WILD HORSE COUNTRY
THE HISTORY, MYTH, AND FUTURE OF THE MUSTANG
DAVID PHILIPPS
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York | London
For Whitman and Frost, who were born wild and free
No one who conceives him only as a potential servant to man can apprehend the mustang. The true conceiver must be a lover of freedom—a person who yearns to extend freedom to all life.
—J. FRANK DOBIE
Contents
INTRODUCTION THE GATHER
CHAPTER 1 THE DAWN HORSE
CHAPTER 2 RETURN OF A NATIVE
CHAPTER 3 THE DOG-FOOD DECADES
CHAPTER 4 PRINT THE LEGEND
CHAPTER 5 WILD HORSE ANNIE
CHAPTER 6 LIFE UNDER THE LAW
CHAPTER 7 RANGE WARS
CHAPTER 8 ALL THE MISSING HORSES
CHAPTER 9 DISAPPOINTMENT VALLEY
CHAPTER 10 A WILD SOLUTION
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Wild Horse Country
INTRODUCTION
THE GATHER
Just after dawn on a frigid January morning, I clambered to the top of a coffee-colored rock spine rising a hundred feet above the gray floor of a broad bowl of sage and alkali dust called Sand Springs Valley and looked out across an unbroken expanse of nothing. Legions of gray brush spread out for miles toward dark mountains that against the brightening dawn looked like a dark tear across the winter sky. What was out here? Beyond the fog of my breath, not much.
Sand Springs is one of those rare scraps of American West that has changed little since the glaciers receded. There are no towns, no houses, not even a shack. I saw no fences, no power lines, no road signs, no roads. There were no blinking antenna spires, no cell towers, not even really a tree. All the bars on my cell phone had long since disappeared and the radio was static. Most of the mountains fencing in the valley were not just unvisited but nameless. I had bumped in on a dirt road that had turned to a gravelly track, then eventually shrunk to two ruts. Brush screeched along the belly of my truck and the smell of crushed sage under tires rose up as thick as incense. It was the kind of place where, if you broke down, you could wait days for help before deciding just to walk out on your own.
I was in the middle of Nevada, in the heart of a region known as the Great Basin—a vast accordion of long valleys and jagged mountain ranges that runs down the interior of the West, through Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and a sliver of eastern California. On a map, the long valleys look as if the center of the nation had been hastily ironed into pleats. The Great Basin is some of the driest country in North America, and the emptiest. It gets its name from the fact that creeks and rivers here never reach the sea. They either sink into the sandy sage or run out onto salt flats where the ever-present sun dries their modest flow into a shimmering white alkaline crust. Locals like to say that what the West once was, the Great Basin still is: open range, cattle rustlers, ghost towns, gold mines, and land so seamless you want to reach out and touch it to make sure it is not just a painted backdrop behind John Wayne.
When I reached the top of the rock outcrop, it was just after 7 a.m. and 19 degrees. The only man-made thing I could see in the vast sweep of hundreds of square miles of desert was some pink plastic tape—the type surveyors use. It had been stretched roughly into a rectangle the size of a walk-in closet along the uneven rocks on top of the spine. And I had been told to stand in it, and not to step out.
Standing next to me was a federal law enforcement agent with a pistol on his hip. He was tall, with thick forearms that he kept folded, and he wore inscrutable dark sunglasses even though the sun had not yet come up. Next to him was a public affairs officer from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM): a somewhat pudgy, smiling man with gray hair and what looked like a twenty-year-old Thermos that he kept constantly unscrewing to pour tiny cups of coffee for himself. The law enforcement agent’s job was to make sure I stayed in the ribbon. The public affairs officer’s job was to answer any questions about it.
As we waited for the sunrise to warm us, I asked him why, in such a remote place, we needed to stand within the ribbon.
For my safety, and the safety of the operation, he told me, never dimming his smile.
“What would happen if I stepped out of the ribbon?”
