No American, or perhaps now even citizen of the world, can escape that. The New World was conquered, if that is the word we must use, by adventurers in search of gold. They took great risks in their searches and not all of them came for gold. The Jesuit and Franciscan monks walked so far in the desert, sometimes totally alone for dreams, of course. Dreams of serving God. Dreams of finding something new. Dreams of a better life. And those of us who have come after are forever in awe of the risks they all took, the suffering they endured. This is why to read All the Pretty Horses is to love not only the book and the story, but John Grady and the young characters as well. We admire them, we are frightened for them, we envy them, we do romanticize them. And is that so terrible? These young adventurers are surely the stuff dreams are made of. Adults steeped in reason, just like the adults in the novel, are way too hard on John Grady; "He is only sixteen-years-old." John Grady is a realist as well as ideal character, for his time and place. But he also is larger than life, mythic at sixteen. Definitely a cowboy. Definitely a lover of horses.
John Grady, on his horse, is the bearer of a whole history, how perhaps a tragic one. Are the "pretty horses" dying? Do the horse and rider, who have achieved so much, also risk losing everything? At the end of All the Pretty Horses, they are still alive, their shadows a single being, where they "passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come." This may be the rider of pale horse, pale rider, linked to death. But it may also be the modern rider, still moving, or dancing, with the forces of existence. In any case, one cannot separate the pretty horses from the rider, or from the dreams.
