Rumor has it that there’s a secret code embedded in equestrian statues: you can tell how a soldier died by checking the position of the hooves on his horse. Uncle John decided to investigate.
Statues of soldiers in heroic poses, often depicted astride formidable steeds, stand in cities all over the United States. The position of the horse’s hooves, the story goes, describes how its rider died:
•If both front hooves are in the air, or if the horse is rearing, the soldier died in battle.
•If one hoof is airborne, the rider was wounded in battle—and may (or may not) have died of his wounds at a later time.
•If all four hooves are planted on the ground, the soldier survived the battle and died later of an unrelated cause.
The problem is . . . none of that is true.
Sure, there are many instances where the theories seem to hold true. After all, a horse’s feet have to be somewhere, and a sculptor has only so many possibilities at his disposal. But in cases that do meet the criteria, says Internet myth debunker snopes.com, the horse’s stance and the rider’s death match purely by coincidence. In fact, the folks at Snopes surveyed all the equestrian statues in Washington, D.C., and found that just 33 percent follow the convention.
Even more telling are the statues that don’t meet the criteria—in particular, two statues of George Washington. In both cases, his horse has one hoof raised. But the Founding Father died in 1799 at his Mount Vernon home. His cause of death: a throat infection unrelated to his military service. Thus, his horse should have had four feet on the ground.
Likewise, Andrew Jackson’s statue in Lafayette Park has both legs raised (symbolizing he died in battle), yet he too died at home after retiring from military service. There are statues of Andrew Jackson in Louisiana and Florida that have hooves raised as well.
A statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson shows his horse standing erect even though Jackson died in May 1863 after being wounded by his own men. And John J. Pershing’s statue in Washington, D.C., has one foot in the air. Pershing, however, was not wounded in battle.
No one knows for sure how the horse-hooves legend got started, but there is a long tradition of reading meaning into statues’ poses. In fact, in England, there is a theory (also false) that the position of arms and legs (crossed or uncrossed) in the statues of English knights identifies them as crusaders (or not) and identifies the number of crusades they participated in.
It seems, though, that the position of horses’ legs in statues of American soldiers has more to do with the artist’s skill and creative vision than with the way the honoree died. Sculptors have other, more practical factors to consider when designing and executing their monuments. Creating an equestrian statue, for example, is hard work—rearing horse statues are especially difficult because all the weight has to be balanced on the horse’s hind legs. In fact, it wasn’t until 1852 that equestrian statues even appeared in the United States. The first? Sculptor Clark Mills’s Washington, D.C., statue of Andrew Jackson . . . astride a rearing horse.
Before there were automobiles, horses pulled fire engines, and the animals were usually stabled on a fire station’s ground floor. The animals could climb straight stairways, though, and because firemen didn’t want them making visits to the upper floors, firehouses started installing circular stairways.