Thomas Dwyer, a lawyer from London who started ranching in the same area in 1847, encountered the same uncountable herds. “I well remember when I first came to Texas seeing thousands and tens of thousands of wild horses running in immense herds all over the western country, as far as the eye or telescope could sweep the horizon. The whole country seemed to be running!” Horses would come up and cut off teams, coaxing the tame horses to join their bands. “Time and again I have had to send out my best mounted men to scare away the immense masses of mustangs (charging around and threatening to rush over us), by yelling and firing at them. Then the mustangs would wheel and go thundering away,” he said, adding, “The supplies of wild cattle and horses then seemed so abundant as to be inexhaustible.”23
How many were there? It is impossible to say. Adding up the grossly general observations of various regions by explorers only gives an even more gross general number. Some scholars have suggested there could have been as many as six million. Others have said there were likely never more than a few hundred thousand.
The most commonly repeated estimate is two million. It comes from a man named J. Frank Dobie, who in 1952 published a beautiful summation of wild horses in America called The Mustangs. Dobie had been born on a ranch in Texas in 1888 and had grown up among adults who still remembered the days of Indian wars and wild horses. He became a professor of literature and folklore and spent much of his life collecting the yarns and legends of the West. He taught at Cambridge University during World War II, and in Austria and Germany after the defeat of the Nazis. When he returned to teach in Texas, he became a lifelong champion of freedom and a staunch critic against any type of institutional oppression, whether Communism, Fascism, or the McCarthy-era capitalism he found in the United States in the 1950s. He was eventually awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Mustangs was in many ways a summation of his life’s work: a monument he penned to the lost wild era of the West and to the ever-enduring spirit of freedom.
When it came to hazarding a guess of how many wild horses had once been out there, Dobie wrote, “All guessed numbers are mournful to history.” Then, not being able to resist, he continued, “My own guess is that at no time were there more than a million mustangs in Texas, and no more than a million others scattered over the remainder of the West.”24 It was at best a hunch, but one that has hold on a larger truth—by the end of the era when the Horse Nations ruled the West, there were a lot of mustangs out there. More than anyone could ever count.
On a summer morning about 330 years after the Pueblo Revolt, I visited Turquoise Pueblo. The site is unmarked to keep looters away, but you can find it not too far off the interstate between Santa Fe and Albuquerque by asking around. When I got there, I walked out into a broad arroyo, expecting to find foundations and faint outlines of plazas. There was nothing left. During the horse-driven raids and fighting that followed the revolt, the village was abandoned. Over the centuries, the adobe walls melted back into the earth like sandcastles and were covered over by chamisa brush and cholla cactus.
But not everything from that time is gone. In the rolling valleys around the former village, horses still roam. Locals say they have been roaming free around local Indian reservations for as long as anyone can remember—maybe since 1580. In recent years, commuters from Albuquerque started building houses in the hills where the horses live, and began to complain to the local and state governments about what they called “feral horses.”
New Mexico has estray laws that require the roundup of any stray livestock. But when calls came to round up the horses in the hills near Turquoise Pueblo, local horse groups and tribes objected. Is a mustang really a stray, they argued, if its ancestors have been free for hundreds of years? They argued instead that the horses were wildlife.
As part of the case, DNA samples were gathered from the horses and tested in a lab at the University of California at Davis. If analysis showed a mix of ancestors, the court said, the horses would be considered strays. If it showed almost pure Spanish blood, they would be considered mustangs.
Over the centuries, untold thousands of domestic horses from the East have been imported into New Mexico, and many have gotten loose, making it unlikely that any true mustangs still exist. Still, the tests went forward. And something astounding happened. When the results came back, every one showed the horses indisputably were Spanish mustangs.
The case went all the way to the New Mexico Supreme Court in 2016. A judge determined that wild horses were not strays, but not protected wildlife either. They were something in between. They would be allowed to roam, like deer, but they could be shot by landowners, as is done with coyotes.