“The ribbon is here for you and you need to stay in it,” he said.
“But couldn’t we just move a little outside the ribbon, to a slightly better spot on the rock?” We were, after all, in the middle of nowhere. Who would know?
The law enforcement agent, who had not said more than a few words since I had met him a half hour earlier, slowly shook his head and said, “Just stay in the ribbon.”
So we all stood inside the ribbon. I wiggled my toes in my boots to keep them warm and looked out at the sweep of the valley. I was there for one reason. I had always wanted to see wild horses. And this was the place to do it. As the first sunlight spilled into the valley, I raised my binoculars and peered out into the distance. Miles away, I saw them. A string of eight dots running. So small they looked like no more than ants in the vast valley, but so fast that they could be nothing else.
Wild horses! Just saying the words sets off a stampede of images: echoing box canyons and dusty blue mesas, hooves flying through golden grass, the defiant scream of a rearing stallion, heat waves rippling the distance, speed and strength and cliffs and cactus and dust and grit, lonely places where big empty skies define the day and coyote songs define the night, wild places forever beyond the grip of civilization.
Wild horses! Even if you have never seen one, chances are if you grew up in the United States you know what they mean. They are freedom. They are independence. They are the ragtag misfits defying incredible odds. They are the lowborn outsiders whose nobility springs from the adversity of living a simple life. In short, they are American. Or at least they are what we tell ourselves we are, and what we aspire to be. If you think I’m laying it on a little thick, consider this: There are only two animals for which the United States Congress has ever specifically passed laws to protect from harm. The first was the bald eagle. The second was the wild horse.
And yes, unusual as it sounds, the United States still has wild horses. Real wild horses. Not just a few relics carefully curated in a national park, but tens of thousands. They roam free, cared for by no one and controlled by no one, nearly as wild as the deer and the antelope. Even in the twenty-first century, when the wild is steadily disappearing, wild horses are not just surviving, but thriving. They are expanding. What a wonderful and strange thing.
Today wild horses still roam on more than thirty-one million acres in parts of ten western states. But few people will ever see one, because wild horses generally live where we do not—the empty spots on the map, remote scraps of the country too dry or rocky or hot or all-of-the-above to be of much use. They once roamed the whole West from the Great Plains to the Pacific, but they have been driven to the sharp angled remnants of the West where there is still room for things to be wild: Rimrock. Cedar breaks. Salt flats. Shale barrens. Almost any unwanted scrap where open space reigns and order and fences are scarce, you will find them. Badlands. Sage flats. Even nuclear test sites and bombing ranges. These are the parts of America most people only see from plastic airline portholes at thirty thousand feet, where gradually the land shrivels and the grid of roads breaks down until it is just mountains and canyons crossed by a few lonesome strands of highway. Almost all of it is located in the dry bowl of land between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. This collective group of relatively pristine remnants goes by ma
ny names. On my repeated visits I began to refer to it simply as Wild Horse Country.
Wild Horse Country is almost all desert. Distance and aridity rule. Little has fundamentally changed in the century since Mary Austin wrote in The Land of Little Rain, “There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring to the snowline. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze.”
The official government names of designated wild horse ranges in Wild Horse Country give some taste of the landscape: Granite, Lava Beds, Slate Range, High Rock, Rocky Hills, Red Rocks, Sand Canyon, Sand Basin, Sand Springs, Black Mountain, Bald Mountain, Dead Mountain. Just reading them makes you thirsty. They are names that map the history of people who came looking for something and found only what a gray-haired curator with dirty bifocals at a one-room roadside Nevada history museum described to me as “nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles.” They are names of want, failure, hideouts, last stands, and wind. Names of places that even the hardy homesteaders we learn about in school sized up and passed over: Stinking Water, Salt Wells, Rattlesnake, Dogskin. Cyclone Rim, Devil’s Garden, Robbers Roost, Hard Trigger. Murderer’s Creek, Deadman Valley, Confusion, Harvey’s Fear.
