Horse Culture

Hoofprints in our history.

From its early human beginnings, Alberta’s history has been indelibly stamped with the hoofprints of man’s real best friend, the horse.

More than 300 years ago, before the fur traders, the settlers and the cattlemen came, Alberta’s First Nations peoples had made friends with the horse following its migration north over the 49^th parallel.

When the first 275 members of the North West Mounted Police arrived in Alberta in the 1870s to rein in the illegal whiskey trade, they wrote home about the thousands of wild horses they saw roaming freely under the big, blue southern Alberta prairie sky.

Tens of thousands of homesteaders with powerful dreams of the future used the brute power of the Clydesdale or Percheron to break endless acres of fescue prairie, their very first step in the beginnings of a rich, productive farming industry.

Beginning in the 1880s, Fred Stimson, George Lane and Patrick Burns each took turns running the huge Bar U Ranch (now a National Historic Site) in Alberta’s southern foothills. The Bar U was one of the forerunners of a cattle industry that, even today, sees cowboys riding the range.

So many things that once were important have died away with ‘progress’. Happily, in modern-day Alberta, the horse wasn’t one of them.

We’ve got 40 horse breed associations(everything from Arabians and Appaloosas to Fjords and Friesens). You can’t find a summer exhibition in any city or town that doesn’t have rodeo, chuckwagon or thoroughbred and harness horse racing as a central event. The Alberta Equestrian Federation lists nearly 100 events throughout the year, many of them at one of the world’s finest equestrian centres, Calgary’s Spruce Meadows. We’re even home to Canada’s largest polo club!

From our awesome Rocky Mountain high country through our foothills and onto our ranch and farmlands, you’ll find a thriving tourism industry brimming with opportunity for horse-loving holidays. Trail rides to classic viewpoints, long backcountry tours in both national parks and provincial wilderness areas, real ranch vacations where you ride with the cowboys – it’s all here for the asking!

Alberta’s a big place. Even our ‘settled’ areas are sparsely populated by plenty of other standards.

Ours is a land just made for horses, and for people who love the extra richness that the horse brings to their own experiences of the land.

In Alberta, some of those wild horses still roam free.

Come to Alberta. Share our horses.

Roam free!

(Much!) More about us, and horses …

We hope this website whets your appetite for experiencing both Alberta and our horses. This page contains links to several highly informative websites about both!

If you want more general information about traveling in Alberta, visit TravelAlberta.com, the world’s most complete source of information about holidaying in our neck of the woods.

The site has an excellent search function which enables you to search EITHER by keyword OR by category. The category search leads to a function that will, if you want, narrow your search to seasons or specific dates, and/or to regions or specific communities.

And finally, since we know you’re likely a sponge for all of the information you can get on specific breeds of horses, here are two we like: Wikipedia (many of whose breed descriptions contain further links to other good-quality, breed-specific web sites) and equiworld.com.