Wild About Horses

by Lawrence Scanlan

Some of us had flown halfway around the world for the privilege of gazing upon free horses, and we took joy and sustenance from their playful little dash across the desert.

  Once common on the plains, wild horses are now relatively rare, and that, too, elevated the moment. According to various estimates, two to five million mustangs (a derivation of the Spanish word mestenos, meaning wild or untamed horses) roamed the West in the early 1800s. Travelers reported seeing herds so massive that their movement across the horizon continued unabated from dawn to dusk. But by the end of that century, the wagon trains had carved deep ruts in the Santa Fe Trail and myriad other paths west. The taming of the West meant the shrinking of lands available to the free horse. Still, their numbers would occasionally get a boost: the defeat of Indian nations in the 1870s meant that a host of war horses and buffalo runners were taken from their tribal owners and released onto the plains. And during the Great Depression of the 1930s, drought and hardship hit hard at farmers. Huge numbers left their dusty acreages and simply abandoned their horse herds, letting them loose on the prairie. But nothing could augment wild-horse numbers. Other forces were at work. The horses were free, all right. Free for the taking.

  Hundreds of thousands of wild horses were rounded up to serve in the Boer War. Industry had need of them to make chicken feed, fertilizer and hides. Ranchers took what wild horses they needed as cow ponies but resented the rest competing with their cows for grass on public lands. Ranchers, game managers, men in planes — all shot wild horses.

  Hope Ryden, whose book America’s Last Wild Horses helped stem the flow of horse blood, asked several of those flyers why they would venture into such inhospitable places to gun down such hardy horses. It was not as if the horses existed in overwhelming numbers. By this time — the late 1960s — the mustang population in the United States had dwindled to a paltry seventeen thousand and some observers were predicting that the wild horse would go the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo. The horse hunters had only one explanation for their actions: the horses were “no good.”

  Some scientists unwittingly blessed the mass culling by noting, rightly, that horses roaming the plains were descendants of once domesticated horses. (Though not always: researchers in the early 1990s determined that horses in the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range, on the Montana-Wyoming border, bear strong genetic links to the Spanish horses brought by Columbus.) Free-roaming horses were deemed to be not true wild horses, therefore, but mere feral horses. Those who love horses prefer the word wild and hate the word feral. Same horse, different word. Yet the world turns on words.

  The common language used to describe wild horses seemed to warrant their slaughter. Cattlemen called them “jugheads” or “broomtails” and maligned their conformation. An entry in The Encyclopedia of the Horse does not remember them fondly: “By the nineteenth century the typical mustang tended to be hammer-headed, ewe-necked, mutton-withered, roach-backed, cow-hocked and tied-in below the knee. These defects were generally ignored by artists, but cruelly displayed in early photographs.”

  Some old photographs seemed even to exaggerate these conformation faults. One arresting nineteenth-century photo in a book of the 1950s, The Indian and the Horse, shows a somewhat shaggy, angular pony, and on his back a two-year-old boy wearing a feathered and horned headdress that gives him the look of a medicine boy-man. Below the photo is a quote from an observer of the time who was less than impressed with Indian ponies: “A typical product of the indiscriminate coupling and winter hardships of the prairie horses — small, tough, deer-legged, big-barreled, with slanting quarters, mulish hocks, a hide fantastically flared and blotched with white, and one wicked glass eye that showed the latent devil in his heart.” Whether the quote refers specifically to the photo is unclear, but they seem a perfect match. The pony does indeed possess a glassy eye.

  Even today, some cattlemen in the Chilcotin Range of British Columbia call wild horses “garbage” — “undesirable and breeding in the wild, like starlings.”

  And yet the wild horse possessed undeniable attributes. The Plains Indians rode only captured or stolen mustangs, who won praise in some historic accounts for their speed and intelligence, their courage in the buffalo hunt, their iron-hard hooves and their uncommon freedom from foot and leg problems. Other observers commented on how docile the mustangs were (perhaps owing something to how they were introduced to the concept of riding by their Indian owners). They were so easily managed, said one white traveler who tried an Indian pony, that they made the Indian rider look better than he actually was. But hammer-headed or not, the several million ponies of the plains were almost wiped out.

