Where did the Chincoteague Ponies come from?

Nobody can tell you for certain, and that is most of the fun.

Horses are not native to North America. Whatever is standing out on that marsh today arrived here somehow within the last four hundred years, and got loose. There are three explanations in circulation. One is famous, one is good gossip, and one is almost certainly right but has the disadvantage of being about paperwork.

The short answer: the National Park Service holds that the ponies descend from livestock that mainland colonists turned loose on Assateague in the late 1600s to dodge fencing laws and livestock taxes. The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, which owns the Virginia herd, holds that they came off a wrecked Spanish ship. Neither can prove it, and both have been working with these animals for generations.

Possibly, but no record has ever confirmed it. This is the version most people arrive with, and Marguerite Henry is the reason. A Spanish ship carrying ponies strikes a shoal offshore, begins to break up, and the horses swim clear and haul themselves onto the beach.

It is not a fairy tale. Two Spanish ships really did go down off this coast. The La Galga, a fifty-gun frigate of the Spanish Royal Navy, left Havana escorting a convoy in 1750, was driven off course by a hurricane, and ran aground on September 5 near what is now the Maryland and Virginia line. The Juno went down in 1802. Our coast is shoaly enough that they eventually built the Assateague Lighthouse over the problem.

What happened next is where it gets interesting. Not long after the La Galga came ashore, the inlet where she wrecked closed up, and island residents began reporting small horses running on the beach. Spanish archives record roughly sixty soldiers aboard. Most of the crew survived. No horses were ever recovered or accounted for.

An author named John Amrhein Jr. spent years in the Spanish archives building the case that the La Galga is the true origin of the herd, and published it as The Hidden Galleon. In 1999 Virginia and Spain went as far as agreeing how to divide the rights to the wrecks. What nobody has produced is a manifest listing horses. The argument has run for the better part of three centuries without resolving.

There is no evidence for it whatsoever, which has never slowed the story down. The claim is that Blackbeard kept a wife on Assateague and left her horses taken in raids down the Carolina coast, and that those horses got loose and stayed loose.

In its favor: he did know these waters extremely well, and he did keep a remarkable number of wives up and down the Atlantic. It is the story you tell on a boat at dusk, and it is not quite impossible, which is the most anyone will claim for it.

This is the explanation most historians accept. In the seventeenth century, mainland livestock was a genuine nuisance. Loose horses, cows, sheep and pigs wrecked crops, so colonial law required owners to fence their animals in. It also required them to pay tax on every head.

Assateague solved both problems at once. It had grass, it had shelter, and it had a natural corral made of water. An owner could turn his animals loose across the channel, skip the fencing, and be difficult to count when the tax man came around. Assateague in those days was brambles, dunes, and marsh muck deep enough to swallow a man, so nobody was going to wade out there on a hunch to take an inventory.

Refuge Inn founder Don Leonard told this version to interviewers for decades.

The two institutions closest to these animals do not agree, which is worth knowing before anyone tells you the matter is settled.

The National Park Service, which manages the Maryland herd, is unambiguous:

The most plausible explanation is that they are the descendants of horses that were brought to barrier islands like Assateague in the late 17th century by mainland owners to avoid fencing laws and taxation of livestock.

The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, which owns the Virginia herd and has managed it since 1925, holds that the shipwreck theory is correct.

Both organizations have worked with these ponies for generations. Neither can prove it. The honest answer is that the herd is probably some of both, plus every horse anybody has turned out on that island since, which is more or less what the animals themselves suggest.

However they arrived, what happened afterward is not in dispute, because you can see it standing in front of you.

They grew thick, shaggy coats against the winter wind coming off the water. They learned to live on salt marsh cordgrass, which is poor feed, and that diet is why they are pony-sized rather than horse-sized. A grown Chincoteague pony stands twelve to thirteen hands, a little over four feet at the shoulder, stocky and thick-maned. The salt in everything they eat means they drink a great deal of fresh water, which they somehow find on a barrier island, and which gives them the round-bellied look that surprises nearly every visitor who asks about it.

They are not miniature horses. They are horses that got smaller because the island made them smaller.

Don Leonard used to call the herd a Heinz 57 variety, and he was being accurate rather than unkind. The Fire Company has introduced outside bloodlines over the years to keep the gene pool healthy, with mixed results.

Fifty western mustangs were brought in and were gone within a few years. They could not manage the salt marsh diet. Whatever the island had spent centuries teaching the Chincoteague ponies, the mustangs had not learned, and grass that keeps one horse alive will not keep another.

A purebred Arabian stallion named Premier, introduced in 1995, did far better. He was bred to sixteen Chincoteague mares and left ten foals, and you can still pick the Arabian out in the wild herds today by the fine head and the thick arched neck. Premier spent time on the Leonard family farm before he was released onto Assateague.

Two of his descendants, mares named Luna and Martha, are among the ponies who rotate through the pasture at the Refuge Inn. They still run like Arabians, necks forward and tails out.

The wild herds live on Assateague Island inside the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The best odds are early morning or the hour before sunset, at Black Duck Marsh along Beach Road, at the Woodland Trail pony overlook, or from a boat. They are wild animals, so stay roughly forty feet back and never feed or touch them.

Our full guide to seeing them, including the Pony Swim, the spring and fall roundups, and how the buyback program works, is on our Wild Ponies page. You can also read more about the Leonard family and the ponies.

National Park Service, Assateague Island. Virginia Places, Horses of Assateague Island. John Amrhein Jr., The Hidden Galleon. Marguerite Henry, Misty of Chincoteague (1947). Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company. Detail on Premier, the mustang introduction, and the Leonard family herd comes from our own records.