Buckskin Indian Pony - What's This?

 I'm generally not a fan of things that are dark and macabre, but I am fond of the character Jack Skellington from the film, The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

And when I am puzzled by something, the song What's This?"that Jack sings when he accidentally falls into Christmasland comes to mind.

This weekend I realized that I had a puzzle on my hand, one that I hadn't even noticed during the fifty years I'd had Miss Windy Warpaint.

I got her when she was first released in 1970 and she is one of my top five favorites from my carpet herd. I knew there were variations in the Native American symbols that she wore and that she had no USA stamp, but I didn't think there was anything odd about her.

Until I read a post written by another blogger. She had just gotten in some new models and one was an unusual Indian Pony. She posted a photo of the model's off side and pointed out that parts of the mane had been hand painted. 

I pulled out Miss Windy Warpaint (when I was a girl I came up with some whopper names, didn't I?) and flipped her over to the off side. What was her mane like?

There they were - can you see them?

I gathered the Indian Ponies in my collection that were made during the same time - alabaster, pinto with warpaint, pinto without warpaint.

None of them had any evidence of hand painting in their manes. And, each of them had a USA stamp.

I pulled up the Identify Your Breyer site and took a good look at the buckskin Indian Pony's photos.

Sure enough, that one had a hand painted mane, too, while the photos of the alabaster and pinto Indian Ponies on IYB showed airbrushed manes like mine. (Photo from Identify Your Breyer.)

It was time to pull out Nancy Atkinson Young's book and see if she had any information about the hand painted mane. Was it also on early versions of the alabaster and pintos? I have several versions of her book (including the earliest when it was in a binder rather than having been bound) and read through the entries for all three colors and then the notes for the mold. 

Nancy's book confirmed that the very earliest models in all three colors from this mold had no USA stamp but there was nothing about any hand painting of the manes.

So now I am curious - do the other two colors have hand painting on their early versions? Or is this something that only the buckskin version received?

I have no answers yet, but I am still doing research. And, I have a friend who is a fount of knowledge when it comes to Breyer model horses and have contacted her to see if she can shed any light on the hand painted manes on early buckskin Indian Ponies. 

Any new information that I learn will be posted here. Stay 'tooned!