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The Native Americans had quickly realized how useful the  horses could be, and they soon became expert riders. They even passed on the skill to the young children, even those who were unable to talk.

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Navajo Horse Riding Song - The Native American Indian

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Track: Navajo Horse Riding Song (Traditional) Album: Spiritual Songs, Chants & Flute Music of the Native American Indian. (Recording Arts Retro UPC 076119005830) The album is available on I-Tunes, Apple Music, Amazon & Spotify

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The Spaniards re-introduced the horses into the Americas after Columbus’ voyages. At one point, the horses must have gotten loose and bred in the wild.

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European Knights - Around 2,000 Years Ago

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European Knights - Around 2,000 Years Ago

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When the saddles and stirrups arrived in Europe, they were able to ride their horses while fully armored in metal plates. They were like early tanks.

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Between AD 1000 and 1500, a lively society developed in Europe. Although most people still worked on the land, this was also the age of CASTLES, cathe

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They used the saddles and the stirrups, and they could then used their free hands to throw spears, use their swords, and even fire arrows. Because of this convenience, the Mongols were able to use their fast raids to conquer most of Asia.

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In China the saddle and stirrup made horse-mounted warfare more effective. Warriors could throw spears, use swords, or fire arrows with their free hand.

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Stirrups give a rider much more security in his seat than bareback riding. The stirrups are used to balance. By inserting his foot into the contraption at the bottom of the saddle fender, the rider gains stability and the ability to alter his center of gravity over the horse's back. They also give some measure of relief to a rider's "bum" when you've just plain been in the saddle too long.
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There are two or three considerations for saddle fenders and stirrups. The fenders are the wide leather that drops down from under the jockey, over the skirt and ends with the stirrup. It is meant to protect the rider from the sweat of the horse. The stirrup leathers are the actual weight-bearing leather attached to the tree at the top and the stirrup at the bottom - sewn either behind or on the front edge of the fenders. Standard width is 3″.

The placement of stirrup leathers and fenders is important. The stirrup leathers sewn to the back (or front edge) of the fenders should be attached to the saddle a little behind the rider's knees to get a more free-swinging stirrup as well as proper balance for the rider. If they are placed too far forward, they will create more weight over the horse's shoulders than is optimum. Too far back, they will also adversely affect the rider's center of balance.

The length adjustment of the stirrup should be easy to change and should be absolutely even on both sides. If the stirrups become uneven (stirrup leathers can stretch), the saddle gets uneven pressure and begins to warp to one side or the other, destroying the even weight distribution of the tree and causing a sore back.
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The length of your stirrups is adjusted according to your need for speed, mobility, control and stability.

Shorter stirrups are used by riders who need more speed or agility from their horses. Short stirrups sacrifice both communication with the horse (control) and safety for the rider (stability). However, a shorter stirrup moves the rider's center of gravity up and forward over the withers for more speed. Witness the race horses and jockey riding nearly on the horse's neck.

Jumpers (who move mostly in straight lines but need agility) use shorter stirrups than cutting horses but longer than race horses. Jumpers need enough communication with the horse to use leg aids but not so long that they inhibit his ability to lift. Again, the rider's center of gravity is more forward than a simple pleasure riding seat.

Cutting horses make very abrupt turns and stops, toppling a rider who does not have a secure seat. While the rider communicates with the horse very little during the actual exercise, longer stirrups afford much more stability for a whiplashed rider.

At the end of the fenders and above the actual stirrup is the stirrup hobble. They keep the stirrup from turning sideways in the fender and trapping the rider's foot. They are an essential safety feature.

The hobble strap also helps set the stirrup leathers so that the stirrup turns out at a 90 degree angle to the fender, making it easy to find the off-side stirrup when mounting and also relieving pressure on the knees while riding. This is also helped by storing your saddle with a broomstick through the stirrups from one side to the other under the saddle, forcing the stirrups to stay turned.

