The three animals which played the leading roles in that conquest were the hidalgo (the Spanish nobleman), the pig, and the horse. The hidalgo led the way – that is clear – but it is difficult to say which of the other two was the more important.

It is possible to imagine the conquistador without his pig, but who can imagine him without his horse? The conquistador came from the most equestrian society in Europe. Medieval Iberia (Spain/Portugal) was the one section of Western Europe where horses were so plentiful and cheap that they were not the exclusive possession of the nobility. This is not to say that every Sancho Panza owned a horse, but it does mean that Iberians of all classes were more accustomed to viewing the world from horseback and more skilled as riders than any other European people with easy access to the Atlantic. The languages of western Europe confirm this: Caballero means knight, nobleman, rider, horseman, gentleman, sir, or mister; Chevalier, from the other side of Pyrenees, also means knight or nobleman, but cannot be so easily stretched to mean also rider or mister.

The first horses to exist in America since the Pleistocene arrived with Columbus in 1493. The transatlantic voyage was not an easy one for horses. . . so many horses died and had to be thrown overboard. . . But the price for getting horses to America was worth paying, and numbers of them were loaded on vessels bound for Hispaniola. By . . .1503 (that island) had not fewer than sixty or seventy.

The enormous value of the horse came not merely from the fact that he provided the conquistador with the services of an excellent beast of burden. In the early years, he was chiefly valuable as an instrument of war. The sight of a man on horseback was so frightening to the Indians... The Indians of South America had never seen an animal as big as the horse. No Indian anywhere had ever seen an animal, which at one time, was as strong, fast, and obedient to the orders of man. The Arawaks suspected that horses fed on human flesh, and a single man on horseback could and did terrify whole crowds of those Indians...

Again and again, the Spanish cavalry turned massacre of Europeans into massacre of Indians...

After the conquest, the horse played a role of a less spectacular but no less significant nature. The conquistador could never have been able to keep the vast sullen Indian populations under control if the horse had not enabled him to transfer information, orders, and soldiers from one point to another swiftly. The horse was a very important carrier and hauler of freight... The horse made possible the great cattle industry of colonial America, which in the final analysis, affected much larger areas of the New World than did any other European endeavor in that period. A swineherd can operate effectively on foot: a vaquero, or cowboy, needs a horse.

Adapted by Roy R. Pellicano, BHSO, from Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, (1972) pp. 17-19.