How Well They Served, Suffered, and Survived

Heavy Horses
Copyright 1986 Western Producer Prairie Books
165 pages,
ISBN 1-894004-74-4.

Work oxen served their owners moderately well and with their natural advantage of large stomach capacity, were able to consume enough roughage feed in the form of pasture grass or hay to meet their energy needs for at least half a day at a time. This avoided the necessity of supplying concentrated grain feed like oats or barley, which most newcomers to homestead country didn't have anyway. Hence the bovine ability to live off the land in the summer seasons. They did not perform as well in the winter when grazing land was blanketed with snow. Horses on the other hand, with a background of millions of years on the North American plains, knew how to paw their way through the snow to the dead grass below.

Oxen had their place and earned more gratitude than they ever received. One of their misfortunes was a sulky disposition, and nobody loved the poor critters. Owners promised themselves they would acquire horses as soon as circumstances justified purchase, at which time the oxen would be converted speedily to winter supplies of beef, albeit tough.

By the year I900, Canada had about 1.5 million horses, mainly of draft type and breeding, and importing purebreds of four or five draft breeds was becoming an important business. Importers and dealers maintained big sales stables in many Canadian cities. Brandon had the self-imposed title of Horse Capital of Canada. The principal items of sale were purebred stallions brought from the United States or overseas, thousands of them, to be offered for sale at one or another of the busy stables operated by Colquhoun and Beattie, Trotter and Trotter, J. B. Holgate, Vanstone and Rogers, Alexander Galbraith, and many other importers and specialists. Beecham Trotter could report that by the first decade of the twentieth century, the horse breeding and selling business was so brisk that his firm paid out over three million dollars for horses brought to the Brandon stable for sale.

It was a time, of course, when every Canadian farmer was a horseman and the ambition of every farm boy was to be an expert horseman like his father. Most horse owners could have been considered specialists, with a good understanding of feeds and feeding, a practical knowledge of disorders and unsoundnesses, and an artistic touch in preparing a team of horses for the showring or a trip to town on Saturday aftemoon. They could drench sick horses, file teeth, break the wild ones, roll mains, trim hoofs, read ages from the teeth, and drive big outfits with four reins. They talked about sweat-pads, colic cures, snorting poles, catch colts, stringhalt, buck straps, bellybands, spreadrings, tie chains, martingales, and smooth mouths. Their vocabulary was their own.

The heavy horse judging ring was, at that time, the acknowledged beating heart of every fair or exhibition, and assisting and promoting governments were anxious to have a financial stake in anything as popular. The Dominion Department of Agriculture not only paid prize money but gladly subsidized horse breeding by paying part of the service fees for every foal that came from an approved stallion. It was reasonable to presume that everyone of the operators of Canada's half million farms wanted and needed at least two horses for work in heavy harness and hoped to breed his own replacements. So great was the Canadian public involvement in horse breeding that Isaac Beattie of the firm of Colquhoun and Beattie could report 607 mares bred to one or another of five stallions kept at the Baubier Stable on Brandon's Eighth Street in a single season.

Feeding work horses at 5 A.M. and working with them almost continuously until they were fed and bedded down for the night at 8 or 9 P.M., was tedious enough to drive some young people from farms, but horsemanship was not without glamour aplenty. Young farmers of the period had no Cadillacs but they found satisfaction and pleasure in placing polished harness with Scotch tops and ivory spreadrings on their most stylish team of heavies for a mission to town where they might drive down the main street with horses prancing and pedestrians on the board sidewalks pausing to stare. There was also the incomparable joy of harnessing and driving a well-groomed and well-trained four- or six-horse team into the local showring and skillfully guiding the powerful outfit as it was called to walk, trot, back up, and cut the figure eight before the judge. The crowning glory would be to qualify for a prize ribbon before a crowd of admiring spectators.

Altogether, it was a glamorous chapter in horse history, also made distinctive and exciting by strong and often bitter breed prejudices. Every horseman in those years when draft horses ruled or at least influenced most Canadian lives, had a favorite breed and was ready to argue or fight in support of its good name. For a few decades before the Belgian had become established, the main quarrels were between the adherents of Clydesdales-many of them speaking with thick Scottish accents-and those with equally strong feelings for Percherons.

Differing denominational loyalties could divide a rural community. Opposing political party affiliations could do the same. But in some districts, where breed prejudices seemed to get out of hand, Clydesdale supporters sat defiantly at one end of the judging ring bleachers and Percheron supporters with the same serious scowls sat at the other. It was told of at least one rural church that friends of the Percheron breed sat on the left side of the central pew and the conscientious believers in Clydesdales sat unbending on the other side.

It would be folly to allow breed animosities to soar to such heights again, but as evidence of the enthusiasm and loyalties that were a significant part of horse history in Canada, that early rivalry should be good for a laugh and certainly worth remembering.

By 1911, the Canadian horse population had risen to 2,664,000, an increase of a million head in one decade. And in 1921, after another ten years, the Canadian horse population reached 3,610,500, the highest figure to be recorded either before or since. The overwhelming majority were farm horses of draft type and the total number would represent about five for every Canadian farm. Saskatchewan alone had about a million head, almost all on farms and showing some degree of Clydesdale, Percheron or Belgian breeding.

But by this time, the horsemen's principal competition was not from another breed but rather from mechanical power which made its initial threat in the form of the slow, heavy, and cumbersome steam tractors. The big steamers gave way gradually to big tractors driven by internal combustion engines. Still, the horsemen laughed at the utter improbability of their draft horses ever being displaced on farms by tractor power.

In 1918 the Government of Canada, motivated by the continuing wartime demands for greater food production and the shortages of farm help, sold and distributed the first of a fleet of small tractors, Ford-built and known as Fordsons. From that point onwards the horseman's position became steadily more insecure. The new tractor presented an entirely new concept; it was a two-plow unit with four cylinders, relatively light in weight, fast on the road or trail and fascinatingly maneuverable. It was being delivered at a price of $795. Moreover, the Fordson was instantly popular and many small farmers who bought Fordsons at what seemed like the going price for four average farm horses, sold or retired forthwith two or three or four of their usual stock of horses.