Though wild horses were almost entirely wiped out, they are still out there, roaming where the Pueblo Revolt set them free.
CHAPTER 3
THE DOG-FOOD DECADES
In 1923, a round-faced New Yorker in a dark business suit arrived via train in the small but bustling industrial town of Rockford, Illinois. The businessman, whose name was Phillip M. Chappel, made his way through the fray of trucks and horse-drawn wagons on the main street, on his way to a meeting with the stockholders of the local farmers’ cooperative’s meatpacking plant. The million-dollar plant on the edge of town had been built to slaughter cattle, but it had fallen on hard times because bigger factories in Chicago could undercut its price. The factory, idle for more than a year, was perched on the edge of bankruptcy. Chappel proposed something bold and unheard of. He had a plan that would allow the company to buy meat for almost nothing, sell it at a premium, and make them all rich. It required doing something many of the men found repugnant, but the money was so good that no one left the room. Two words: horse meat.
The town of Rockford, Chappel said, should become horse-meat capital of the United States. Timing was perfect. With the automobile taking over, the market for workhorses had collapsed. Mustangs from the West that once had satisfied a steady need for wagon-pullers in the East were now piling up in places like Montana and Wyoming. Ranchers would almost pay to get rid of them. Horses that once were the most valuable commodity in the West could be had for next to nothing.
The plan was simple: Round up as many mustangs as possible, drive them onto trains, ship them east, prod them up the cattle ramp, pack them into cans, and sell them as dog food. The approach was summarized a few years later by Time magazine as “round-up and ground up.”1
The investors agreed. By 1925, the Chappel Brothers factory in Rockford was up and running. A four-story brick plant rose in the center, bristling with smokestacks and steam pipes. A huge smokestack that towered over anything in town was emblazoned with its logo. Hammers clanged as workmen expanded the already sprawling complex, building new processing plants and new rail lines.
FACTORIES LIKE THE CHAPPEL BROTHERS PLANT IN ILLINOIS TURNED UNCOUNTED MUSTANGS INTO DOG FOOD AND FERTILIZER.
Every day, more than a dozen train cars wheeled into the complex, their sides often shuddering with the thunder of wild horse hooves trying to break the wooden walls. What those wide-eyed animals, which had grown up knowing only distance and freedom, thought of the stench of the boxcars could be surmised by the high-pitched shrieks and whinnies heard coming from the factory.
When Chappel proposed the idea, there were an estimated two million mustangs in the United States. A few decades later, hardly any were left. Many culprits helped do in the wild horse in the twentieth century: barbed wire, railroads, settlers surging into empty country, competition from cattle and sheep, a warlike campaign by state and federal governments against all wild animals that threatened agriculture, and, of course, plain old greed. But none did a fraction as much damage as Phillip M. Chappel—or P. M., as he was always called. Men had been chasing mustangs for meat and saddle stock for centuries in the West, but only mechanized, marketed, industrial-scale slaughter created both a financial incentive to annihilate wild herds and the practical means to make it happen.
I pieced together the saga of Chappel Brothers thr
ough clips from the local newspapers, the Rockford Daily Republic and the Rockford Morning Star. It is a largely forgotten story, but one that still has deep resonance—not just because it helps explain what happened to the vast wild mustang herds a century ago but also because it is a window into how people still react to the slaughter of horses, an issue that dogs the Bureau of Land Management to this day.
When the Chappel Brothers firm hatched its grand plan to turn mustangs into dog food, the term animal rights had yet to be coined. Still, the plan was not without its detractors in its day. People in that era had grown up with domestic horses. Many had used them for transportation or farm work. They respected them. Many found abhorrent the idea of turning a trusted servant into dog food. Some newspapers bemoaned the passing of the mustang and the sad fate of the slaughtered horse. At the same time, the United States was still in the throes of a Manifest Destiny–fueled bender of natural resource plunder, and there was a competing belief that mustangs, like timber and grass and minerals, should be used to fuel the nation’s progress.
