attended by a pack pony to carry his war kit and face paint for use on occasions of high ceremonial, or a full dress battle. [Sidenote: Barbarians] It is a superstition of running and jumping horsemanship that a big horse and a little man are the right combination for travel. The Red Indian of the Plains would average five foot ten, and his pony say thirteen hands, a big man on a very little mount. The United States cavalry were on the average smaller {110} men on very much larger horses. They sometimes intercepted Indians on the march, but rarely overtook them. Closely pursued, Chief Joseph commanding the Nez Percé tribe, marched with his women and children fourteen hundred miles, before the United States forces succeeded in intercepting their flight. In the case of the Blackfoot outlaw Charcoal, up to a hundred-and-sixty Mounted Police were engaged for four months catching him. So on the whole the primitive savage, once he had a pony, was not deficient in mobility. And given the pony, he became the Mounted Barbarian whose Hordes played havoc with the elder civilizations. At the very dawn of History three hundred thousand head of Turanean chariotry romped down on the Persian Empire. They are said to have been very haughty and oppressive to the poor Persians. The fact that range men travelling are usually attended by a herd, change ponies at every halt, and so ride fresh mounts two or three times a day, gives them a mobility with even the smallest ponies which has never been matched by one-horse cavalry. It was not the foray, but shock action which had to wait, until the crossing of stocks produced the war horse. {111} CHAPTER V. THE HORSE IN HISTORY. I. THE DAPPLED HORSE OF EUROPE. THE BALTIC PEOPLE. The Baltic, which once drained through Lapland to the Arctic, became, as the icefields melted, a land-locked lake until a local sinkage of the rocks opened its Danish channels into the Atlantic. At the same period the North Sea was eating its way up the old vale of North River. The melting of the icefields had left these Baltic and North-River Provinces of Cloudland an ill-drained country of bare rock wastes, of boulder tracts and clay, cluttered with lakes and swamps. It was long before its damp and frosty soils yielded a scanty crop, eight bushels of wheat, for instance, in Plantaganet England as compared with thirty-six bushels, the present average. The only wealth was that of fisheries in cold and deadly shallows.