The horses represent more than just themselves, and they also are the center axis around which the novel revolves. The horses connect all the characters. They connect John Grady to his parents, to his grandfather, to his other ancestors. Even Rawlins says he had seen his father rattle a few times on a horse, indicating that he was a cowpuncher, too, and most likely broke a few horses as Rawlins did. Horses connect the men and women, not just John Grady and Alejandra, but his parents. His father tells him that the two (his parents) had in common a great love of horses, and they were mistaken in thinking that was enough. The horses connect John Grady and Don Hector, owner of the hacienda, who can spend hours talking of the merits of individual horses. The two of them have even read some of the same horse books. The horses tie John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins together, even after Blevins' death, as John Grady tries to find the rightful owner of Blevins' big bay horse. The horses connect all the cowboys and vaqueros. They connect the old men and the young, the Mexicans and the Americans.
Perhaps most importantly, the horses connect the present to the past. The imagined scenes John Grady sees on his lone rides on the prairie are of the Comanches in the past on their ponies. Horses connect the events of this era back to the conquistadors who brought the horses back to America, after the indigenous horses of America had long been extinct.
The horses are also the connection to work — working the cattle on ranches and play, riding to hunt or just for pleasure. In short, the horses are connected to all the enterprises of the characters. This includes transportation. Horses still had an important function in 1949, often still used in farming. In the western half of the country, kids still went to school on their ponies, and in the blizzard of 1949, after weeks of being snowed in, fathers finally got to town by horseback. John Grady and Rawlins are too poor to own a car in this novel. In the fifty years since the novel takes place, this has all reversed, so that everyone has a car, many equipped to get through heavy snow, and only the rich can afford horses. The horse, thus, has become a creature for pleasure, and has lost its work function.
