About

Both the homeliest and most beautiful horses I have ever seen were natives of Southern Baja California. The most spectacular was an Azulejo.

            Horses from the coastal regions south of the city of La Paz were generally small, inferior specimens compared with those from herds owned by some of the larger inland ranchers. This may have been because the fishermen looked to the sea and their little canoas for long-distance transportation rather than becoming horsemen.

            My father was an eccentric British explorer with a medical missionary background who first took me to Mexico when I was four. He forged some of the original dirt roads to outlying regions, including the road that connected El Camino Real with the ranches that later developed into the Punta Pescadero and Boca de Álamo resort settlements. My father also administered simple doctoring and extracted teeth among the poor people. It was during long horseback rides to visit remote ranches that I garnered some of the experiences that later became memories for this book.

            My thirteenth through fifteenth years I spent camping on the uninhabited island of Cerralvo. For many months, my only companion was my mother and later, visiting staff and students who attended my parent’s International Pioneering School, as well as horses and goats my family imported from the mainland.

            From 1969 to 1972, my parents relocated their undertaking to Rancho San Juan de La Costa. In those days, this isolated stretch of property was described as a dry mainland delta situated south of the ill-famed Mechudo Point. No mining operations had begun, and five pristine oases graced the inland regions.

Horsemen and muleteers sometimes dropped by our corrals to visit with me on their way to La Paz. Many of them had already traveled miles of arduous trails all the way from their ranches, yet they usually finished the fatiguing trip in a day.

            One of my visitors was an old gentleman who routinely traveled from Ensenada to La Paz with his band of pinto burros, selling cartons of cigarettes to the inhabitants of the fishing settlements he visited along the way.

            Unlike some of the city folk, many of the rural horsemen and muleteers lived by a chivalrous old-world ethic and treated both people and their fine animals with the utmost respect. I based the account of Don Tomas on the life of the son of a French immigrant. Alazán, the burro Pancho Villa, the giant mule Machismo, and the Azulejo type of horse all existed as I described them in these pages. The Azulejo sported a silvery-white mane and tail and a sleek metallic coat. As with most good-looking colts in Baja, the animal I knew was eventually gelded and made into a saddle horse.

            Similar to the blue-black roan Azulejos with white manes and tails in my story, there is a reference to black horses with white manes and tails in the 1969 publicationof the Time Life book, The Kingdom of the Horse, by H. – H. Isenbart & E. M.Bührer. However, this coloring is so rare that I have talked to only one other person who claimed to have seen it. That was John Derek, the actor and director, who described an Azulejo he had seen in mainland Mexico. Also like the blue-eyed black-bay standardbreds that showed up among the On To Glory bloodline, strange genetic exceptions do apparently sometimes occur.

            Tales I heard from fishermen inspired my accounts of pearls and buried treasure. The descriptions of various mysterious lights combine my own accounts with those given to me by local inhabitants originating from Southern Mexico to Guatemala.