There are several shapes of stirrups, depending on the type of riding. The roper stirrup is the most common, but the trail stirrup is gaining in popularity for trail and endurance riding, and the sloped stirrup is also becoming popular because of the added comfort of the slant.

Oxbow stirrups require that the the boot be pushed deep into the stirrup (all of the way up to the heel of the boot) so that it places the stirrup tread under the arch of the boot. The boot needs a good steel arch to distribute the rider's weight. The roper stirrup is best when only the ball of the foot is placed over the tread. The trail stirrup allows more of the rider's weight to be distributed over the entire foot.
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It is important that you dress properly for riding. Riding boots (both English and Western) are designed to have pointed toes, slick soles, and deep heels. All of these features are for safety. The pointed toe is easier to get in and out of the stirrup. The slick sole slides in and out readily. And the heel prevents the boot from entering too far into the stirrup. Never ride in tennis shoes, mountain boots, mud boots or other gripping shoes. There is far too much danger of being unseated and not being released from the stirrup.

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Stirrups give a rider much more security in his seat than bareback riding. The stirrups are used to balance. By inserting his foot into the contraption at the bottom of the saddle fender, the rider...

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Middle Eastern Chariots - 4,000 Years Ago

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Middle Eastern Chariots - 4,000 Years Ago

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Drawings show that people in the Middle East started using horses to pull chariots around 4,000 years ago.

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The war chariot was made possible by two inventions, the spoked wheel and the bit. Complete chariots have been found in Egyptian tombs. The frame was made of wood covered with leather. It had two wheels, each with four (later six) spokes, and an axle placed at the very rear of the body for stability on fast turns. Attached to the sides were one or two quivers, each containing thirty or forty arrows, a bow case, and sometimes a quiver for javelins.
In the late eighteenth century BC both the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and the Babylonian Empire fell apart. Everywhere records failed, leaving the seventeenth and much of the sixteenth century a dark age. In the old centres of civilization alien conquerors took over, and new powers arose in the north. Amorite and Hurrian invaders, called by the Egyptians hyksos ('foreign chieftains'), established themselves in the Nile Delta and in about 1650 BC proclaimed a new dynasty with its capital at Avaris - the first non-Egyptian dynasty in the history of Egypt. At about the same time a Hittite king called Hattusilis created a powerful state, controlling central Anatolia from his citadel at Hattusas. His successor Mursilis extended Hittite rule over northern Syria, and in 1595 BC performed the most spectacular military exploit in history to that date, when he led his army all the way to Mesopotamia, sacked the great city of Babylon and carried off the statue of its god Marduk, doubtless accompanied by much booty of a secular nature. As a result, the enfeebled dynasty of Hammurabi vanished and was soon replaced by barbarians known as Kassites from the Iranian hills. Like earlier barbarian invaders of Mesopotamia they were quickly Akkadianized; their king called himself 'King of the Kassites', but also 'King of Sumer and Akkad'; and the dynasty lasted longer than any of the native dynasties of Sumer and Akkad, though next to nothing is known of its history. The Hurrian princes took advantage of the general disorder: in about 1550 BC a great Hurrian kingdom called Mitanni arose in northern Mesopotamia and soon contested the domination of Syria with the Hittites.

All these kingdoms relied upon a new military technology, the horsed chariot and the composite bow. Early evidence for chariot warfare links it to the Hittite kingdom. The hyksos princes introduced it to Egypt, and then it became common all over the Middle East. But it is unlikely that the Hittites invented it. There is a mysterious but definite connection between chariot warfare and people of Aryan heritage that is, speaking dialects ancestral to the Aryan or Indo-Iranic division of the Indo-European linguistic family. Today Aryan languages are spoken in Iran, much of Central Asia and most of the Indian subcontinent. The oldest literary evidence for an Aryan language is the collection of Sanskrit hymns called the Rig-Veda, composed in about 1500 BC. Most of the people of the kingdom of Mitanni spoke Hurrian, but the aristocracy, all chariot warriors, had Aryan names and worshipped the same gods - Indra, Varuna, Mithra - who appear in the Rig-Veda. Many cities in Syria and Palestine acquired dynasties with Aryan or Hurrian names at this time. Some scholars have thought that even the Kassites of Babylonia (whose original language is obscure, but could not have been Indo-European) paid homage to some Aryan gods. Everywhere the Aryan word maryannu (young warrior) was used for chariot fighters. There survives a Hittite treatise on the training of chariot horses, translated from Hurrian, which is studded with Aryan technical terms. In the fourteenth century, when this treatise was written, Aryan may no longer have been spoken in the Middle East, but it was still the international language of chariotry, as Italian is of music.

