In 1493 the Spanish horses treaded on American land for the fi rst time in La Española, the island nowadays called Hispaniola, and were the direct ancestors of all the American Crioulo (or “Criollo”) horse lineages. After getting habituated to the environment, and horse-breeding being incremented by later imports, the stock underwent a rapid reproduction, for within a few years they spread to the other islands of the Antilles, and arrived to the continent. As far as it is known, Panama and Columbia were the fi rst regions of importance for the herds reproduction. From Panama they passed on to Peru taken by Pizarro, where they started to multiply as of 1532. This is also the place where horses proceeding from breeders of Santiago de Uruba (Colombia) arrived in 1538. Then Charcas became an equine breeding center of paramount importance.
In the same period of time, Pedro de Mendoza (1535) and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1541) introduced into the Rio de La Plata region and Paraguay horses brought directly from Spain. Alonso Luis de Lugo pledged himself to take two hundred horses from Spain for the conquest of Nueva Granada, and Hernando de Soto left San Lúcar de Barrameda (1538) with one hundred horses for his expedition to Florida. From then on a genuine interchange of equine herds started to occur among the distinguished regions. From Charcas departed the herd of horses Valdivia took to Chile in 1541, the ones Diego de Rojas took to Tucuman in 1548, and the ones Luis de Cabrera took to Córdoba in 1573, and right afterwards to Santa Fé. This is the zone where approximately on the same period of time Paraguayan horses were brought by Garay. They descended from the ones Cabeza de Vaca introduced directly from Spain 30 years before, and from the ones Felipe de Cáceres took away from Peru in 1569. From Paraguay also went the herds of horses that arrived to Buenos Aires in 1580, taken by Juan de Garay, and the horses Adelantado Juan Torres de Vera y Aragón took to Corrientes in 1588. From Chile, the herds arrived to Argentina in 1561 passing through Cuyo brought by Francisco de Aguirre, Castillo, and others.
In 1605, came to Chile animals the Chilean governor Garcia Ramos took from the Rio de la Plata, and in 1601 the ones Capitán López Vasques Pestaña took away from Tucumán. It was found (Goulart, 1964) that the horsebreedings started in the reduções or “reductions” (settlements of Indians converted and governed by the Jesuits) of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1634, when those animals were brought by the Jesuit priests Cristóbal de Mendonza and Pedro Romero from Corrientes, Argentina, to where they were brought from Asunción, capital of Paraguay, by Alonso de Vera y Aragón, in 1588.
Simultaneously to such displacement of tame herds, whether they were abandoned or have run away, as the years went by the number increased in such way that all the possibilities or needs of the fi rst inhabitants to keep them under control of northern or southern regions went beyond their reach in the American continent. Those Crioulo herds from the earliest times have scattered and formed huge wild herds, called “masteños” and “mustangs” in Mexico and in the United States, and “cimarrones” in Central America and the islands. In Rio de la Plata they are denominated “baguales”, or are named “kaitá” by the Indians of the pampas (extensive generally grass-covered plains) who accompanied Dr. Zeballos (1834) in his journey to Chile. The Indians in northern Argentine call them “saguá”. With respect to the scattered horses, the “cimarrones” that lived in the “Dominican Sabanas” (broad stretches of land) or in the “Venezuelan llanos” (plains) it is said that they were chased during the fi rst quarter of the 18th Century. Roberto Cunninghame Graham (1946) says in his book that in those years the Venezuelan llanos were the only place in the Americas where “cimarrones” horses could be found.
The American “mustang” or the Mexican “mesteño” have a similar origin. Cabrera (1937 and 1945) and Denhardt (1947) explain that those animals could not have been abandoned or lost by the expeditions of Cabeza de Vaca (1528, 1537), Soto (1539, 1543) or Coronado (1540, 1542), because the former did not took horses in the journey, and the other two practically lost all their riding horses, dead due to journey weariness, or by Indians. Its is accepted as true that it was Juan de Oñate, around 1595, who took to the southwest of the United States the ancestors of the “mustangs”. Part of those tamed horses were later on scattered away from the religious Missions, farms, or “ranchos” attacked by Indians and formed what the American literature called “wild horses”, the tame horses that became wild, “cimarrones” or “baguales”, according to denominations they received in the “Dominican sabanas”, or in the “South-American pampas”. As to the original Andalusian “ginetes” (horse riders) many of them have probably died during the territory conquests, but others undoubtedly reproduced and their descendents, habituated to the American environment in the course of many generations, have forged these Crioulo populations made up by the “small great horse of the Americas”, as Guilherme Echenique has correctly nicknamed them.
There is no doubt that the Crioulos descended directly from the horse the conquerors brought to the Americas. The most diffi cult thing is to demonstrate the ethnical composition of the Spanish equine population in those ancient times, what were the predominant types, and which ones, for what reasons of geographic distribution, would be chosen to come to the Americas and originated the Crioulo breed. Prado (1941) engaged in the study of ethnographic “ancestors” of the 1541 Chilean horse. According to the author, the primitive types of horses that deeply infl uenced the conformation of the Crioulos are the celtic and the saloutre horses, a combination that originated the ancient “Spanish Jaca”, this horse’s average height is inferior to 1.47 meters (14/4 hands) - U. Prado, “El Caballo Chileno” (The Chilean Horse) , pg. 13), the bérbere (Barb horse) or african race, asian or arabian horse, and the germanic or nordic horse. These types of horses can give you an approximate idea, according to Prado, of what kind was the Spanish horse of that ancient time. Professor Ruy D’Andrade, in his studies, (1935, 1939, and 1941), specially these three works in which he examines the basic elements of the equine population in the Iberian peninsula represent a precious contribution to the study of our Crioulos ancestors, thus confi rming their European origin, although they are deeply infl uenced by the Bérbere or African type, but completely distant from any infl uence of the Asian or Arabian type. The union of the types called “garrano” and “líbico” (Andalusian horse with a convex or sub-convex profi le) makes the author suppose where the Andalusian type came from with its straight profi le, and also consider that the fi rst ones are more than suffi cient to explain the profi les types of our Crioulo, called respectively Asian and African types, the ones our author calls “garrano or Celtic” type, and “Andalusian or líbico” type. Like Dr. Cabrera, he admits a paramount infl uence of “bérbere” (Barb horse) in the constitution of the Spanish horse, but without actually laying to him the real cross-breeding character, as the Lusitanian author hypothetically supposes that “the Andalusian horse is not a close relative of the Arabian horse, and not even descends from the bérbere, or the Germanic horse, but comes from a natural and local breed transformed by domestication and several succeeding crossbreedings accomplished until our current days. The bérberes and germanic horses belong to these groups”. Infusion of bérbere blood in the old andalusian type would be only act as a sip of blood and not as a cross-breeding. By eliminating the Arabian as an important factor in the breeds origin formation, only two important ethnic origins are apt to give a balance to its action on it; the African, represented by the primitive bérbere horse, and the European horse, a product from crossing of the two celtic types: soloutre and germanic. From the most ordinary characteristics inherited from their ancestors, the average height, which hardly reaches 1.50 meter (15/½ hands), its short head, triangular, of straight or sub-convex profi le, the ears well-separated and short, with a broad base and not perfectly straightened up, the neck set upright, the croup a little tilted, and an expeditious temperament inherited from the bérbere horse, showing abundant mane and tail, with a “low and strong” aspect, and the smooth trait from its European ancestors.
