For many years, I have been waiting for a book such as Ann Greene's Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America, a comprehensive history of the draft horse in the nineteenth-century United States. Although almost surely an equine lover, Greene treats horses unsentimentally, as machines, as a crucial but neglected energy technology driving both rural and urban America into the Industrial Age.

Horses at Work is a wide-ranging book brimming with facts, facts about the Great Epizootic of 1872/73, about the physiology of horse muscle, about the innovations of the Confederate cavalry in the early years of the Civil War, and about the complexity of the Philadelphia transport system. One of the useful features of the first part of the book is its detailed comparisons of the advantages and disadvantages of different draft animalsoxen, horses, mules, and even camels. The discussion goes beyond comparing the power, speed, feed requirements, endurance, and disposition of animals. The roles of social status and culture are also considered. Greene, moreover, provides an informed description of the types of roads, including dirt, gravel, macadam, paved and plank, the evolving mix of vehicles, such as the Conestoga wagon and Concord coach, of wheel designs, and of hitches and harnesses that developed over the period. This discussion harkens back to the early days of the new economic History, when the pros and cons of the different types of waterwheels and steam engines were carefully delineated.

The major theme of the Horses at Work is that equines performed much of the labor for industrializing America. Echoing the findings of Robert Fogel on the railroads, Greene argues that the increasing use of horses was integral to the early transportation revolution. To travel by train between Washington, DC and New York City in 1860 also required taking almost a half-dozen horse trips, to go to and from the depots, to cross the large rivers lacking bridges, and to fill the gaps between different railroad lines in the age before “union” stations. Greene views animal and steam power more as complements than as substitutes, with “each occupying a unique niche in nineteenth-century industrialization” (p. 78). She finds “the critical difference lay in how and where each worked most efficiently.”

Although current perceptions link horses with cowboys on the western range and farmers on the prairies, Greene argues that over the 1860–1920 period a Boston banker would likely see more horses on a given day than any cowboy or rancher would (p. 166). One reason we do not associate equines with cities is that photographs taken with wet plates required the subject remain still for ten to fifteen seconds. Before the introduction of faster dry plate methods in the 1880s, horses appeared only as blurry ghosts in photographs of the cityscape. But as Greene catalogues at length, urban horses were everywhere, pulling streetcars, heavy freight wagons, taxis, private carriages, and so on. They created rising demand for feed, harnesses, straw hats, stable keepers, blacksmiths, veterinarians, and street sweepers. With their numbers growing in major Gilded Age cities up into the 1890s, “horses were indispensable and irreplaceable as industrial workers” by Greene's account (p. 199).

While its scope is comprehensive, Horses at Work treats the transition to the horseless age less thoroughly, less definitively. Members of the Progressive Movement regarded work horses as a problem in two ways, first as a source of waste, urban pollution and traffic congestion, and second as victims of inhumane treatment by teamsters and hack drivers. As Greene documents, organizations arose during the Progressive Era to address many of these and related issues. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the like distributed Anne Sewell's Black Beauty to encourage greater kindness in the treatment of animals. The League of American Wheelmen promoted building “good roads” to facilitate the use of bicycles and later automobiles. The Scientific Management movement sought to increase the efficiency of horse labor through the use of time-and-motion studies (following on the heels of Muybridge's famous series of photographs). And the Audubon Society fought to protect native bird species from the expanding population of English sparrows that fed on the ubiquitous piles of horse manure that accumulating on city streets. But more important than these organizational responses were the decentralized decisions of increasing numbers of rich and middle-class Americans in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s to purchase and drive private automobiles. Greene adds to the recent work by Joel Tarr, Clay McShane, and Martin Melosi in tracing out the conflicts over the presence of horses in urban areas at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the full history of the political economy of the introduction and adoption of the automobile and the complementary investments in roads and highways remains to be written.