It’s not the land the horses chose. It is just the land that was left to choose. Hardscrabble islands of desiccated emptiness that herds were pushed into. Put together the patchwork where wild horses are found in the West and you have an area the size of Alabama. And a human population near zero.
Actual road signs I have seen on the way through:
NEXT GAS 167 MILES
DANGER CROSSWINDS 50 MPH +
CAUTION EAGLES ON HWY
That’s Wild Horse Country. And yet, as Austin said of the desert, “Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.”
The legend of the wild horse—all that stuff about freedom and toughness, which secured its place as an American icon? It is well deserved. Like nearly all Americans, the wild horse is an immigrant. And like many, it prospered through sheer grit. The herds on the land now are the descendants of the painted war ponies that allowed a few thousand native warriors to hold off the industrialized American army. They are also the descendants of the cavalry mounts that chased down Crazy Horse and cornered Geronimo. They are the descendants of the Pony Express runners that whisked messages from the Mississippi to San Francisco in ten days before the invention of the telegraph, and the cowboys’ tireless sidekicks in the great cattle drives.
Somewhere back in time, they all descended from domestic horses, many of them of Spanish blood but likely as many or more from American stock. What you see on the range are ones that got away—the refugees, the outcasts, the fugitives. Their toughness is legend. One newspaper account from the early days of the California gold rush told of a mustang found trapped at the bottom of a dry well after twenty-two days—still doing fine. In San Francisco around the same time, a mustang rode five days straight during an endurance exhibition. In 1897, the United States Bureau of Animal Industry sponsored a 2,400-mile race from Sheridan, Wyoming, to Galena, Illinois. Any horse could enter. Two brothers caught wild mustangs, broke and saddled them, and, ninety-one days later—with no horseshoes and no grain—trotted across the finish line. The only survivor of Custer’s Last Stand was a mustang named Comanche. He had been shot seven times, not counting an arrow wound from a previous battle. He lived for years afterward, developing a taste for whiskey in his old age.
“If I had my pick between a $1,000 Arabian steed and a common fuzztail,” the cowboy and author Will James wrote a century ago, “I’d much rather select the one with the snort and the buck, cause I know the trail between suns is never too long for him, no matter how scarce the feed and water may be.”
Mustangs are the subject of hundreds of tales in pulp novels, movies, radio dramas, TV Westerns, and songs sung around the campfire. Goodbye, old paint, I’m a-leavin’ Cheyenne. Sure, much of the history is just legend and myth, which has grown with the telling, but as I eventually learned in Wild Horse Country, legend and myth can have as much weight as fact.
Officially, the Sand Springs Valley, where I had gone to see wild horses, gets just over seven inches of rain a year. But on the ground, which is mostly rock and dust with low, thorny brush, it is hard to believe. There are no creeks or ponds. The terrain is so flinty and remote that NASA once tested a Mars Rover here. It is textbook Wild Horse Country. The Bureau of Land Management estimated that hundreds of horses roamed in the valley, but in the dawn light I saw nothing but a half-dozen distant dots. You would think a vast herd of horses would be easy to spot, especially with binoculars and a wide-open view of a treeless plain running for miles. But the West is not always what you think, especially when it comes to its wild horses.
Wild Horse Country is both harsh and intensely beautiful. The view can suddenly stop you in your tracks. The sun can flood an empty valley as clouds trail violet veils of rain that fall but never quite hit the ground. Canyons that feel like a tomb can, with one fresh mountain-lion print in the sand, seem suddenly alive and full of movement. The deserts of endless thorns and dust can suddenly break on a hidden spring where a quick step startles a whole congress of butterflies. The light can glint on rail-straight highways, making them shine like silver thread twenty miles long, connecting your boots to the distant horizon.
