Hey Doc - thanks for your reply to my inquiry - have to be honest, I never gave the horse question much thought. I've been looking in some references I have but haven't come up with anything. A good question though!
I can tell you (based on coming from a large family of "outlaws" - at least my Dad always called 'em that
) - that outlaws ALWAYS owned a horse - that way they could get away from the lawman who probably didn't own one!?!?
Seriously though - I hope someone out there has a good reference that could answer this question. Those of us who grew up on Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Matt Dillon and The Cisco Kid are probably influenced in to thinking that EVERYONE owned a horse - and that couldn't possibly be true. Just thinking of my own hometown which is in Michigan (not the wild west) - I know for a fact that our local "Marshall" in the 1800s was not furnished a horse - the village was only a mile square and he walked everywhere he went. We did have a jail - built in the 1880's which was also a village office upstairs and it held a hand pulled "pumper" on the gound floor. We used it to house our fire grass rig in up until the 1970s when we built a new fire station and the old building was torn down. The jail cell was in the back of the downstairs and I ended up witht he door when the building was torn down - I kept it for historical reasons and after storing it for close to 30 years, I finally gave it to a cousin in lower Indiana who now uses it for a trellis in their garden.