Galiceño

The Galiceño has been in the Americas almost as long as horses have. Columbus established breeding herds on Hispaniola on his second voyage, and in the early 1500s Cortes brought horses from Galicia in northern Spain to Cuba and bred them there. After the fall of the Aztecs those horses spread through southern Mexico, ran loose, and worked their way north into what is now the United States.

Then 350 years of natural selection did the shaping. DNA work at Texas A&M places the Galiceño closer to the Garrano of northern Spain than to any modern southern Spanish breed, which fits where Cortes got them.

Through the 1700s and 1800s they were pack horses and rancho horses in northern Mexico, still largely free-ranging, with people catching and feeding the ones they liked. Feral bands crossed the border on their own, and border-state ranches bought them out of Mexico, which is how the first ones reached the US.

The formal imports started in 1958, when Harvey Mecom of Liberty, Texas began bringing them north. Breeders in Tyler and Eagle Pass followed.