A more calculated strategy used in Texas was to lie in wait. According to the historian Frank Dobie, some mustangers—as men who pursued the herds were known— would set out salt licks surrounded by hidden snares. A man would hide with a lasso on the ground near the salt, then pull when the right horse stepped in. The problem is that mustangs are smart and have a keen sense of smell. They often wouldn’t go near the trap, and men who waited for days eventually learned the strategy wasn’t worth the time.
Dobie also tells of a technique in Texas where cowboys would tie a dummy of a man to a mustang and then turn him loose, letting him tire out his entire herd as he tried to run back to them and they fled. When the horses were exhausted, cowboys could come in and rope the ones they wanted. But Dobie didn’t say how the cowboys managed to get the dummy on the first mustang—which may be why I found no other references to the practice. Like creasing, the strategy was probably better for storytelling than for catching mustangs.
A more dependable approach was colt catching. At the right time of year, a few months after mares had foaled, when the young were starting to eat grass, riders would charge a herd, chasing until the colts fell behind. The young horses were easy to rope, gentle, train, and sell. The practice was used for generations by the Spanish, the Horse Nations, and the Americans. In 1878, a pair of American surveyors in West Texas came across mustangers from New Mexico who were traveling slowly in a wagon pulled by two cows, leading a chain of thirty colts bound for market. Each was hobbled by a hair rope tied from its tail to its front ankle.5
In dry places, where the only water was from isolated springs, men found another approach. They built round corrals around water seeps where horses would come to drink. The corrals would stand open and unattended for most of the year, and horses would get used to going in and out for water, but when a mustanger wanted his catch, he would lie in wait as a herd sauntered in, then quickly close the gate.
In regions where water was too plentiful for these water traps to work, many mustangers used the technique that the BLM still uses in modified form today. They built sturdy, round corrals in places where the land would naturally drive horses together. At the opening, they erected long brush walls, like wings leading into the corral. Then riders working from all directions would drive herds toward the wings and into the mouth of the corral. For centuries, this technique was used in much of Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and California—nearly any part of the West that had enough natural wood to build corrals. Hundreds of semipermanent corrals dotted the hills, and some can still be seen in remote places today. A few years ago, a rancher in Beaver County, Utah, pointed out a weathering corral built of silver-cedar logs. How long, I asked him, had that been there? “Near as I can tell, forever,” he said. “And we used it, too, until the law stopped all that.”
In the Wild Horse Desert of Texas, it was typical to gather two to three hundred mustangs per season, but you had to be careful. Too many and the horses would either break down the fences or trample one another in the corral, as the explorer Zebulon Pike noted in 1807, and their rotting carcasses would leave an “insupportable stench” that would make the corrals unusable.6
Most outfits lacked the manpower for such massive gathers, so they simply tried to “walk down” a herd. A small group of men, working in relays, would pursue a group of mustangs over several days. The first rider would set out at a leisurely pace, staying just fast enough behind the herd to keep them from eating and drinking. He would try to work them in a circle, so that twelve hours later he again would be passing by camp, where another rider would take his place. After two or three days, the horses were so exhausted that they could easily be roped or corralled. Often mustangers would mix tame mares with a captured herd to act as leaders when it came time to drive them to captivity.
Slowly, as settlers came into the West, the dynamic of roundups changed. What was once the pursuit of a valuable trade item—the horse—became an effort to clear that item from the land to make room for an even more valuable trade item: cattle. As Texas became more populated, stockmen organized massive roundups. On Mission Prairie in 1875, about 150 riders set out one summer day to drive horses from all sides of the region toward a lake in the middle. They had orders to shoot any horses that broke back. After several hours, a dark line of horses converged like geese. Many broke back and were shot or trampled. It’s said the men gathered fifteen thousand horses that day.7
These kinds of roundups could produce good riding stock for ranches, and a little extra pocket money, but they rarely netted enough horses to make a dent in the West’s vast population. It was like trying to drain a river with a bucket.
