Prince Charming on his white steed, Paul Revere racing through the night–we grew up on the romance of the horse, didn’t we? Those living in late 1800s America didn’t. Horses were a means, a tool, a necessary evil, the only way to get somewhere without walking. You never gave horses a second thought. Everybody needed one… and what went with owning one: a stable, feed, occasional shoeing… and a lot of cleaning.
Horses, you see, emit. And what they emit isn’t lavender.
The New Yorker of August, 2009 transports us back with a whiff of how things were, describing Manhattan as “stinking ‘with the emanations of putrefying organic matter.’ Another observer wrote that the streets were ‘literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting . . . smelling to heaven.’” The only time this wasn’t too much of a problem was winters because ice and snow held the aroma of decomposition at bay. Spring naturally brought the thaw which, in turn, added the accumulated winter’s deposit to the daily offerings’ odor.
The Sweet Smell of Horses
Let’s just say spring in the cities of America did not only bring the gentle wafting of orange blossoms and jasmine. It got worse: summer brought not only flies feasting on feces and spreading disease but decaying horse carcasses left on the street.
The advent of the industrial revolution brought thousands of new people to cities so the equine blight on city streets was only going to get worse. Says the New Yorker article: “One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows. New York’s troubles were not New York’s alone; in 1894, the Times of London forecast that by the middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure.”
Add to that the problem of flies and related diseases and we begin to realize that the horse at the time of Billy Durant did not have nearly the romance we tend to bestow upon it.
My wife grew up on a farm. When she was a teenager she begged her father for a horse. “Not a chance,” he said, proceeding to lecture her on the virtues of an automobile which doesn’t need to be fed when it’s at stable. “It took mankind thousands of years to invent the wheel,” he added, “And we’re not spending money to undo that.”
Billy Durant, of course, made his first fortune with horses. Wealthy, he didn’t have to put up with too many of their, shall we say, olfactory inconveniences. Ransom E. Olds, on the other hand, hated horses with a passion. No surprise, then, that he was the first of offer the world a way to rid itself of its mess. Thousands agreed with him and made him the first automobile success story. City governments breathed a sigh of relief: no more three story high piles of you know what.
The automobile as a solution to excessive pollution. Who knew? 🙂
Have you owned a horse? How was that experience? Pray share.