Return Horses: Homing Pigeons of Colorado Mining Camps

Back when Colorado consisted of mostly mining towns, the main forms of transportation through the mountains were walking and riding horses.

Riding was especially important when miners needed to carry supplies and tools to their camp. Most miners didn’t own horses of their own and only had need for a steed a few times a year. This meant that miners needed to rent horses - but they only needed them for a one-way trip. There were no national rent-a-horse chains such as today's car-rental companies, so livery stables needed a way to get their horses back. Horses were expensive to raise and train, and were scarce in the lightly populated Rocky Mountains, so these horses could not be easily replaced. It thus was very important that any horse that was rented was returned to the livery.

The livery owners started investing in “return horses,” animals trained to return to their home stables from wherever they were set loose. Using these horses, miners didn’t have to worry about traveling back to town. They could set the horse loose once they got to camp, and it would return to the livery.

Return horses had to be well trained to deal with all the obstacles they might meet on the trail:

• Large snowdrifts, blizzards, fast-moving thunderstorms and flash floods.
• Predators such as mountain lions, which could be especially hazardous to horses which got tangled in their tack or in fallen trees.
• Other horses which they might be tempted to follow - but which might not be going back to the same stable.
•  Thieves. Return horses had to learn not allow themselves to be caught after being sent home.
• This meant avoiding people or fighting back if a person managed to catch them, and staying out of the way of wagon trains and pack groups.
• The difficult terrain of the Rocky Mountains.

There were some etiquette rules for renting and encountering return horses. When you set a horse loose, you had to make sure the girth was tight so the saddle wouldn't slip and get caught on tree branches or other hazards, and the horse would be kept from getting tangled. The reins also needed to be tight when they were pulled over the saddle horn, to keep them from getting tangled and to give the horse extra incentive to return home. With the reins pulled tight, a horse can’t lower his head to drink or eat, so the only way for it to get relief was to get back to the stable. Since the horse needed to get back as soon as possible, it was illegal to catch a return horse.

These horses were impressive in their ability to return to their stables and saved everyone time and effort.

As Enos A. Mills, father of Rocky Mountain National Park, wrote about the return horses, “These horses are the pick of their kind.”