HEAVENLY HORSES

 

by Kerry Ross Boren

 

The Emperor Wu-Ti (145 - 87 BC) was the most spectacular horse rustler in history. Because he coveted a few mares and stallions that belonged to an obscure ruler at the end of the known world, he nearly engineered the collapse of China.

Wu-ti, like all Chinese emperors, claimed the Mandate of Heaven in all that he chose to undertake. But Wu-ti, unlike his predecessors, did not divorce himself from practical affairs. As a monopolist he believed it to be his right to order the lives of his sixty million subjects, to tax the rich out of existence, and to fill his treasury with spoils. He was seldom opposed, since, by virtue of his divinity, be controlled the seasons, his moods of love and hate reflecting changes in the weather. When he castrated his Grand Historian for defending the actions of a disgraced general, it was no more significant than a thunderstorm.

He was considered an improvement upon his predecessor, Shih-Huang-ti, the Great Unirie, who burned books and slaughtered the people he could not manipulate. But Wu-ti was possessed by doubts about his divinity. When the Yellow River overflowed its banks, he commanded the flood to abate, but the flood raged on. His magicians Proved to be frauds Not a single one of them could even turn cinnabar to gold.

He pondered the uncertainty of death. While, by virtue of his divinity, he was supposed to be immortal, his predecessors had all died. The court flatterers lied to him. First they told him that the Yellow Emperor had been lifted, with his retinue, to heaven on the back of a whiskered dragon. Then they showed him his grave. When they realized their mistake, they said it was, instead, the grave of his coat and hat.

Wu-ti then set out across his empire in search of an Immortal. He sacrificed on mountain-tops and pursued the rumor of an immortal footprint. He set out dried mean and jujubes on a special terrace outside the Imperial Apartments, but could not understand why the Immortals never ate them. One year they caught a unicorn. He took it as a good omen, but as the issue of immortality plagued him ever more, he concluded that the answer lay in the Far West  with the Heavenly Horses of the King of Ferghana.

An ocean of grass extends westward from Manchuria to the Hungarian Plain. Over its vast undulating expanse, mounted nomads moved their flocks, glued from childhood to their horses. In the reign of Wu-ti the nomads who wandered along the northern frontiers of China were the Hsiung-nu, who would appear four centuries later as the Huns when they ripped the Roman empire apart. They lived in felt tents or covered wagons with clothes of patch-work dyed skins in brilliant colors. They drank fermented mare’s milk and ate lamb. Tribes within their territories were unstable and they were constantly engaged in raids and counter-raids.

These mounted horsemen would, without provocation, spill over the Great Wall, swoop down on farmsteads, color the ground with blood, and retreat with their spoils. Wu-ti refused to pay their tribute of provisions and skills. Their ruler, the Shan-yu, could not be reasoned with.

The Huns wore wolf-masks and armor with reptilian leather scales, and were one with their horse. To defeat them Wu-ti had to get horses, horses far faster than the Huns’ steppe ponies. The Chinese were not used to riding, and China was poor horse country. The chariots they used in battle were no match for the mounted bowmen of the steppe.

For a time fortune smiled upon the Emperor Wu-ti’s first attempt to launch a Chinese light cavalry. A youth of eighteen called Ho-Ch’u-p’ing appointed himself the scourge of the Huns. In 142 BC he rounded the Gobi Desert with a band of rough-riders, slaughtered a surprised enemy, and captured a “million” animals, as well as making off with a prime minister.

The grateful emperor rewards the boy with an estate of several thousand households, but the youth said he could not be interested in houses as long as a single Hun breathed. Wu-ti advised him to read Sun Tzu’s Art of War (which would one day inspire the military aspirations of Mao Tse-tung), but Ho-Ch’u-p’ing said he had his own Strategy. He was mean to his soldiers and pushed them unmercifully; however, he pushed himself, too, and died young. The emperor erected on the mound of his grave a stone horse trampling a Hunnish bowman underfoot.

On the western frontier of China lived a people called the Yueh-chih, who had reddish hair and blue eyes and who spoke an Indo-European language related to Gaelic. The Huns had horribly defeated the Yueh-chih and converted the skull of their king into a drinking cup. The Yueh-chih had fled across the terrible sands of Sinkiang and settled near the present city of Samarkand.

