Rocky Mountain

The name misleads. The Rocky Mountain Horse is a Kentucky breed, and it takes its name from one stallion.

Kentucky sat where Spanish horses coming up from the South met English horses coming from the East, and that combination produced every gaited breed developed in the United States, the American Saddlebred and the Tennessee Walking Horse among them. Gaited means the horse has natural gaits beyond the walk, trot and canter: the rack, the single foot, the running walk, all easier on a rider than a trot. The Spanish side probably supplied it.

The horses that became the breed were shaped on the limestone plateau and in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where an animal had to be sure-footed, rugged, versatile, easy to keep and calm about it.

In the 1890s a stallion was brought into eastern Kentucky from out west. Oral history describes him as chocolate with a flaxen mane and tail, carrying a smooth four-beat lateral gait. Local people called him the Rocky Mountain horse. He was bred to mares within a small area, and the strain that came out of it kept the name.