It is widely supposed that the ancestors of these Aryans had come from the north, and likewise the horse and the war chariot. The dissemination of the horse preceded the other two. The original range of the wild horse (Equus caballus) lay on the Eurasian steppe, where domesticated horses were being ridden as early as the fourth millennium BC. By 3000 BC there had developed a nomadic pastoral culture exploiting the deep steppe with riding horses and ox-drawn wheeled carts, stretching across the European steppe from the Dneister to the Ural River, and soon to spread across the steppes of Central Asia. Horse nomadism was never suitable for the arid steppes of the Middle East, but by the Middle Bronze Age Syrian and Mesopotamian princes were importing horses from the north and occasionally riding in horse-drawn chariots. These were prestige vehicles, with no military function.

The war chariot of the High Bronze Age was a much more specialized vehicle and could not have come from the European steppes, which lack the necessary woods. Many scholars think the likeliest place for its invention lies in the mountainous regions south of the Caucasus, where the high pastures were famous for horse-breeding in antiquity. Some think that we should also look there for the homeland of the Aryans. It seems certain that by around 1700 BC horsemen in that part of the world developed a chariot built of lightweight hardwoods, with two spoked wheels and a leather-mesh platform on which a rider could stand, the whole thing light enough (about 60 pounds) for one man to carry, and pulled by two fast horses. It was the first effective use of the horse as a draft animal, and the swiftest vehicle ever designed. It was surely invented for hunting, which always remained one of its main uses, but some enterprising highland chieftain soon experimented with using such chariots in war: that is, as a galloping archery platform, carrying two athletic young men, one an expert driver and the other an expert archer armed with a composite bow, firing a steady stream of arrows with a range of several hundred feet. The basic principle of the composite bow had been known in the Middle East for some centuries, but it was an expensive weapon requiring years to manufacture; like the rifle of the eighteenth century AD, it was probably used for hunting by kings and nobles, and in war by certain highly trained specialists. The weapon may not have been perfected, nor its full military potential realized, until it was mounted on a mobile platform. These inventions eventually spun off a third invention, the first real body armour: the archer, and sometimes the horses, were protected by leather tunics sewn with bronze or copper scales.

It has been suggested that chariot warfare was first tested early in the seventeenth century at Troy, which at that time was taken over by the conquerors who built the citadel known to archaeologists as Troy VI. Knowledge of the new art had spread far by about 1650 BC, when upstart regimes in Anatolia and Egypt used it in their rise to power. The long Hittite march to Babylon in 1595 BC demonstrated its full potential. Over the next century Aryan and Hurrian adventurers seized power in cities all around the Fertile Crescent.

These conquests were not mass migrations; rather, we should imagine quick takeovers by small military elites, resembling the Norman conquests of England and Sicily in the eleventh century AD. There was relatively little destruction; the transition from Middle to High Bronze Age was not marked by any general decline in material civilization, such as had accompanied the transition from Early to Middle Bronze Age. Like the medieval Norman knights, the chariot conquerors were soon absorbed culturally by the conquered. Only in two places did these conquests lead to lasting cultural and linguistic change. In the west, around 1600 BC, a band of Indo-European (but not Aryan) charioteers established themselves in Greece, and two centuries after that took over the more advanced Minoan civilization on Crete, adapting the linear Cretan script to write a language that was turning into Greek. In the east, a larger migration spread over the Iranian plateau and during the latter half of the second millennium overran northern India, taking over the remnants of the Indus River civilization, whose people became the lower castes of Hinduism; the oral poetry of the conquerors preserved faithfully an Aryan dialect that was turning into Sanskrit. But in the Middle East the upheavals were over by about 1550 BC, when the native Eighteenth Dynasty expelled the hyksos from Egypt. By that time the barbarians had been assimilated and a new pattern of interstate affairs had taken shape.

