderness, and sent the spoils
 of the wilderness back to civilization. There was the prospector, who
 started all the mining camps from Arizona to Washington, with the
                                                              S1