When the railroads came after the Civil War, the West finally had quick, easy access to eastern markets. More important, eastern capitalists had quick, easy access to the West. What followed was the wholesale liquidation of anything and everything of value in the West: timber, minerals, wildlife, grass. The federal government, having fought to rid the West of the Horse Nations, threw open the gates and invited settlers in. The historian Vernon Parrington, writing in the 1920s, called this time of rapid resource extraction—when speculators, creditors, railroad companies, and wealthy investors feasted on the virgin West—“the great barbecue.”8
It was a pattern that originated with the first trappers who stalked up western streams in search of furs and grew exponentially as access and demand snowballed. Bernard DeVoto, a historian who was born in Utah in 1897 during the barbecue era and later taught at Harvard, summed up the pattern of exploitation this way: “You clean up and get out—and you don’t give a damn, especially if you are an Eastern stockholder.”9
The first people to arrive in the West were generally there only to exploit natural resources, and they wrote the laws to protect their pursuits. Even if later settlers wanted to push for a bit of restraint, or even conservation, legally there were few ways to do it. The laws of the region can basically be summarized as “I got here first: it’s mine, not yours.”
The stock raisers, loggers, and miners in the West went along with it, DeVoto said. “The West does not want to be liberated from the system of exploitation that it has always violently resented,” he wrote. “It only wants to buy into it.”
Once the railroads reached Wild Horse Country and the Horse Nations were driven onto reservations, the Great Plains slowly became a giant pasture. Teams of hunters killed off the roughly thirty million buffalo within twenty years. They also shot tens of thousands of mustangs and stripped them of their hides, which were sent east. Horsehides had many uses, but the most notable one at the time was in the newly popular game of baseball. It’s said that the mustangs’ hide, which is softer and more textured than cowhide, made the best leather covers for balls, and made for a better curveball. We’ll never know how many baseballs covered with mustang skins were used in the major leagues. Also, at the turn of the twentieth century, horsehair “pony coats” became a fashion rage, boosting the demand for skins.
As the buffalo died off, the legendary drives of longhorn cattle started north from Texas. Less well known is that huge drives of horses also went north to places like Dodge City and Abilene, Kansas. “During the time of the longhorn drives, probably a million range horses were trailed out of Texas,” Frank Dobie noted. “Yet so far as print goes, for every paragraph that relates to the driving of these range horses, a hundred pages relate to the trailing of longhorn cattle. . . . The cowboy rode to glory but the horseboy never became a name.”10
Live horses were packed on boxcars and shipped east, where they were sold as low-end stock and ended up in the most unlikely places. One mustang named Hornet starred in “Professor Bristol’s well-known troupe of 22 performing horses,” where he did a rocking-horse act and skipped rope.11 One ended up pulling a smoked fish cart near Coney Island, in New York, where every summer afternoon he went swimming with his owner on the beach. But most of them simply ended up as anonymous, low-cost muscle that fueled country and city life in the nineteenth
century.
One of their main destinations was New York City. Its bustling streets had an insatiable need for horses—the cheaper and smaller, the better. “The time for the degrading slavery of the wild Western mustang has come,” a reporter noted in the New York Times in 1889. “Within a very few months he has been brought to this city in droves and, at present, on the Third-avenue surface railway, at least, he outnumbers the Eastern horse in the ratio of nearly five to one.”12
The little weather-beaten horses had become the favorite power source for streetcars, the newspaper noted, because they were stronger and healthier. And since they were not much larger than ponies, they also ate less. “After they are once trained they work together with quite as much ease as their more civilized brothers. But before they are trained they are not inclined to peace,” the reporter said, noting they came off the train “as wild as a Manitoba blizzard” and often bit their handlers.13
On streetcar teams, mustangs were harnessed with tame horses until they learned the job. “Two days are generally sufficient to convince the mustangs that there is a point where obstinacy ceases to become a praiseworthy attribute,” the newspaper said. After two weeks, they are used to the noises and smells of the city, and have “an appreciation of the dull realities of Eastern life.”14
