Off the Beaten Path: War Horses |
VideoCliff Naylor | 2/20/2012
The movie "War Horse," which is now in theaters, highlights the significant role horses played in World War I. What you may not know, is that nearly every horse that was used by the U.S. and British armies during that conflict was trained in Ft. Keogh, near Miles City, Montana.
Montana is horse country, but few people realize just how many stallions, mares and geldings were once rounded-up, trained, and shipped out of Fort Keogh.
"This was the largest remount station in the United States and literally hundreds of thousands of horses went through here between 1908 and 1920," said Ft. Keogh Historian Amorette Allison.
A museum diorama shows how massive Ft. Keogh once was when it covered 100 square miles, or 64,000 acres of land in eastern Montana. The breeding barn is one of the few original frontier buildings still standing.
Mark Petersen, who works with the Ft. Keogh Agricultural Research Station, described the different areas of the barn. "This is the breeding box and the stallions would be brought in here and they would bring the mare into this box and I`ve been told the reason why it`s so tall is that sometimes there would be a scuffle between the mare and the stallion."
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