Like a lot of things that persist both in the present and in legend, Wild Horse Country is a heap of contradictions. The intermountain West is the emptiest part of the country and also the most urban. It is the most traditional and also the newest. Here ranches and strip malls are sometimes separated only by a few strands of barbed wire. The locals tend to see themselves as rugged individualists, and suspicion of the government runs deep, but no other place is under as much federal control or receives as much federal money. The situation with wild horses, too, is a contradiction. They are truly wild and directly descended from the herds of the old West. There is nothing phony about them. But they are tightly controlled by federal bureaucrats in Washington, DC, corralled by lawsuits and directed by sheafs of government impact statements. The riders that have the tightest hold on them are the riders in federal budget bills.
Wild Horse Country also occasionally contains rectangles of pink plastic tape. This is because nearly all wild horses—at least all those that are legally considered wild horses (I’ll explain that part later)—are found on federal land and are controlled by the BLM, part of the Department of the Interior. Even though the BLM oversees 253 million acres of public land—roughly an eighth of the United States—I’m constantly running into people who don’t know it exists. It is the agency that took control of the land no one had wanted after the federal government gave away land through the Homestead Act: valleys too dry to farm and mountains too scraggly to log. Almost all of the land is sandwiched between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. The harsher the climate, the more BLM land there is. Some desert counties in Nevada are 90 percent BLM land.
In 1971, Congress passed a law to protect wild horses. Since the BLM oversees so much unwanted land, and most wild horses live on the same unwanted land, it has fallen to the agency to oversee the horses, too. When I say “oversee,” I mostly mean “remove.” In an attempt to keep the horse population stable, the agency rounds up thousands of horses a year using helicopters that sweep across the desert and chase the herds into corrals, where they are trucked away and put in storage.
That is what I had come to see in the Sand Springs Valley. I wanted to know how it worked, why we do it, and how the horses fared. I also wanted to know what happened after the horses were trucked away. Helicopter roundups have been blasted by animal rights groups as cruel and unnecessary since they started in the 1970s. The BLM has continued, insisting it has little choice. I wanted to see firsthand if roundups were really so inhumane, and if there was any better way. That had brought me to this lonely rock spine whe
re a roundup was about to begin.
Over the years, various animal rights groups have tried to shut down roundups. They have sued. They have blockaded. They have buzzed the area with an airplane. By the time I signed up to see the helicopters work in the Sand Springs Valley, roundups had grown so controversial that the agency had started limiting public viewing to a specific area. If I wanted to watch, I had to sign up to stand in the taped-off rectangle, presided over by an armed guard. I figured it was a small price to pay. But when I got there after driving about twelve hours, I realized the BLM had set up the rectangle in a place where part of the rock outcrop hid much of the roundup from view. I wouldn’t be able to see the horses driven into the corral, or what happened afterward.
After spotting the first group of horses miles away through my binoculars, I lost them as they ran into a part of the valley hidden by the rock outcrop. I asked the public affairs officer if we could move out of the pink plastic tape again. He said no.
“Just a little, maybe up to the next rock?”
“No.”
“Who is in charge? Maybe we could ask them?”
He explained that we had to stay where we were because if we moved closer to the corral, we would scare the horses.
“But aren’t helicopters chasing the horses?” I asked. “And aren’t they more likely to scare the horses than a guy crouched in the rocks?”
The public affairs officer shrugged. His job was not to engage in debate. We were staying where we were.
I was raised by parents with an orange VW bus and a sometimes-counterproductive resentment of authority—one I inherited and have nurtured through years as a newspaper journalist. I’ve learned that being gently defiant may not get you what you want, but it often gets you closer. I figured I could get the BLM to budge just a little by continuing to push, but it was no good. I argued for at least twenty minutes, but the pink tape never moved, and neither did I. It was a fitting introduction to Wild Horse Country. A lot of stuff the BLM does here makes little sense, and plenty of people have pointed that out for a time, but it hasn’t kept the agency from doing it.
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