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| The Roan Horse 1913 (Hornung) |
This is the true story of the only time a horse was arrested and tried for a felony in a federal court in New Mexico.
...This horse tale starts at Jemez Pueblo during a feast-day celebration in November 1913.
Lambert, two years into his service with the Mounted Police, was also serving as a deputy special officer for the U.S. Indian Service, which was charged with enforcing a law prohibiting alcohol on Indian reservations.
While Lambert was working the Jemez festival, a heavy-set Hispanic man trotted a roan horse into the pueblo. A roan horse, by the way, is a horse whose coat contains a thick sprinkling of white hairs. Dangling from the horse’s saddle were 13 gunny sacks, each of which, as it turned out, contained a quart bottle of alcohol.
Suspecting just that, another officer grabbed the big man by the collar of his coat and pulled him out of the saddle while Lambert got hold of the spooked horse’s reins and settled it down. Before the man could be subdued, he spun out of his coat, jumped into a fast-moving stream and disappeared into the willows as the other officer fired four or five shots at him, apparently in vain.
Left standing with only the horse and the prohibited booze, Lambert arrested the animal and charged it with taking alcohol onto an Indian reservation. If the horse made any statement, no record of it has been discovered.
In the hope of arresting the escaped suspect, or at least getting a lead on him, the officers put an ad in the newspaper saying that a roan horse lost at the Jemez Pueblo festival could be claimed at the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Santa Fe. No one was danged fool enough to claim the horse, so it remained in the marshal’s custody for six months.
To get the issue resolved before the horse ran up too big a feed bill, the animal was put on trial in federal court in Santa Fe in May 1914.
Did the jury find him guilty? Read the entire article here.
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