  To understand what happened to all those horses and who saved them from extinction, you have to know something about Velma Bronn Johnston.

  She was born in Reno, Nevada, in 1912, the eldest of four children. At the age of eleven, she contracted polio and spent six months in a body cast, which left her able to walk but her body misaligned. Pain and fatigue would plague her all her life. Some of her schoolmates taunted her for her disability, but she found solace in poetry and drawing and in the animals on her parents’ ranch. She knew what it was to be an outcast.

  One morning in 1950, Johnston was driving along Highway 395 to work in Reno when a truck hauling horses cut in front of her car. Shocked by a stream of blood dripping from the truck, she followed the van to a slaughterhouse and watched from behind bushes as a yearling was trampled to a pulp between terrified stallions. The horses had buckshot wounds; some stood on bloody stumps after their hooves had worn off from running over rocks; one stallion had had his eyes shot out. What Johnston saw and heard that day would change her life. She would take on the U.S. federal government, specifically the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which was encharged with managing wild-horse populations. Her most bitter opponent there, Dan Solari, would dub her “Wild Horse Annie,” and the name stuck. Friends began to use it with affection.

  Meanwhile, powerful enemies lined up against the wild horse. Cattle ranchers and sheep farmers complained that wild-horse herds ate their hay and competed with their livestock for precious water and grasslands, that stallions trampled fence lines and stole their mares.

  Bureaucracy lined up against the horses. In 1919, the American government — pressed by ranchers — issued a bulletin that dealt in part with what it called “wild or worthless horses.” Citing economic reasons (sheep and cattle fetched far more money than wild horses), the Department of the Interior outlined its plan for “ridding the range of these worthless horses.” Australia, meanwhile, declared its own intention to rid the Outback of “brumbies” — “a very weed among animals.”

  2.2 Mustang roundup, Arizona, 1980: less than 200 years ago, two to five million horses roamed the plains. (photo credit 2.2)

  But the loudest death knell for wild-horse herds was rung by the burgeoning pet food industry. “Nuisance” horses were rounded up and slaughtered, and the meat canned for consumption by cats and dogs. It was not just the fact of the slaughter that appalled Wild Horse Annie but its scale and practice. Mustangers (horse hunters) had been using planes since the 1930s, and by the 1950s they had it down to a science, deploying aircraft equipped with sirens.

  “The mustangs,” wrote Johnston, “are driven at breakneck speed by planes from their meager refuge in the rough and barren rimrock onto flatlands or dry lake beds. There the chase is taken up by hunters standing on fast-moving pickup trucks … after a run of fifteen to twenty miles, [the horses], many of them carrying bullet wounds inflicted to make them run the faster, are easy victims for ropers.”

  The wild horse was then lassoed, with a heavy truck tire at the other end of the rope serving as anchor. By then, Johnston wrote, the frantic horse’s sides were heaving and blood ran from his nostrils. The mustanger tied the horse’s feet and the creature was pulled up a rough plank ramp (which often stripped the hide from his flanks) onto a stock truck where the ropes were removed and he was prodded to his feet.

 
Another option, graphically portrayed in a film from 1961 called The Misfits, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, was to rope mustangs from a flatbed truck, hogtie them and then leave them in that abject state all night, to be picked up by another truck in the morning.

  Terrified and often hurt, the horse faced a long journey to an abattoir that might be many hours away, perhaps in another state or even in another country (horses were sometimes shipped to Canada). Left behind to die were young colts or horses too badly injured to load. Thus to slaughter went what Velma Johnston called “the harassed, abused remnants of our Western heritage.”

