‘Horses, Mules, and Men from … America Destroyed the Two Little Republics’: American War Horses and Army Mules in the Anglo-Boer (South African) War, 1899-1902, and Resources for an American Perspective on the War through the Lens of Equine History

Abstract

Major-General Sir Frederick Smith, British Army Veterinary Department officer in South Africa, called the death of the equines in the Anglo-Boer (South African) War, 1899-1902, “a holocaust.” The Royal Commission on the War concluded that “the chief cause of the loss … was that they were … brought from distant countries … [and] submitted to a long and deteriorating sea voyage.”

To get the numbers it needed, the British Empire established remount stations in the American West, gathered range horses there, and hired American cowboys to break them. Indeed, according to Irish-American Colonel John Blake, commander of the Irish Brigade of the Boer Army, “Horses, mules, and men from … America destroyed the two little [Boer] republics.”
The USA sent more equines to the war than Great Britain and the other Commonwealth countries combined. Their transcontinental, trans-hemispheric, and transatlantic trip was an equine Middle Passage of the transatlantic horse trade. The cruelties endured by these equines, which Smith called “this flotsam and jetsam of human passions and strife,” are worth remembering.

By studying the supply of American equines for the war, particularly its economic motivations, commercial processes, trade routes, defending and challenging ideologies, and historical characters, this project fills a gap in the historiography and history of the war. It not only breaks new ground by gathering, analyzing, and giving South African and British historians access to resources unknown to them. It also extends their work with a new American perspective through the lens of equine history that will help to re-image the war for the next “120 years down the line.”

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