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The war chariot was made possible by two inventions, the spoked wheel and the bit. Complete chariots have been found in Egyptian tombs. The frame was made of wood covered with leather. It had two wheels, each with four (later six) spokes, and an axle placed at the very rear of the body for stability...

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Fossils of worn-down horse teeth were found, and that suggests that those people used bits in their horses mouths. But it is possible that horses were ridden without bits before the time of the fossils.

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Q: I have a Thoroughbred who has been showing in the Baby Green Hunters. He nearly constantly chews on his horse bit. We've tried many types of horse bits with no improvement. He's currently working in a flash noseband, and we have to keep punching holes because he stretches the leather. We've had him fully checked out by a vet and a chiropractor. Is there anything else I can do to break this habit of bit chewing? Since he's a hunter, there's a limit to the equipment I can use at shows.
Liza Towell Boyd
A: It sounds as if your horse is trying to tell you something. Constant horse bit chewing is often a sign of nervousness, particularly in younger horses, or discomfort. Consulting your vet and chiropractor is a good start, but you may need to dig deeper to discover the root of the horse bit chewing problem. Ask for second opinions, do your own research and experiment. Here are some avenues to explore.

If your horse is young, his bit chewing may result from immaturity or unfamiliarity with the bit. He might need more time getting accustomed to the feel of the bit in his mouth without also having to focus on a rider on his back. Remove the noseband and reins, and put the bridle on him in his stall for an hour or so, staying nearby to keep an eye on him. (Make sure there is nothing in the stall he can catch the bridle on. Never do this with a bit that can hook onto things, such as a full-cheek snaffle.) Repeat this daily until he seems to get tired of bit chewing.

Next, longe him with the bridle on, either feeding the longe line through the bit ring, over his poll and attaching it to the ring on the other side, or putting a halter or longing cavesson over the bridle and attaching the longe line to that. When his chewing ?decreases significantly on the longe line, begin riding him again.

In horses of any age, bit chewing can signify anxiety. Different horses mature at different rates. Even if your horse seems physically prepared to perform at his current level, he may not be ready mentally. Try reducing the pressure: shorten your schooling sessions, take him on trail rides and so on. Even consider turning him out for a few months and giving him a total break. Then bring him back slowly, making sure he's comfortable in every situation ?before progressing. When you ease back into showing, do just the ticketed warm-ups at first.

If your horse is older, the first thing I'd suspect is ulcers. Not all ulcers are easy to diagnose, and some do not respond to anti-ulcer medications. Even in the absence of a diagnosis, there are a wide range of effective treatments, including diet changes and alternative therapies, such as acupuncture and herbs, worth trying. Try substituting alfalfa and corn oil for portions of your horse's hay and grain. Provide his hay ration in a hay bag with very small openings to encourage him to nibble throughout the day in a more natural "grazing" manner.

Also look closely at his mouth for cracks in the corners of his lips or sores on his gums or inside his cheeks. Apply petroleum jelly to the sores and ride him in a hackamore, if possible, until they heal.

Find a certified equine dentist to take a second look at his teeth, as well. (Because they specialize in teeth, equine dentists can sometimes catch abnormalities that veterinarians miss.) In addition to identifying possible hooks, wolf teeth, etc., that might be bothering your horse, he or she can also tell if your horse has a low palate, which makes the bit sit differently in his mouth.