  2.3 After repeatedly trying to vault a fence in Montana, this mustang stallion got what he cherished: his freedom. (photo credit 2.3)

  The cruelty was methodical, even ingenious. In America’s Last Wild Horses, Hope Ryden describes how mustangers in Wyoming’s Red Desert — precisely where I rode in 1997 — would capture and gentle a mare, then sew her nostrils almost completely shut with rawhide or barbed wire. Unable to take in a full breath of air, her speed was reduced and she would act as a brake on the herd in the spring when another roundup occurred. Another braking tactic was to bend a horseshoe around the ankle of a mare, which bruised her when she ran. Only a quality mare was selected, wrote Ryden — “so she could perform double duty by bearing a good colt for the mustangers during the year she was free on the desert.”

  The ten-year battle to save wild horses from virtual extinction had Velma Johnston right in the thick of it. The one photo I have seen of her shows her in a beehive hairdo and oversized sunglasses, standing outside a corral. She might have passed as a visitor to a dude ranch; she was, by all accounts, a quietly determined woman whose house, with its horse-inspired paintings, ceramics, lamps and bookends, reflected her love of the horse. Or at least the idea of the horse. For tiny Velma Johnston was, in fact, allergic to horses.

  But before she died in 1977, Johnston proved to be a burr under the saddle of every cattleman, bureaucrat or pet food profiteer who stood between her and the horses she loved. Like many people who will never see a wild horse in their lives, she felt it important that free horses have a secure place on the planet.

  Hope Ryden’s book and Velma Johnston’s campaign began to show results. An organization called WHOA (Wild Horse Organized Assistance), with Annie at the helm, undertook surveillance patrols and field studies; WHOA raised funds for the beleaguered wild horse as well as its profile. The New York Times carried a front-page story on the plight of mustangs. Other publications, including National Geographic, Time and Reader’s Digest, followed suit. The latter ran a footnote to its story and suggested that concerned readers write to members of Congress. They did: one senator got fourteen thousand letters in one week.

  The same stirrings for the wild horse that compel today’s advertisers to feature horses — and often free-running herds of horses — in ads for cars, lottery tickets, beer, doughnuts and clothing also ran deeply in 1970. But so did feeling the other way. A letter to the editor of the Nevada State Journal around this time predicted, ominously, that “Wild Horse Annie will be called Dead Horse Annie in a very few short years.”

  Nine years after Johnston first followed that slaughterhouse truck, the U.S. Congress passed what became known as the Wild Horse Annie Law. Using motorized vehicles and polluting water holes to capture wild horses were both banned. Later, in 1971, mustang allies got another law passed: this one protected wild horses and burros from capture, harassment or death.

  “Congress finds and declares,” the legislation read, “that wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people.” Protective ranges were declared in Montana, Nevada, Wyoming and several other states. One, the Book Cliffs Refuge in Colorado, was dedicated in memory of Wild Horse Annie.

  Today, the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, which Velma Johnston helped found, oversees an adoption program, as does the Bureau of Land Management itself. The government occasionally culls wild-horse herds to control their numbers, but members of the public are invited to “adopt” these horses. In principle, it is a good idea that often works well. But too many of the horses still end up at meatpacking plants, often because the owner lacks the considerable skill and patience required to gentle a wild horse.

  The first wild horse I ever saw was also the most vigilant horse I had ever seen. Everything about him said he was not a horse to be trifled with. I was in California in March of 1997, in the high desert of the Cuyuma Valley, and the mustang was alone in a corral. With me was Monty Roberts, a horseman who had recently adopted this horse and another from the BLM and who planned to gentle one of them in the wild during the week to follow. A BBC-TV documentary film crew were to arrive shortly and record his success, or failure, and the entire chronicle would go into the book I was helping Monty write, The Man Who Listens to Horses.

  While Monty attended to details of the shoot, I stood by the fence and watched this wild horse, a little bay. He would find a spot in the dusty corral as far from me as he could, then circle and eye me. His stare was unrelenting. Some years earlier I noticed a wolf in a field in northern Ontario, and despite the great distance between us, it was instantly and instinctively clear to me that here was no dog. The focus, the stare, the wariness, said so. Here, now, was no pack horse. And though he had been in the corral for some weeks and had surely seen his share of humans in that time, he remained highly suspicious of all two-legged types. Not once did he lower his head or bend one leg or show any sign of relaxing his vigil.

