DWARF HORSES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4430, 26 May 1941, Page 8

DWARF HORSES

SECRET OF GRAND CANYON. The North American continent has not yet, it seems, revealed all its secrets to the explorer. In particular the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is still capable of springing surprises. There arrived recently at the town of Phoenix, Arizona, a veteran cattleman who reported that a herd of dwarf horses was roaming the floor of an almost inaccessible valley in the depths of that canyon. He had himself seen two of them. One of them, a mare, was 30 inches high and weighed less than 90 lbs; while the other, a colt, weighed about 19 lbs. According to the cattleman’s story, a group of Indians had come across about fifty of these tiny horses and had brought out the two which he had himself seen. There was, he said, a legend among the Indians that hundeeds of years ago a Supai chief took his horses into the valley to hide them from the plundering Navajos. The animals were unable to find their way out, and their owner never returned to retrieve them. In the cattleman’s opinion, in-breeding and lack of food had caused this once normal strain of horses to dwindle in size.