Speaking of bits, keep experimenting! We sometimes consult an expert bit salesman for suggestions when nothing in our trunk seems to be working. Some horses like thicker bits; some like thinner. Some like bits with multiple joints; others prefer straight, soft bits. Try different metals and materials. Look online, browse tack shops and ask other riders and trainers if they have bits you can borrow.

Hunter judges may penalize "nonconventional" bits in the show ring, including hackamores, kimberwicks, gags, multiring snaffles, etc. However, if your horse goes well in a mild, less-conventional bit, it's the judge's prerogative to deem it acceptable. I know a famous hunter, for example, who shows in a leather bit, and judges either can't tell or don't mind.

Experiment with his noseband, too. It sounds as if he's fighting the flash, which may be contributing to his anxiety. Try removing it and lowering or raising the cavesson a hole or two. Sometimes repositioning where the noseband sits on the jaw can make a positive difference. Switching to a figure-eight noseband temporarily may also help. Remember, though, that flash, dropped and figure-eight nosebands are not "recommended" in the show-hunter ring (according to the USEF Rule Book).

Finally, ask a trainer or clinician to evaluate your riding to make sure you're not contributing to the problem unconsciously. Too-strong hands or locked elbows, back and shoulders even in the subtlest form can cause this type of resistance in sensitive horses. Asking an experienced rider to school your horse can also supply valuable feedback that may help to identify the source of the problem.

Whatever is causing your horse's chewing, be patient with him. Taking time to solve this problem now is much more important than sticking to whatever predetermined plan you may have had for this show season. If you only fix the problem temporarily, don't be discouraged. Some solutions need to be modified over time. But you'll succeed in the end if you keep thinking outside the box and listening to your horse!
One of today's leading hunter riders, Liza Towell Boyd learned much of what she knows from two top trainers: her father, Jack Towell, and Missy Clark. After college, she joined the family business and went on to win 11 USHJA Hunter Derbies and numerous major hunter championships. Liza and her husband, Blake, have a 2-year-old daughter, Ellen.
This article originally appeared in the January 2012 issue of Practical Horseman magazine.

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A reader says her horse chews on bit constantly. Find out several ways to fix bit chewing this from top hunter rider Liza Boyd.

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The first known evidence that horses were domesticated is from horse dung inside post holes of what looks to have been a stable in modern-day Kazakhstan. The stable was from about 5000 B.C.

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Persian Empire's Royal Road - Fifth Century B.C.

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Persian Empire's Royal Road - Fifth Century B.C.

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Horse-mounted messengers used the Persian Empire’s Royal Road to transfer their messages. They could carry a message 1,700 miles in seven days, as compared to 90 days by foot.

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The Persian Royal Road by Student Group 2

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TOUCH this image to discover its story. Image tagging powered by ThingLink

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Bering Land Bridge - Around 10,000 Years Ago

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Bering Land Bridge - Around 10,000 Years Ago

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Around 10,000 years ago, the relatives of the horse traveled on the Bering Land Bridge, making their way into Asia and Europe. Around that time, horses had completely vanished from North America. Experts are unsure if the disappearance had to do with the changing climate after the end of the ice age, of many if human hunters from Asia had wiped out their population.

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Land bridge clipart.. Free clipart collections. Use these Land bridge clipart.

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Lascaux Cave Horse Paintings - Over 17,000 Years Ago

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Lascaux Cave Horse Paintings - Over 17,000 Years Ago

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Over 17,000 years ago, the paintings in the Lascaux Cave were painted, and they show how much the foragers in Asia and Europe worshiped the animal.

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The Hyracotherium, a distant ancestor of the horse, lived about 55 million years ago, and it lived in the tropical rain forests of North America. The Hyracotherium was a leaf-eating mammal the size of a dog who was apart of the rise of mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

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Hyracotherium Facts - information about the extinct, prehistoric animal, hyracotherium

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Facts about Hyracotherium, an extinct prehistoric animal