I think that the very first test I remember taking in elementary school (beyond the Friday spelling tests) was one on the Spanish explorers and the conquest of America. We had to draw a line matching the explorer with the territory—Cortes with Mexico, Ponce de Leon with Florida, De Soto with the Mississippi and Louisiana. In my memory the Spanish Conquest was a cornerstone of the elementary curriculum.

There are other eras and episodes in history that are taught and re-taught, written about in grave historical texts, threaded through social studies units, and the subject of novels. To even think about writing a novel on some of these subjects is daunting just because they have been written about so much. From an author’s perspective the stories seem almost threadbare or worn out from so much exposure. She thinks to herself, What else might I offer?

And then in this nearly threadbare, worked-over historical tapestry, you find one little maverick thread sticking out at an edge and you just can’t help giving it a tug. What will happen? Will the entire tapestry unravel? Or will the thread itself lead like a trail into new, undiscovered territory?

A little of both happened to me when I tugged on one such thread in the story of the Spanish Conquest. It was that of horses. We have been told and taught in elementary school that the Spanish brought the first horses to our continent; that in February of 1519 Hernando Cortes sailed from Cuba to Mexico. He sailed with eleven ships, five hundred men and sixteen horses. All this is written down in the seminal book by the conquistador/historian Bernal Castillo Diaz who was on that voyage. Interestingly enough Hernando Alonso, the blacksmith for the horses, was a Jew escaping the Inquisition. He was a secret Jew actually or what was called a converso. There were several conversos on board.

I found all this intriguing. Yet what really caught my fancy was a revelation that it is completely erroneous to think of these sixteen horses as the first ones ever to set hoof onto the soil of the New World. There had been horses in the New World but they had disappeared millions of years before the Spaniards had arrived.

So for the horses of Cortes it was not so much an arrival as a return, a homecoming of sorts. In fact it was in the New World that the first horse Eohippus equus, known as the Dawn Horse, had evolved. Of course the Dawn Horse did not look much like the modern horses we know today. It was tiny, no more than ten to twenty inches in height. Over the vastness of time that tiny creature changed and became the progenitor of three other species of horses much closer to what we now consider a modern horse. However, two million years before the arrival of Cortes those horses mysteriously vanished .

This seemed like a story waiting to be told. But then again, how to tell it?

I considered telling it from Hernando Alonso’s point of view—a secret Jew with a deep empathy for horses, fleeing his own native land. Or perhaps I might tell it from the perspective of a young groom for the horses, an African boy who was on the ship as a slave. Finally, I thought, Why not tell the story of the Spanish coming to the New World from the horses’ point of view.

At first I was rather intimidated. I have written so many books about animals now—owls in The Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, wolves in The Wolves of The Beyond series. But all these animals were completely wild. Indeed I set those series in post-human times. There was no contact or involvement with humans.

p: Randy C. Bunney via Wikimedia

But the history of horses is inextricably involved with humans. Horses were domesticated for centuries. Oh yes, I know there are ‘wild’ ones, mustangs, but in North America they are nonetheless the descendants of the horses that came to America with the Spaniards. To say they were “wild” is not entirely accurate. They were “feral.” That means they were not born in a wild state but only became wild after they escaped from captivity or domestication. Therefore they had to actually learn how to live wild, to forage, to shed the gaits they were trained to trot in and to gallop without shoes.

It is an odd angle perhaps from which to tell this uniquely American story, but as I said it is an alternate history. I truly felt there were themes and subtexts concerning questions of wildness and freedom that I could only explore from this peculiar perspective of the horses who had been brought to serve in the Spanish Conquest of the Americas.

Winston Churchill once said that history is written by the victors. THE ESCAPE, the first book of my new Horses of the Dawn series, is in one sense a novel of alternate history in that it is not being told from the perspective of the victors or the vanquished, but of the horses. I think of it as an equine retelling of the coming of horses to the New World that for them was ultimately a homecoming after millions upon millions of years.

Kathryn Lasky is the author of more than 100 books for children, adults, and young adults, including the New York Times bestseller series "Guardians of Ga'Hoole", basis for Warner Brothers recent film "Legend of the Guardians". She has won awards including a Newbery Honor, New York Times Best Books, Boston Globe Hornbook Award, and the Washington Post Children's Book Guild Award for the body of her non-fiction work and the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers Literature. She has twice won the National Jewish Book Award.

Kathryn lives in Cambridge, Ma. With her husband Christopher G Knight who has photographed many of the nonfiction books.