At the Chappel Brothers slaughterhouse, that societal tension between love of horses and love of money eventually collided in a way that created headlines across the country and nearly destroyed the whole factory. But that wasn’t until later, after Chappel Brothers had become one of the largest slaughterhouses in the country.
P. M. Chappel’s success came down largely to being in the right place at the right time. Born in England in 1872, he emigrated with his parents as a young boy to Pennsylvania. As an adult, he moved to upstate New York, where he worked as a traveling salesman for Swift and Company—the Chicago meatpacking giant that was so horrifically efficient at slaughtering that it inspired Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. In 1911, Chappel became a dealer in horses around the city of Rochester. It was a good time to be in the business. When World War I broke out, it ignited a massive demand for horses to move armies in Europe. In 1916 alone, Europe bought 350,000 horses from the United States. Prices spiked and Americans made good money rounding up excess animals and putting them on boats with a one-way ticket to the front. Chappel got a government contract and claimed to have sold 117,000 horses this way.2 Many of the horses that went to war were mustangs gathered by ranchers and sold to middlemen like Chappel, who shipped them east and put them on boats.
After the war, the price of horses hit bottom and Europe had exhausted its coffers. In America, the automobile and the tractor had arrived. No one was buying horses. A mustang that brought $30 in 1915 was now worth maybe $1.50. Many dealers got out of the business, but Chappel saw the bust as an opportunity. During the war, he had met a number of French officers, and through them he knew that while the demand for workhorses had dried up, Europe still had a hunger for horse meat. His experience with Swift had familiarized him with the world of large-scale, industrial meatpacking. It didn’t take much to put the two together. P. M. would buy old, worn-out horses from midwestern farms and wild horse herds in the West. He’d pay cowboys to bring them to railheads and he’d ship them straight to the killing floor. The good cuts would become pickled meat for Europe. The rest would become a product of his own invention: Ken-L Ration—the first-ever canned dog food.
In 1922, he opened a small New Jersey packing plant, supplied mostly by worn-out city horses, but he soon realized he needed a bigger factory and a bigger supply of horseflesh. He settled on Rockford, in a spot right between the supply lines of the East and the mustangs of the West.
Chappel employed crews of young men on horseback in Montana and Wyoming to gather up horses and drive them to the rails. These drives, sometimes sweeping up a thousand horses, were often punishing, since the cowboys were paid only by the head, not by the condition of the horses. They knew the animals were bound for slaughter, and they only had to get them to the rail line.
“There was little grass and the animals suffered accordingly,” one of those “canner” riders, Robert W. Eigell, remembered fifty years later in an article for the Western history magazine Montana. “It was one of the most depressing experiences I encountered in the West.” His bunch drove the animals twenty-five miles a day, leaving a string of dead horses all the way to the railhead.3 Mares stopped giving milk and their starving colts started to drop behind. Out of desperation, they nuzzled at the cowboys’ horses. One cowboy took out his pistol and dropped behind with the colts. The others heard a shot, then several more. The cowboy came back and said, “Poor little fellers don’t have to suffer no more.”
Horses arriving in Rockford often had spent days without food or water on the trip east. Packed together, they kicked and sometimes trampled each other. Many arrived dead.
At the factory, huge holding corrals with reinforced fences held hundreds of horses that gathered and broke in waves as cowboys on horseback tried to herd them toward the chutes. The mustangs were pushed up a long covered ramp that led from the final corral to the fourth floor, where a workman known as “the killer” waited with a silencer-equipped rifle. In 1925, the plant was processing two hundred horses a day—one about every two minutes.
On the top floor, carcasses were skinned and drained of blood before being moved to a maze of butchering rooms, where snaking lines of men in white aprons carved down the meat to manageable chunks that were sent down to cooking and baking rooms, then into the clanging machinery that would pack the meat into one-pound cans.
