Horse Power and History : Exhibit gives complete picture of the hoofed creatures in the New World.

In 1493 Columbus did something that would alter the Americas forever. He brought 35 horses with him when he landed on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola during his second voyage of discovery.

Horses had been extinct in the New World for 10,000 years when Columbus reintroduced them. They returned with a vengeance. The small, sturdy horses favored by the conquistadors were instrumental in the Spanish conquest of the great empires of both Mexico and Peru.

As one of the conquerors wrote: “Horses are the most necessary things in the new country because they frighten the enemy most, and, after God, to them belongs the victory.” And once the horse was established in New Spain, it remained to shape cultures as different as those of the Mexican rancher, the American cowboy and the Comanche.

Called “Thundering Hooves: Five Centuries of Horse Power in the American West,” an exhibit documenting the horse’s profound impact opens Saturday at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park.

Originally presented in 1993 at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, the traveling show includes more than 400 items, from conquistador horse armor to posters advertising the equine stunts that thrilled audiences at Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.

Ford Motor Co. underwrote the exhibit. “Just as the introduction of the automobile revolutionized transportation in America, the reintroduction of the horse 400 years earlier transformed the indigenous and immigrant cultures of the continent,” said Ford’s Leo J. Padilla. “This remarkable exhibition has given all of us at Ford Motor Co. a new appreciation for the words horse power. “

As Bruce Shackelford, the San Antonio museum consultant who curated the show, makes clear, the horse was vital to all three cultures that created the American Southwest--Native American, Hispanic and Anglo. Visitors will be able to see horse-related artifacts that range from lethal-looking spurs to the contents of a chuck wagon. But perhaps the most dramatic items in the exhibit are life-size models of four iconic Western horsemen, fully equipped and mounted on their steeds--a Spanish cavalryman of the 1520s, a Rio Grande vaquero of the 1770s, a Comanche buffalo hunter of the 1850s and a Central Texas cowboy of the 1860s.

The models display replicas of actual spurs and saddles, weapons and riding clothes, made as the originals were, right down to the deerskin leggings tanned with brains on the Comanche rider. According to Shackelford, the commitment to authenticity made the models “just a killer to do.”

The horse made possible the vast haciendas worked by the vaqueros. And the American cowboy adopted and adapted the skills and equipment of the vaquero to his own needs, including the brutal cattle drives that loom so large in the mythology of the West.

Native American culture was also transformed by the horse. The Comanche acquired their first horses around 1680, from the Utes to the south. Using bits and other riding gear whose origins sometimes lay in Moorish Africa, via Spain, the Comanche rode into the great buffalo herds with vastly improved odds of bringing down the shaggy behemoths.

According to Shackelford, the buffalo herds had already begun to decline by the early 1800s simply because Comanche on horseback could kill far greater numbers than Comanche on foot. It’s a myth, Shackelford says, that the Native American hunters were indigenous eco-purists who used every bit of every animal they killed. Before the herds began to dwindle, he says, “the Indians would go out and kill a hundred buffalo and cut out just the tongues and livers and wait for the next go-round.”

The horse caused the Comanche to make bigger tepees, because horse-drawn sledges could cart around more massive tents than dog-drawn sledges. The Comanche became famous horse traders, and Shackelford says, it was this “that made them probably the wealthiest culture on the Southern plain, even more than the Anglos and the Hispanics.”

As Shackelford points out, only the dog antedates the horse as man’s boon companion. “The bond between them goes back to before Bucephalus and Alexander the Great,” he says. Training the powerful creatures is “a sophisticated deal” that involves understanding them in the most visceral way and inducing them to do what the human wants, with the slightest press of thigh against flank or merest tug at the horse’s mouth. Shackelford isn’t surprised that horsemen and women give their mounts affectionate names. “With a really great horseman and a really great horse, they are one creature for a while.”

No part of the country has been mythologized more extensively than the American West, and the horse helped shape the myth as surely as it helped shape the Comanche tepee. One section of the show is devoted to the horse as part of the Western myth-making machinery. Trick riders and their steeds brighten posters for various Wild West shows, while cowboys gallop across the lurid covers of Western pulp magazines.

The Autry has added some materials of its own to this pop-culture section, says Michael Duchemin, the museum’s curator of history. These include items from a recently acquired collection relating to working cowboy-turned-movie cowboy Tom Mix. Visitors will be able to see fancy spurs that may have touched the photogenic flesh of Tony, Mix’s wonder horse. And they can also see the shirt Mix is believed to have been wearing when he died in 1940 in an Arizona car crash.

In a sense, “Thundering Hooves” will begin even before the visitor enters the museum. After all, outside in the entry plaza there’s a bronze statue of singing cowboy and museum founder Gene Autry, with his faithful horse Champion at his side.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Thundering Hooves: Five Centuries of Horse Power in the American West.”

Location: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, adjacent to the Los Angeles Zoo.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday. Opens Saturday; through May 7.

Admission: $7 general, $5 for seniors and students with I.D., $3 for children ages 2 to 12.

Call: (213) 667-2000.