The emperor sent his ambassador Chang-ch’ien to rind them in the countries of the Far West, but he was delayed on the way for ten years by the Huns. He was eventually able to escape and continue his journey. His mission to the Yueh-chih, to convince them to return to their land, was unsuccessful.

But Chang-ch’ien had also visited the Kingdom of Ferghana (Ta-yuan). These people were whiskery men with deep-set eyes who lived in mud houses. They tilled the lush soil of their country, abandoned by Alexander’s Greeks not long before. They cultivated peaches, apricots, mulberries, melons, and grapes - several varieties of which Chang-ch’ien took back to China.

His most important discovery, however, was the king’s remada of horses. The remarkable animals sweated blood, ate alfalfa, and their ancestors had descended directly from Heaven.

But the king of Ferghana could not be persuaded to give up even one of his Heavenly Horses. Wu-ti heard of another people of the Far West called the Wu‑sun, living in present-day Soviet Kazakhstan, who supposedly possessed some of the horses. In 111 BC he dispatched the aging Chang-ch’ien with Imperial gifts and made the King of the Wu-sun prostrate himself. The king agreed to send some horses to Wu-ti, but in exchange he required an Imperial princess.

The king was called K’un-mo and as a child had been abandoned on the steppe, where wolves were said to have suckled him and birds had dropped raw mean from the sky for him to eat. But to his bride he was a decrepit old man who only had enough strength to drink a cup of wine with her. She wrote a sad little poem that has been preserved:

A tent is my house, 

Of felt are my walls: 

Raw flesh my food 

With mare’s milk to drink. 

Always thinking of my country, 

My heart sad within,

 Would I were a yellow stork

 And could fly to my own home!

The Emperor Wu-ti held his Wu-sun horses in high esteem, until his spies informed him that they were not true Heavenly Horses. These belonged only to the King of Ferghana who

kept them closely guarded in his capital. Their whiskers reached their knees and their tails swept the ground. They had a “double-spine like a tiger.” Their hooves were “like a thick wrist.” When the sun was high they sweat blood. They could travel 1000 li a day (about 300 miles).

The Kingdom of FeTghana was fully 3000 miles away across the Roof of the World, but Wu-ti wanted the Heavenly Horses. He sent an ambassador who offered the King a golden horse in exchange for Teal ones, but the people of FeTghana were bored with Chinese gifts and evaded the issue. The ambassador, in a fit of Tage, smashed the gold horse to bits, cursed the people of FeTghana, and left. The king had him killed on the frontier.

In 104 BC Wu-ti sent a vast army under General Li-kuang-li through the Jade Gate in the Great Wall to attack Ferghana. Some months later the army returned, greatly reduced. Locusts had devoured the grass before them, tens of thousands of men and horses perished.

Wu-ti was determined. An even greater expedition was planned. He emptied the jails of criminals; he sent water engineers to divert the rivers of Ferghana; he Organized relief supply trains of dried boiled rice for the journey. He left nothing to chance, and this time he succeeded.

The capital of Ferghana was besieged. The inhabitants killed their old king and promised Li-kuang-li a pick of the Heavenly Horses if he would lift the siege. The Chinese chose thirty breeding animals, with the promise of two more to be sent annually, and 3000 of lesser breeds. The emperor at last had got hold of a horse with “hot blood.”

It is difficult to determine the breed of the horse that sweats blood. What is certain, however, is that the Heavenly Horse was the Arab horse. The late Professor Ridgeway maintained that somewhere in North Africa or South-west Asia there had once existed the ancestor of the modern Arabian horse. He said it may have looked like a quagga (an extinct form of zebra).

The Arabs say it all began with Baz, the great-great-grandson of Noah, who captured and tamed wild horses. This horse is even described in the Old Testament by Job: “The glory of his nostrils is terrible ... he paweth in the valley ... swallowing the ground in fierceness and rage...

There are, as any horse-breeder can tell you, two main streams of blood. One is the “cold-blooded” stock of the north. The ponies of the Huns, with an upright bristly mane, a Roman nose, heavy lower jaw, and a thick neck, still survive in Outer Mongolia and are named after a Russian traveller called Colonel Przwalsky. These steppe ponies, bred to buck against headwinds and snowdrifts, have marvelous endurance.

