Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S.C. Gwynne

The Spanish horses were also, by the purest of accidents, brilliantly suited to the arid and semiarid plains and mesas of Mexico and the American West. The Iberian mustang was a far different creature from its larger grain-fed cousin from farther north in Europe. It was a desert horse, one whose remote ancestors had thrived on the level, dry steppes of central Asia. Down the ages, the breed had migrated to North Africa by way of the Middle East, mixing blood with other desert hybrids along the way. The Moorish invasions brought it to Spain.19 By that time it had become, more or less, the horse that found its way to America: light, small, and sturdy, barely fourteen hands high, with a concave Arabian face and tapering muzzle.