In the 1860s, it was one of the most humiliating, brutal and feared forms of punishment at Fort Bridger. More than 160 years later, it’s the most popular attraction at the Fort Bridger State Historic Site.
It seems nobody can escape the Fort Bridger “punishment horse.”
The punishment horse is a military punishment that goes back thousands of years. Also called the “wooden horse” or “Spanish donkey,” it was used as an instrument of torture and a tool to mete out military discipline.
Many times, the wooden horse had an edge to it and those “riding” it would be forced to hold heavy objects, with their weight pressing continually down onto the rail, causing increasing levels of agony.
What made Fort Bridger’s punishment horse unique was that it resembled an actual horse.
“It’s an old military tradition, and forts across the United States had them, but we’ve got a really interesting case at Fort Bridger,” Joshua Camp, superintendent at the Fort Bridger State Historic Site, told Cowboy State Daily. “They actually gave it a head, a tail and everything else. Rather than just being a log between two posts, they made it look like a horse.”
The story of the Fort Bridger punishment horse is full