The “hot-blooded” Strain, represented by the modern Arabian, is basically a different animal. It is distinguished by its gazelle-like skull, flaring nostrils, eyes set well down the head, an arched neck, a flowing mane and tail, a depressed spine with two ridges of muscle along it (the Chinese “tiger-back”), and a light gait.

What was the blood-sweating? Some authorities attribute it to a parasitic insect called PaTafiliaria multipapilosa, but Lady Wentworth, who bred the finest Arabians in England, once had a horse that sweated blood. A great authority, she found no parasite.

Heavenly Horses had been around since long before they came to Ferghana. Three centuries earlier, twelve fine thoroughbreds were buried in the ice-bound grave of tribal chieftain in the Altai Mountains, north of the Wu-sun. The same hot-blood strain was bred into Greek battle-charger, on the Thessalian Plain. Passing through the region fourteen centuries later, Marco Polo learned of a local breed that claimed a pedigree going back to Bucephalus, the famous Thessalian battle horse of Alexander the Great, himself a God-king. As for Wu-ti, he had found his Heavenly Horses and now felt secure that his Immortal Soul would be carried to Heaven. He wrote in a poem: “They will draw me up/and carry me to the Holy Mountain. / I shall reach the Jade Terrace...” There the Royal Mother of the West would greet him. She would hand him one of her peaches that ripened every 6000 years, and he would eat and become Immortal.

Thus the story of the Emperor Wu-ti ends, but the pedigree of the Heavenly Horses continues. In time they arrived in the Middle East, the property of the Moorish Nabobs who conquered the Mediterranean region, including Spain. The Moors brought the horses to Spain; by their laws no one but a Moor could own one of the white horses. By now, with crossbreeding, a magnificent white strain had emerged.

In a famous painting, The Surrender of Boadil, Queen Isabella is portrayed seated on one of these white horses while the last of the Moorish captains bows before her in Surrender. The descendants of Queen Isabella’s horses became the famous war horses of the European royalty.

Because Queen Isabella made another momentous decision, Columbus discovered America. In time Hernan Cortez, great-nephew of the purchaser, sailed to the New World and conquered Mexico. He brought with him sixty-six horses, descendants of the horses bought by his great-uncle from the Moors.  

In 1539 Francisco Coronado took an expedition northward from Mexico to the vicinity of northern Arizona. One of his lieutenants, Cardenas, took a small exploring party even further north to explore the Grand Canyon. Cardenas sent out a third exploring company under the command of Thomas Blaque. This small company, comprising only seven men, brought extra mounts and pack animals.

Thomas Blaque was an interesting character. His true name was Thomas Blake, and he was a Scotsman, an adventurer, and soldier-of-fortune - the only white European permitted to live in Mexico. As captain of the exploring company he has the distinction of being the first white man known to have set foot in what is now the State of Utah in the spring of 1540.

Crossing the Rio de los Yutas (Green River) near present-day Jensen, Utah, they encountered a village of Yuta (Ute) Indians on the site currently occupied by Vernal. When they saw that the Yutas wore Ornaments fashioned from gold, the Spaniards tortured members of the tribe to learn the source. They put the chief’s son to death; they fired their muskets to frighten them, for the Indians had never before seen guns, which they promptly called “thunder-sticks.”

In a pouring rainstorm the medicine man led the Spaniards to the source of the gold. They brought out a pack-animal laden with precious metal back to the Indian camp. Again the Indians protested the taking of their sacred metal. The Spanish leveled their muskets, but they would not fire; the Tain had wet the powder. The were overpowered by the Yutas.

When the Indians first set eyes on the bearded white men they thought they were gods or spirits sent by the gods. Having never seen a horse, they thought the mounted Spaniards and their horses were one beast, and that the thunder-sticks were weapons of the gods. But now, when the muskets did not fire, the Indians knew the visitors were not all-powerful and subdued them.

Still uncertain whether the Spaniards had come from the gods, or might be gods themselves, the Yutas did not kill them. They put them on their mounts, escorted them back across the river, and instructed them not to return. They did return - but not until much later.

