The Horse

From Timothy C. Winegard’s Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the primary mode of transportation, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion, and a formidable weapon of war. Possessing a unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse dominated every facet of human life and shaped the very scope of human ambition. And we still live among its galloping shadows. Horses revolutionized the way we hunted, traded, traveled, farmed, fought, worshipped, and interacted. They fundamentally reshaped the human genome and the world’s linguistic map. They determined international borders, molded cultures, fueled economies, and built global superpowers. They decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture, and fashion. From the thundering cavalry charges of Alexander the Great to the streets of New York during the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 and beyond, horses have shaped both the grand arc of history and our everyday lives. Driven by fascinating revelations and fast-paced storytelling, <The Horse< is a riveting narrative of this noble animal’s unrivaled and enduring reign across human history. To know the horse is to understand the world.

Auteur

Dr. Timothy C. Winegard is a New York Times bestselling author of five books including The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford, served as an officer in the Canadian and British Armies, and has appeared on numerous documentaries, television programs, and podcasts. Winegard is an associate professor of history at Colorado Mesa University.

Résumé
**THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

An Amazon Best Book of the Month

A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book

From New York Times bestselling author of The Mosquito, the incredible story of how the horse shaped human history
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Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands.

Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the&#160;primary mode of transportation, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion, and a formidable weapon of war. Possessing a unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse dominated every facet of human life and shaped the very scope of human ambition. And we still live among its galloping shadows.

Horses revolutionized the way we hunted, traded, traveled, farmed, fought, worshipped, and interacted. They fundamentally reshaped the human genome and the world’s linguistic map. They determined international borders, molded cultures, fueled economies, and built global superpowers. They decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture, and fashion. From the thundering cavalry charges of Alexander the Great to the streets of New York during the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 and beyond, horses have shaped both the grand arc of history and our everyday lives.

Driven by fascinating revelations and fast-paced storytelling, The Horse is a riveting narrative of this noble animal’s&#160;unrivaled and enduring reign across human history. To know the horse is to understand the world.

Échantillon de lecture
CHAPTER 1

The Dawn of the Horse

Equine Evolution and Bone Wars

The enticing and seducing whisper of the Wild West was summoning Othniel Charles Marsh. The Civil War had been over for three years, and the vast, windswept prairies and majestic cloud-piercing mountains motioned for American Manifest Destiny. The war-weary nation was licking its wounds and trying to forget four years of unforgiving slaughter that left 750,000 Americans dead but ultimately unshackled 4.2 million human beings from the bondage of chattel slavery. For many like Othniel Marsh, the untamed West was the epitome of freedom and the essence of the rugged frontier spirit.

Born into modest means in Lockport along the Erie Canal in western New York, Marsh, a dour, scraggly bearded thirty-seven-year-old bachelor, had nothing tying him down. He purchased a train ticket to the newly established Wyoming Territory and methodically packed and bundled the bare necessities of a paleontologist: notebooks, pencils, shovels, picks, a well-worn straw boater hat, and, of course, a six-shooter pistol. In short order, restless men and women like Othniel Marsh transformed the West.

The providential opportunities were as endless as the horizon stretching seamlessly beyond the eternal grassland prairies and cascading foothills of the Rocky Mountains, to the sparkling, wave-crested waters of the Pacific. Fortunes awaited in the boomtown gold and silver mines. Fertile and vacant land hungered for the cultivating cleaves of the plow and the ranching hoofbeats of horses and cattle. Ferocious fur-bearing beasts howled from the rogue silhouettes of the snowy peaks. Adventure and amusement beckoned from whiskey-soaked saloons, sweaty bordellos, and dodgy gambling dens west of the Mississippi River.

Within this Gilded Age of upheaval, war, and shifting cultural and economic landscapes, railroads opened the door to westward expansion and, in the process, unlocked a window to our petrified past. The so-called Bone Wars between 1868 and 1892 witnessed a frenzy of trailblazing-and, at times, ruthlessly cutthroat-fossil expeditions and momentous discoveries. Rival fossil hunters and bone collectors scoured and combed the rich beds of (what are now) Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Montana.

To climb the professional ladder and attain the accompanying financial windfalls of celebrity status, callous and vindictive American and European paleontologists resorted to bribery, theft, sabotage, violence, and slander. Allegiances were fickle, and alliances fleeting. In this contentious age of embryonic Darwinian evolution, unearthing fossils meant fame, fortune, and academic immortality.

Given the increasing popularity of paleontology, and with successive and seemingly unearthly finds dominating the press and captivating popular imagination, in 1866 the millionaire financier, banker, and philanthropist George Peabody donated $150,000 ($3 million in today's money) for the construction of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. In a brazen act of nepotism, the institution promptly appointed its benefactor's nephew, Othniel Charles Marsh, professor of paleontology (the first such academic position in North America) and a trustee of the museum. Marsh was an unlikely candidate to seize the crown of early American paleontology.

Subsidized by his uncle, Marsh had previously studied geology, anatomy, and paleontology at Yale, followed by three years at various institutions in Germany. Although not yet established, he was talented, keen, energetic, and-most importantly, given the sizable expense of research excursions-fully funded. In 1868 Marsh packed his duffle, holstered his pistol, and bought passage (quite ironically as it would turn out) on one of the first "iron horse" trains to chug west on the overland route of the newly constructed Union Pacific Railroad.

During a quick pit stop on the Nebraska-Wyoming border, Marsh took the opportunity to stretch his legs and chat with the locals, explaining in the process the purpose…