The Hearts of Horses

The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss is a nostalgia novel mostly about the winter of 1917 and 1918. The story is as meandering as a winding trail up a mountain, and like a winding trail that suddenly ends at the top, the story culminates with a written view of where the heroine, Martha Lessen, 19, female horse-whisperer and bronco-buster has been and experienced in her youth as well as giving a verbal glimpse of her future life in the west as it was further tamed.

In the meandering story Molly Gloss shared fascinating lost horse-sense on horse markings and pigmentation:

• a white-faced horse's eyes will weep
• a horse with white feet is prone to split hooves
• palominos, claybacks, skewbalds, piebalds, some strawberry roans have amber hooves that are brittle and prone to cracks
• white hides will scald and chaff from sweat and heat
• some paint horses—the ones with mostly white on them—and blue eyes are not right in the head
• a pure black horse will sunburn in hot weather and fade out under the saddle and harness
• but horses seem to know that those of them that are the plain-colored ones are the lucky ones (p. 115)

Molly Gloss also wove little known knowledge of the 1910s, a time when cars were replacing horses, and other era-specific tidbits into her narrative. For example, some young kids collected the shed antlers of bulk elk and bull deer to be sold for a few cents a pound at a hardware store. Or cars were driven backwards up hills to keep fuel going into the carburetors. Or ptomaine poisoning, from improperly canned foods, was a very serious matter. She shared the time-era social gossips of the time too. As the war picked up (1917), women gathering at the many functions debated over whether Americans should get involved in Europe's war, whether Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn ought to have been arrested for handing out birth control information and whether Jeannette Rankin over in Montana would cause a riot when she arrived in Washington DC as the first woman elected to Congress.

Molly did later add some insightful humor on Margaret Sanger later in her book:  Although Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn was arrested for just passing out birth control information, condoms did in fact already exist. Evidently it was as illegal to share birth control information publicly just as it was illegal to ship condoms across state lines and in some/many counties, buying and selling them was also illegal.

Other social dynamics in the books concerned entertainment, which primarily centered around theaters. Back in the 1910s the plots of movies were the near equivalent of dime novels. "Stories of Mounties and Texan Rangers abounded, frontiersmen in coon caps, heroes with swords and plumed hats, Kit Carson-style scouts; titillating stories of girls dressed in breeches and pith helmets, cave girls in fur tunics, brown-skinned girls in grass or leather skirts, innocent girls in jeopardy from mustache-twirling villains. Quite a few movies made a point of the barbaric and the unusual—Eskimos in the far North, for example, building their igloos. The movies brought a lot of people their first glimpse of a seaside bathing beach, a woman smoking, colored people in a jazz band, men in swallow-tailed tuxedos, a woman in a negligé. Charlie Chaplain was popular, and Buster Keaton, an unlucky young many coping with the mysteries of modern life; it was from these picture shows that most people in the West had their first images of electric streetcars, ocean liners, airplanes. And in the war years there rained down a storm of movies about boys in uniform, boys who were the pride of their fathers and the envy of their younger brothers" (p. 261).

During the movie real changes, Four-Minute Men, community volunteers who spoke for encouraging enlistments or making communities aware of other wartime needs, delivered speeches. They might incite members in their communities to look for spies among their neighbors, expound on the evil of extravagance (eating sugar, wheat, pork chops when soldier boys get stale bread and cold meat), laud the virtues of wearing half-soled shoes and mended trousers and of signing food pledge cards to eat less, and of course to extol the wearing of Liberty Badges to confirm their patriotism. This was the era when Germans were hated, and even those German families with children born in America and fighting against the Germans overseas were hated. Such were the social dynamics of the times.

Patriotism ran wild. Conscientious objectors were jailed, war protesters were to be kicked out of the country, as well as pacifist ministers and journalists who wrote anti-war editorials, soldiers who complained of bad conditions in the army, and teachers who spoke out in favor of German literature.

The spirit of ruthless intolerance and repression continued after the war. The Ku Klux Klan became strong and put ads in the paper calling for "Patriots Who Hold This Country Dear" to conceal their identities in robes and hoods and come for public initiations. Negroes and Chinese were not as yet in Elwha country where Martha Lessen had her riding ring for breaking horses, and the KKK was determined to keep them out as well as plan their attacks on the "unwanted" Jewish family, some Basques, Mexicans and Catholics already there.

The Heart of Horses was not focused on the political or social currents but rather on the mundane riding circle of Martha Lessen and her gentle-taming of horses who were owned by seven separate households. Written in the first person, Martha rides her ring daily, breaking and loving the horses. Her thoughts are shared on the horses she rides as well as their owners, for as Martha says, knowing the owners is primary to knowing the horse itself.