The First Modern Horses in the Chesapeake Region

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Modern horses arrived in the Chesapeake region with the first Virginia colonists. Although scenes of Indians mounted on horseback attacking a wagon train or battling cavalry troops are a staple of westerns, these were nineteenth-century experiences. Native Americans in this area did not raise or have access to horses.

As was the case with many of the new human arrivals, the horses brought in as part of the earliest expeditions did not survive the "starving time" of 1609-1610.[1] Archaeological evidence indicates that all were consumed as food by the desperate colonists. The ships that arrived in subsequent years to resupply the Jamestown colonists carried more horses; these horses survived, and as they reproduced horses became a permanent part of the Chesapeake landscape.[2]


S. D. Rager

It is interesting to note that the lists of needed supplies, prepared both for the Virginia Company and for Maryland settlers, never mentioned livestock of any kind. Ships making ocean passages carried live animals as a source of food during the voyage, and successful settlement required domesticated animals for food, transportation, and labor. But the few accounts that we have of the early years of colonization make no mention of horses.

Father Andrew White notes in his journal that the first Maryland colonists bought cattle and hogs when they stopped in Virginia before sailing up the Potomac River to their landing at St. Clement's Island, but he doesn't say anything about horses. Nor is there any indication that the Ark and the Dove carried horses, something that was a possibility but very unlikely. Nevertheless, the first settlers must have purchased horses in Virginia within a short time of arriving in Maryland and later-arriving ships may well have carried at least a few horses.

Both artifacts recovered on archaeological digs and a variety of documents provide evidence about the presence of horses in early Virginia. Archaeologists working on the site of Martin's Hundred, first settled in 1618, recovered both horse shoes and a stirrup during their excavations of the site. The "Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall", promulgated in 1612 to bring order and discipline to the Virginia colony, included the following order:

Now know yee therefore, these promises carefully considered, that it is our will and pleasure, that every one, of what quality or condition soever hee bee, in this present Colony, to take due notice of this our Edict, whereby wee do strictly charge and command, that no man shall dare to kill, or destroy any Bull, Cow, Calfe, Mare, Horse, Colt, Goate, Swine, Cocke, Henne, Chicken, Dogge, Turkie, or any tame Cattel, or Poultry, of what condition soever; whether his owne, or appertaining to another man, without leave from the Generall, upon paine of death in the Principall, and in the accessary, burning in the Hand, and losse of his eares, and unto the concealer of the same foure and twenty houres whipping, with addition of further punishment, as shall be thought fitte by the censure, and verdict of a Martiall Court.

Later Virginia records include a report made in 1616 that noted only six horses in the colony; a request that twenty mares be shipped in 1620 (but no evidence either way about their arrival), and the notation of only one horse in the 1625 muster for Martin's Hundred.

On the other hand, the Virginia Council in June 1620 described the colony's horses as "more beautifull, and fuller of courage" than the English horses from which they descended. The massacre that occurred in 1622 may well have wiped out many of those horses, resulting in the low number reported in 1625.

A proclamation issued in 1622 imposing the death penalty for anyone convicted of stealing "beasts & Birds of Domesticall & tame nature," placed horses, mares, and colts at the top of the list of protected animals, indicating both their importance and the fact that there were horses that might be stolen.[3]

While this evidence is mixed as to the presence of horses in Virginia's first decades, it is unambiguous about the value attached to them.[4]



[1] A recent study of colonial diet, based on archaeological investigations of early Virginia sites, notes that fish, wild fowl, turtles, and small mammals represented the "mainstay" of the early Virginia settlers' diet. Faunal remains from the winter of 1609 reveal the extent of the colonists' hunger, as they included vipers, black rats, dogs, cats, and horses. Archaeologists do not normally find horse bones in kitchen middens -- only the very poor ate horse meat, and then only when they had access to it, horses normally being too valuable and too scarce to be butchered for food. Yet the biomass recovered from early deposits at Jamestown included heavily butchered horse bones from heads and feet as well as carcasses. Cary Carson, Joanne Bowen, Willie Graham, Martha McCartney, and Lorena Walsh, "New World, Real World: Improvising English Culture in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," The Journal of Southern History, LXXIV (February 2008), 40.

[2] Nor was their adaptation to the Chesapeake in any way unusual. The Narragansett sachem Miantonomi, speaking to a local tribe on Long Island in 1642, despaired that "these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved." Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates, (2008), 203.

[3] Ivor Noël Hume, Martin's Hundred, (1982), 147-48.


[4] Equally signficant, perhaps, is the choice of a cover illustration for Hume's book: Gerard Terborch's "Cavalier in the Saddle."

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