BUCEPHALUS owes his fame mainly to the historian Plutarch, who described the horse in his biography of world-beater ALEXANDER THE GREAT. Plutarch tells the tale of how Alexander, audacious even as a boy, took his father's challenge and tamed the wild horse by turning its head into the sun, thereby preventing it from being frightened by its own shadow. That story may or may not be true, but Bucephalus was indeed Alexander's mount for many of his military campaigns. The horse was eventually killed in battle and given a solemn funeral by Alexander himself.

Twenty centuries after Alexander, General ROBERT E. LEE led the forces of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Lee's horse TRAVELLER became a familiar and beloved figure among Confederate troops as he carried Lee on the war's many long campaign marches. After the war Lee took Traveller with him into retirement, and the horse was finally buried near Lee's tomb on the campus of Washington and Lee University.

GEORGE CUSTER was also an officer in the Civil War, but his big defeat came later: in 1876 he and all his troops were killed in a battle with Native Americans which became known as Custer's Last Stand. The most famous non-human survivor of that battle was COMANCHE, an Army horse who came through wounded but alive. (Comanche belonged not to Custer but to one of his officers, Miles Keogh.) Comanche was so famous that after his death in 1891 he was stuffed and put on display at the University of Kansas, where he remains to this day.

Another famous military pair: NAPOLEON BONAPARTE and MARENGO. Marengo became most famous after the Battle of Waterloo, when he was captured by the British and taken to England. Marengo was displayed by the British both before and after his death (ending up on permanent display much like another famous horse, Trigger). While Marengo remains famous, it seems clear that he was only one of many horses used by Napoleon during his career, a notion that was explored in-depth in Jill Hamilton's 2000 book Marengo: the Myth of Napoleon's Horse.

ROY ROGERS and TRIGGER were favorites of the early TV age. Rogers began featuring the wonder horse during his years in the movies, and took Trigger along for the ride when Rogers and his wife Dale Evans began their own successful TV show in the 1950s. (Evans had her own famous horse, Buttermilk.) When Trigger died in 1965, Rogers had the horse mounted rather than buried, and Trigger can still be seen on display in the Roy Rogers -Dale Evans museum in Victorville, California.

PEGASUS is one horse who who grew more famous than his rider. In Greek myth Pegasus was a wild winged horse, eventually tamed by the daring BELLEROPHON . The two were highly effective together, slaying the dreaded Chimera and (some say) performing other great deeds before they were separated. Bellerophon is no longer a famous figure, but Pegasus has remained a favorite in fairy tales and cartoons into the modern day.