Welcome to the Riderless Horses
Team!
Riderless horses is honored to
provide a place that shares the memories of those
we have loved and lost. This team provides a place
of dedication for those who kindled our hearts and
spirits in some way by their love or their deeds.
The deep and special bond we share with
our pets makes the pain of their deaths just as
deep. Many people find comfort by remembering
their pets in memorial pages.
For your
littlest angel to a beloved grandparent we hope
you will join our team and share your memories
with us.
The riderless horse
or caparisoned horse (in reference to its
ornamental coverings, which have a detailed
protocol all to themselves) is the single
riderless horse with boots reversed in the
stirrups that follows the caisson carrying the
casket in a funeral procession.
The custom
is believed to date back to the time of Genghis
Khan, when a horse was sacrificed to serve the
fallen warrior in the next world. The caparisoned
horse later came to symbolize a warrior who would
ride no more. Although, it should be known that
over a thousand years before Genghis Khan the
Afghan people represented the Buddha as a
riderless horse.
In the United States, the
caparisoned horse is part of the military honors
given to an Army or Marine Corps officer who was a
colonel or above; this includes the President, by
virtue of having been the nation's military
commander in chief and the Secretary of Defense,
having overseen the armed forces. Abraham Lincoln,
who was killed in 1865, was the first U.S.
president to be honored with a caparisoned horse
at his funeral.
The most famous riderless
horse was "Black Jack," named for General of the
Armies John "Black Jack" Pershing. Black Jack took
part in the state funerals of Presidents John F.
Kennedy (1963), Herbert Hoover, (1964), and Lyndon
Johnson (1973), and General of the Army Douglas
Mac Arthur (1964).
Gen Mac Arthur 1945
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