The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [12]
After the war, hundreds of German-bred broodmares and stallions had been brought to America as spoils of war. Europe and, especially, Germany had dominated equestrian competitions for most of the twentieth century. Their horses were perhaps the finest in the world. But the American Jockey Club refused to certify German stallions as “thoroughbreds,” reluctant to incorporate the horses into the American line, even though their ancestry had been meticulously documented by the Germans. The Jockey Club’s officers’ justification for this refusal was that they would have to take assurance of the horses’ bloodlines from “the enemy.” The American thoroughbred horse, proud and noble, beautiful and homebred, had become a symbol of the country’s new postwar pride.
At that time, most thoroughbred stallions were kept on manicured stud farms, primarily located in the bluegrass region of Kentucky. The stud fees were high, and the horses were part of the horse-racing pipeline, the bloodlines carefully watched over to produce superior racing stock. Some small and very specialized breeding operations bred saddle horses for hunter and jumper competitions—these tended to be small-scale operations owned by wealthy private breeders who kept one or two horses at stud.
Despite the declining use for workhorses in the twentieth century, historically the United States had long been proud of its equine product. The rangeland of the western states had always been an excellent environment in which to breed horses. Through the late nineteenth century, domestic horse production had been so high that in addition to supplying workhorses for the large eastern cities and remounts for the U.S. cavalry, the western states had been the world’s top producer of military horses, eventually becoming the breeding ground for horses used in European wars. Prior to the First World War, most of the countries in Europe imported horses. For example, in 1899, the United States exported nearly 100,000 mounts to the United Kingdom for use in the Boer War. But with the advent of the motorcar, after 1910 the horse population in the United States began dwindling rapidly, provoking widespread concern that the army would not find enough horses to muster in time of war.
Horse scarcity was a genuine national security concern. Wartime consumption of horses was astronomical: it’s approximated that more than 1.3 million horses were pressed into service by Allied forces between 1914 and 1918. Of these, many were fatally injured in battle, and even more were lost to equine infectious diseases, which ran rampant as horses were transported via ship and train in difficult conditions. In wartime, horses were so expendable that the demand was insatiable and the supply difficult to maintain.
To address the concern about the declining horse population, in 1912 the U.S. Army established the Remount Program, a systematic horse-breeding operation for the cavalry. Its goal was to improve the general stock of American horses for use in war. (The term “remount,” used to describe a cavalry horse, actually stems from the need to re-supply soldiers with fresh horses.) The program selected stallions that were considered the best type of the American horse, sometimes described as a “usin’ kind of horse.” Appropriate for riding, the horses were bred to be well balanced, with well-sprung ribs and a deep heart girth to provide plenty of lung capacity, a well-developed set of withers to hold the saddle in place, legs of sufficient bone to stay sound, and a foot large enough to provide a solid foundation. In addition, the horses’ temperament was a factor, with emphasis given to “a gentle disposition and a willing mind.” These excellent stallions “would be made available at a nominal fee” to improve the quality of American stock. The United States cavalry, the mounted force of