Among the horses the Spaniards brought were some mottled-white mares and stallions, descendants of the Cortez Moorish

strain. Because of their color, and because the Spaniards attached so much significance to them, the Yutas believed them to be Heavenly Beasts and kept them.

In the course of events the Yutas became prolific horse breeders and were among the first of the western tribes to become mounted warriors and hunters. As more Spaniards encroached upon their territory, the Yutas obtained more horses of various breeds. The Heavenly white horses, however, became the personal property of the chief and constituted the authority and medicine by which he ruled.

Over the next two centuries some of the horses escaped to the wilds. By the mid- 1800s the white horses were running wild on the San Raphael Swell in east central Utah and were jealously guarded as the personal property of Ute Chieftain Walkara, whom the whites called “Walker.” By this time, due to inter-breeding with leopard-spotted Appaloosas and an admixture of other blood-lines, most of Chief Walker’s white horses had leopard spots, particularly on their rumps. Chief Walker died in 1855. One or more of the Heavenly Horses were killed and buried with the Chief in his secret tomb in the mountains; like Wu-ti before him, the horses would escort his soul to Heaven. According to Ute Indian tradition still in vogue today, Walker is hunting buffalo in the Happy Hunting Ground on the back of a Heavenly Horse.

After the Mormons settled the eastern part of Utah, many settlers noticed, and tried to capture, the wild horses running on the San Raphael Swell. The Meeks family who lived at Cleveland was notably successful in this regard. They sold one of the horses to the outlaw, Butch Cassidy. Butch named the horses - his favorite - Mine Guard.

Cassidy’s friend, Amasa Davidson, captured one of the beautiful white stallions on the San Raphael Swell when in his early teens. He named the stallion King of the Mountain.

One of King’s colts was called Fred, Fred sired a mare called Blue Cotton. Blue Cotton was bred to Cassidy’s stud, Mine Guard, and their colt was called Prince of the Mountain Prince, for short.

Among the male colts of Prince were Secret and The Kid. Among the female colts were Vandetta (Etta) and Queen. Queen was renamed Van Dyke because she had a moustache.

The Kid sired, among others, Puss, Brownie, and, once again, the Queen. The girls, the “Highstepping Ladies,” were Fanny and Black Bess; they pulled Mrs. Davidson’s buggy. 

The mare Queen (Van Dyke) was back-bred to Mine Guard and her colt was a peculiar two-toned color that was neither cream nor bay, and certainly not buckskin or sorrel. The color was almost a peach with an overlay of red. Amasa Davidson named him Red Amber and sold him to Butch Cassidy. Red Amber was the last remaining uncastrated male descendant of Mine Guard.

Throughout all the stories about the white horses there is the recurrent theme that the white horses were the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the best horses God ever created.

Admittedly, Mine Guard was a white horse. In all the stories about the outlaws there was only one outlaw gang and one outlaw gang leader who was reported to ride white horses. These stories are all about Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch.

But the equine pedigree does not end here. Remember the Moorish horses of Queen Isabella that became the stable of the royal houses of Europe? From this stable came the horses of Cortez. But another line also descended from this strain.

In addition to having been my ancestor, Sir Francis Bryan was courtier to King Henry VIII. Henry’s first queen Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Queen Isabella of Spain. Sir Francis was sent to negotiate the exchange of wedding gifts (later he would be sent to Rome to negotiate with the Pope over Henry’s divorce), and brought back to England a remund of Spanish Moorish horses for the king’s stable. Descendants of these horses still pull the royal Coach of Queen Elizabeth, and are ridden by the Queen’s Equerry (guard).

In 1548 Sir Francis Bryan married the Irish Princess, Lady Joan Fitzgerald, and became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He served less than two years and was murdered by poison. But he lived long enough to establish a herd of thoroughbred horses on 300,000 acres in County Clare, on the former estates of the Earl of Ormonde; some of the horses were white Moors from Spain.

One hundred years later, in 1650, William Smith Bryan, the grandson of Sir Francis, declared himself heir to the throne Of Ireland and fought against Cromwell from the back of a white horse. Defeated by sheer numbers of the Puritan army, Bryan was deported to the Colony of Virginia in America, together with “twenty-one sons and grandsons,” and according to the Thoroughbred Record - the first thoroughbred horses in America.

