St. Stephen News

As anyone who knows and loves horses can tell you, our modern horse owes its beginnings to a group of 24 ponies brought to the New World by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in the late 15th century. These ancestors were a cross be-tween standard Spanish stock and the fabled Ara-bian horses brought into Spain by those who fol-lowed the prophet Mohammed in the 8th century.

While this is common knowledge to many, recent negative reaction to the blessing of the Fort Worth Stock Show by a Muslim cleric shows how quickly we can forget the facts when in the grip of fear mongering. We have the culture of Islam to thank in no small measure for the quality of the horses that entertain us in the rodeo. With tongue in cheek, I would suggest that if there had not been early Muslim horsemen, we might not have a ro-deo.

We need also to remember that cowboys of the West were joined in the mid-nineteenth century by Bedouin camel handlers when the U. S. Army imported 74 camels to be the foundation of its Camel Corp. Bud Kennedy has already reminded us of this in a recent column on this unpleasant and rude behavior at the rodeo. What Bud didn’t men-tion is that one of those camel-boys went by the Arabic name Hadji Ali. After the outfit was dis-banded, he made his home in Arizona under the nickname he got from soldiers, Hi Jolly. The pallet of “cowboys of color” just got richer.Read More »How Fear Can Blind