  As I leaned on the fence and looked in, I thought of the words of a Scottish doctor named John Bell who observed wild horses on the China-Mongolia border in 1719. He had seen what we now call Przewalski’s (pronounced pshuh-vahl-skeez) horse, chunky little pepper pots with black manes and zebra stripes on their back legs. “The most watchful creatures alive,” he wrote. Dr. Bell might have said the same of this bay.

  In a fifty-foot round pen, Monty typically takes thirty minutes to introduce a green horse to bridle, saddle and rider. But gentling a wild horse in the wild (it was actually a twelve-hundred-acre pasture — ample room indeed for a mustang to ignore a gentler’s inquiries) drew deeply on Monty’s reservoir of skill and patience. Monty followed him around that huge field, in walk, trot and canter, for thirty-five consecutive hours and for several days thereafter. The message to the wild horse was something like, I’m not going to hurt you, but you and I have to talk. And I’m not going away until you do talk to me.

  I plotted the course of their deliberations for several days, sometimes looking down with binoculars from a high knoll. By the second day, the wild horse would let Monty approach on his mount, but only from the near side. Approaching from the right, or off side, was met with fierce resistance. Finally, after many hours, the horse did allow Monty to reach down and touch him, and that moment seemed portentous somehow. The cold wind up on that knoll seemed to ease; the sun got a little warmer. Man and horse were talking.

  But even on day four, when the mustang — whom Monty had named Shy Boy — came to abide being haltered and even saddled, he struck Monty hard with a front hoof when the latter moved too quickly to untie a knot. Shy Boy also greeted the young rider chosen for that first ride with another blow. As wild as some of us are about wild horses, or at least the idea of wild horses, wild horses are clearly not wild about humans. Not at first, in any case.

  Sometimes the task of gentling adopted mustangs falls to people who perhaps have yet to learn the wisdom of patience and trust — inmates in penitentiaries. At the end of the gentling process, horses from the correctional center in Susanville, California, for example, fetch $350 to $600 at public auction. It is not a lot of money for often a very good horse.

  2.4 Convicts play tag on wild horses in Wyoming: the games are part of the gentling process. (photo credit 2.4)
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  Tom Chenoweth, a veteran trainer who oversees that program, does not hold with the view that the wild horse is inherently a superior horse. “Some wild horses,” he told me, “are exceptional horses, but that’s true in any breed. Most people who come to the prison to buy a wild horse are after economy horses. They’re generally caring, feeling people. They like the idea of a wild horse and they need a trail horse. And for that, the wild horse is in a class all its own.”

  The good ones are never rattled, for example, by stepping into a muddy bog. Where a domestic horse would panic and likely pull a muscle, Chenoweth notes, the wild horse calmly backs out. Of the 650 or so wild horses who have gone through his program, only two ever suffered from colic and none suffered navicular, a disease of the hoof that riders and trainers traditionally fear.

  Tom Pogacnik, who oversees the U.S. government’s wild-horse gentling program, similarly sings the mustangs’ praises. “They have strong legs and perfect feet,” he says, “and once they know you they’re incredibly affectionate. They’re not always pretty horses, but they’re perfect horses. They’re horses as nature designed them, not as humans have bred them.”

  In fact, one reason to preserve the wild horse is as a gene pool, to be dipped into as needed. As Karen Sussman (president of the organization founded by Wild Horse Annie) told me, “We’re breeding pretty and beautiful horses, but pretty and beautiful may not last.” Studies have determined that wild horses are more genetically diverse than any other breed of horse. Nature weeds out the weak, the lame, the unwary; those left are tough enough to endure harsh winters and summer drought and to resist disease.

  Around the world, wild horses can be found throughout South America, southern Japan and China. France has its Camargues; Britain, the Exmoor, Dartmoor and New Forest ponies. The Australian brumby population, estimated to be as high as six hundred thousand, ebbs and flows but somehow thrives on one of the most unforgiving territories on the planet.