The Bryan family resided at Gloucester Beach, Virginia, but by the mid- 1700s had spread throughout the Pennsylvania-North Carolina-Virginia frontier. Morgan Bryan pioneered a route from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. A member of his mother’s family, the Morgans, cross-bred the Bryan Strain to create the famous Morgan horse.

The Bryans were the first family to penetrate the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky with Daniel Boone-who married Rebecca Bryan‑on the backs of their thoroughbred horses. They constructed Bryan’s Station on the banks of the Kentucky River, where the city of Lexington now stands. Their huge estate, called Waveland, is now a Kentucky historic site.

 

Waveland, with its acres of waving bluegrass, became the breeding-ground for Kentucky’s finest thoroughbred horses. The Cavendish Stables, taking their stock from Waveland, began breeding race horses. The original Kentucky Derby racetrack was constructed on the site of the Bryan family’s first residence, surveyed by Daniel Boone. Today the Derby is run at Churchill Downs, Louisville. Nearly every champion of the Derby, including the famous Man-O-war, descended from the Bryan strain. According to breeders, about every other generation, nearly without exception, the thoroughbreds gave birth to a mottled-white foal.

In about 1880 an Irishman named Cleophas J. Dowd, living in the Uintah Mountains of Utah, made a trip to Nashville, Tennesse, to confer with his friend, Charles Howard. Together they went to Kentucky to the Cavendish Stables where Dowd paid two-thousand dollars for a horse which became renowned throughout the West as the”Cavendish Stud.”Two years later Charles Howard was murdered in St. Joseph, Missouri, by his cousin, Bob Ford. Charles Howards’ true name was Jesse James.

The Cavendish Stud was employed to breed a strain of fast, hot‑blooded, well-trained mounts to supply the needs of the outlaw gang of the McCartys ‑ Tom, Bill, George and their offspring. A young man named Robert Leroy Parker was a protege of the McCartys. He became better known as Butch Cassidy.

An offspring of the Cavendish Stud was a mottled mare named Betty. Betty was the fastest race horse in three states and was managed on the Colorado-Utah circuit by Butch Cassidy and Matt Warner. Cassidy had Betty bred to a horse called Prince of the Mountain. Prince and Betty had a colt called Queen (Van Dyke) that was back-bred to Mine Guard, Cassidy’s other mottled white stallion.

With the inter-breeding of Prince and Betty the equine pedigree was complete. Two breeds, originating with the Heavenly Horses of the Chinese Emperor Wu‑ti, separated by Cortez and Bryan at the time of Queen Isabella, after more than two thousand years were together again in one strain.

But the story does not quite end yet.

One of the San Raphael Swell horses of Ute Chief Walker became the subject of Wildfire, a book by famed western novelist, Zane Grey. Wildfire became the epitome of the fiery, wild mustangs of the American West. The late author and biographer of Butch Cassidy, Charles Kelly, expended considerable time and effort in tracing the pedigree of Wildfire and connecting it to the San Raphael strain of Chief Walker.

Finally, five descendants of Mine Guard, Prince, and Betty played an important role in more modern times. They were commissioned to do national service because they were a white, royal breed. Following the asassination of President John F. Kennedy (whose family, the FitzgeTalds and Kennedys, orginated on the Bryan family estates in Ireland), four of the mottled white horses were commissioned to pull the caisson in the funeral procession, bearing the body of the slain president down Pennsylvania Avenue. A fifth horse proceeded ahead of the procession: the symbolic riderless horse.

After nearly three thousand years the Heavenly Horses were once more fulfilling their purpose: to escort the soul of another King to Heaven. The equine pedigree of the Heavenly Horses is complete.

 

HEAVENLY HORSES SOURCES:

1.  What Am I Doing Here, Bruce Chatwin, Penguin

 

Rooks, 1990

2.     Throrough bred Record

3.  Charles Kelly Collection, Utah State Historical Society

4.  Tracks and Scars, Art Davidson & Kerry Ross Boren,

 

unpub. mss.

5.  The O'Bryan Chronicles, Kerry Ross O'Boren, unpub.

 

mss.