It's a certainty that among the horses pulling our carriages, there is a bloodline to the original Spanish horses brought here by Spain's early explorers.
     They were aboard Ponce De Leon's ships on his second voyage to the New World in 1521. Along with a small herd of cattle, they were the first to ever land on what is now the continental United States.
     In 1565 St. Augustine Founder Pedro Menendez had cattle and horses shipped from Spain to begin producing beef for the garrison. However his effort to bring horses on his founding voyage was tragic. From the memoir of Father Francisco Grajales, principal priest on that voyage:
     "In the port of St. John's of Porto Rico, the general purchased twenty-four horses and a ship to transport fifty men, whom the King had commanded to be taken from this island. The very day we set sail, this ship sprung a leak, and the danger of foundering was so imminent that, in order to save the men, it became necessary to lighten her by throwing overboard a large quantity of merchandise.
     "Seeing that this produced but little effect, it became necessary also to throw over the horses. Twenty-three were either lost in this way or died during the voyage, so that but one arrived in Florida."
     Spanish horses did the heavy pulling in our earliest days, were prizes for British raids in the 1700s, and were the most common type of horse throughout the Southeast and all of the regions west of the Mississippi.
     The leading breed in 1750 and 1850, the pure Spanish horse in North America was almost extinct by 1950, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy tells us. Almost all Spanish stocks were crossbred with or replaced by horses of larger size, including thoroughbreds, other riding horse breeds, and draft horses.
     Only in recent years has attention been paid to preserving the pure Spanish horse, with numerous associations formed beginning in the late 1950s, today registering more than 200 horses annually with a breed population of over 2,000.