In a sense, the only thing new about what Chappel was doing was the scale. Rounding up mustangs in the West predated Chappel not just by decades but by centuries. As long as wild horses had been roaming free on the land, people had tried to catch them, both because they wanted to have them and because they wanted to get rid of them.
Early in the history of the West, mustangs were a valuable commodity—to be sold, traded, or trained as a new mount. But later, they became so numerous that many locals only wanted to destroy them. In all cases, until the mechanization of the twentieth century, corralling wild horses was extremely hard and often dangerous work, impossible to do on a scale that could ever drain the West of millions of horses.
The earliest way of catching mustangs is the one we still imagine when we think of wild horse roundups: the lone rider clinging to the neck of his pinto in a full gallop, half obscured by the hoof-pounded dust, jutting forward, one wrist cocked with the weight of a swinging lariat, ready to sling it out around a mustang’s neck.
The first recorded account of this may be from Washington Irving, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, who visited Comanche territory in what is now Oklahoma in 1832. One evening, after Irving had spotted bands of wild horses cantering over the rolling plains, a young guide in his party, half French, half Osage, came into the camp with a fine, two-year-old colt he had just captured. Around the fire, he told of how he had come across a band of six horses along the river. He chased them through the water, then tried to lasso one with a lariat on a pole, but the rope skipped off the horse’s ears. The guide galloped after the band, surging up over a hill and cresting the other side, only to find himself suddenly nearly airborne, plunging down a twenty-foot sand bank. “It was too late to stop. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and went over with them—neck or nothing,” Irving wrote.
In the confusion at the bottom, the rider managed to snare the colt, but then the colt jagged back around a tree, pulling the rope loose from the rider’s hand. The rider chased the colt out onto open ground and somehow got hold of the rope again, then spent considerable time trying to get the horse back across the river and back to camp. “For the remainder of the evening,” wrote Irving, “the camp remained in a high state of excitement: nothing was talked of but the capture of wild horses; every youngster of the troop was for this harum-scarum kind of chase; every one promised himself to return from the campaign in triumph, bestriding one of these wild coursers of the prairies.”4
That thrill of chasing mustangs never wore off. Westerners continued galloping after mustangs until the practice was o
utlawed in 1971. Clubs of mustang chasers in places like Salt Lake City and Reno used to rope wild horses on Saturday afternoons in the 1960s the way some people went fishing. Years later, I met a dentist who had grown up in western Colorado. He had become an advocate for wild horses and was working to oppose BLM efforts to remove them from a place called West Douglas Herd Area. As we hiked through the herd area on the lookout for wild horses, he grew wistful describing his days as a teenager in the mesas of the area, crashing through the piñons after mustangs. “I damn near killed myself,” he said, “but man, it was exciting.”
Chasing mustangs with a lasso, however thrilling, had too many limitations to ever be a good way to catch horses. The first problem was that you could only catch at most one horse per chase. The second was that the biggest, fastest, and most desirable mustangs were the hardest to lasso, especially when the pursuing horse was weighed down by a rider. But the biggest problem was that the mad dash of the chase held too many risks to rider and horse. A valuable saddle horse might step in a badger hole and break a leg chasing a useless old cayuse, or fall on his rider, killing them both. Folks living in Wild Horse Country developed a saying: “Chasing mustangs is throwing good horses after bad.”
While roping never went away, it remained a young man’s pursuit that was probably more about ego than it was about horses. Instead of lassos, mustang hunters developed more effective techniques. The frontier held many stories of a technique called “creasing,” in which a man would aim his rifle at a horse just along the crest of the neck and graze the vertebra—stunning but not harming the animal. The practice had obvious risks. A few inches off the mark and the horse would either run away or drop dead. And early documenters of the frontier often repeated the story but never reported witnessing the practice. It’s likely that creasing got far more use as a campfire story than as an actual catching technique.
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