SANTO DOMINGO: WHERE KING HORSE REIGNS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 38, 7 May 1927, Page 12

SANTO DOMINGO: WHERE KING HORSE REIGNS

KING HORSE still reigns in Santo Domingo despite the advent of motor transportation. Booted and spurred in the traditional frontier manner and wearing the great two-gal-lon sombreros of the type common along the Rio Grande, hundreds of riders, many of them Americans and Canadians, spend long hours in the saddle during the process of harvesting what is hoped to be a bumper crop of sugar cane. No weaklings are these centaurs of the South, but men inured to hardship and outdoor life in any kind of weather, and when they gather at their clubhouses during their rare intervals of leisure wonderful yarns are told in a casual manner of wild work in out-of-the-way corners of the earth. Men who have ridden the feverstricken sugar lands of Mindoro in the Philippines, where for almost each acre of soil turned by the plow a life was claimed, exchange reminiscenes with former cowpunchers of the Montana cattle ranges, and ex-cavalry-men of a dozen European armies compare their war-time experiences. Nationality is not considered in the selection of riders by the officials of American sugar companies. Applicants must be expert horsemen and be able to speak Spanish. If the new man understands sugar cultivation, so

much the better; but if not tee speedily will be instructed. Men familiar with stock raising also are in demand, for the cane, after being cut in the fields, must be hauled to the loading stations in wagons drawn by oxen, and one American company operating in Santo Domingo possesses more than 16,000 head of bueys, as these beasts of burden are called. The best bueys are those obtained by the* crossing of humpbacked Indian cattbe with the native stock. The rider's day in the harvest season, lasting from December to July, begins before the first streaks of dawn. At six at the latest tee must mount his morning horse and be on the way to the fields. Perhaps he will be able to return to his quarters for a lunch at noon, and perhaps mot, depending on the press of work. At dark he rides in for his bath and dinner, after which he is usually glad to “hit the hay.”

And yet hard as the life is, the average rider in the Dominican Republic would not change jobs with a king. He is well housed, fed and paid, the sugar companies sparing no expense to insure his comfort. His horses are of the best, for none but well trained and cared for animals could survive ’he strain of work.

There is practically no diversion at the out stations of the sugar centrals, and no time for them in the crop season. After the cane is in the riders usually take their vacations or obtain a few days’ leave in which to visit the capital, Santo Domingo City. Sometimes these visits are a bit lurid, for there is no prohibition in Dominica and the long repressed spirits of the horsemen of the cane fields are apt to bubble but in the main these men are steady and abstemious. Gun toting is frowned on in Dominica. A few of the stock men pack a licensed six gun during long rides in isolated districts, hut at every rider’s saddle bow swings a razor-edged machete, an instrument as readily adaptable'to self defence or homicide as to agricultural purposes. But Dominica is now peaceful and law abiding, far more so than some American cities. The gavilleros or bandits which infested the country 10 or 15 years ago have disappeared, the majority having been gunned out by the Domincan National Guard. Mounted police maintained by the sugar companies patrol the vast holdings and life and property are safe. —-

And so His Majesty the Horse will continue to be bred and reared in Santo Domingo as long as the sugar industry prevails, for even the übiquitous Ford cannot swim rivers and penetrate the long green calles where the waving verdure closes about the rider’s head as he makes his daily tours of inspection. And the riders —adventurous youth will always serve to replenish their ranks.