Of course, not all mustangs gave in so easily. Breathless reports of the latest mustang gone wild in Gotham were so common in the late nineteenth century that they became almost their own genre in the city papers. In one, a policeman made a daring rescue straight out of a dime novel, jumping onto mustangs bareback and riding through Central Park until he could calm the frightened animal. In another, a mustang got spooked by the clatter of a passing elevated train and took off down Forty-Second Street, dragging a wagon behind. It knocked down a little girl, plowed into another parked horse, smashed its wagon, and thundered down the street dragging the splintered wreckage through a crowd of strikers picketing a carpet works. Another, fresh off the train from the West, got away from a peddler and dashed through the carriage traffic of the Upper West Side, clattering onto a crowded sidewalk. “The broncho [sic] again played havoc with the throngs on the sidewalk, for it galloped at a terrific pace for five blocks, while thousands rushed into near-by doorways,” a report in that evening’s paper read. The mustang outran a police horse in pursuit, tripped over its own lead rope and tumbled twice, sprang back to its feet, turned a sharp corner and knocked over a beloved theater manager, and was headed for a park. On the corner, it was suddenly shocked to a standstill by a crowd of men who opened their umbrellas.15
The railroads continued to deliver fresh carloads of wild horses to the East from the 1880s through at least 1910. The West continued to replenish the population with little reported impact on the wild herds. But as the West grew more crowded and ranchers turned out more sheep and cattle, the naturally replenishing spring of horses started to be viewed not as a resource but as a problem. The vast herds on the prairie, which had so impressed explorers, exasperated the settlers who wanted to farm and raise livestock. Wild horses came at night, knocking down fences to abscond with domestic horses. “Large numbers of wild horses abound on the prairies between the Arkansas and Smoky Hill Rivers,” the Topeka Commonwealth reported in 1882. “They are of all sizes and colors, and are the wildest of all wild horses. . . . Settlers on the frontier would hail speedy extinction as a blessing, for when domestic animals get with them their recovery is simply out of the question.”16
Settlers began comparing the predations of wild horses with the raids of the Horse Nations they had recently driven onto reservations. “Not satisfied with its own freedom the wild horse has adopted the tactics of the Apache and the Sioux and stampedes its brethren,” a Colorado journalist noted in 1897. “Novelists have taught us to believe that the wild mustang is emblematic of freedom pure and noble. The Texas ranchman regards him as an emissary of the evil one, for he brings to his ranch despair and loss.”17
The simple solution, one many in the West yearned for, was to get rid of the mustangs, permanently. And, if possible, make money in the process. Where it was economical to ship them east, they did, but the Far West’s leagues of canyons and mountains gave herds too many places to hide. Even if horses could be caught, they were often far from rail lines, so there was no economical way to get them to market.
In places where wild horses had no realizable value, settlers treated them like they treated coyotes, prairie dogs, or any other critter they labeled “varmints.” They shot them. Starting in the 1870s, ranchers in Texas began cooperative hunts to try to eradicate mustangs on the Gulf Coast. Local and state governments got into the act, passing laws allowing open season on free-roaming horses. On the plains around Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1884, one reporter wrote: “Wild horses have become so numerous on the Plains that some of the stockmen in this vicinity have organized a hunting party whose object will be to thin them out. The hunters are provided with long-range rifles, fleet ponies, and supplies and forage enough to last all Winter.”18
In the red mesas around Kanab, Utah, ranchers organized yearly hunts. Sometimes horses were shot on the run, but: “If possible the horses will be driven into some ‘blind’ canyon, where the work of slaughter will be made easy,” one observer noted.19
Though the myth of the West puts the cowboy and the wild horse on the same team, they were more often adversaries. “There!” one Wyoming rancher cursed in 1888, as he stooped over an immense black stallion bleeding from a bullet hole in its neck: “I guess you won’t steal anymore of my mares, you old rascal, you.”
“It seems a pity to kill such a fine animal,” said a journalist who had witnessed the kill, as the two looked down at the dying mustang.
“A fine old thief,” the rancher corrected him. “Why, man, do you know that cuss has stolen more than a dozen of my mares, and I reckon $1,000 wouldn’t cover the damage he’s done to this valley in the past summer.”20
Area ranchers took up collections to pay bounties for wild horses. Much of the killing was done by professional hunters, called “wolfers,” who made their living killing wolves, mountain lions, and any other offending critters. A lone wolfer traveling on horseback with a packhorse in tow could get up into the remote benchlands where mustangs hid. The aim was not to lasso the mustangs, but to shoot them. After dropping several from a distance with a rifle, a wolfer would lie in wait for wolves and lions that showed up to feed on the carcasses. A pair of wolf ears could be worth $4. A wild stallion’s scalp could bring up to $25.
In 1893, Nevada passed a law allowing anyone to shoot mustangs on sight. “There are now in Nevada more than 200,000 head of these horses,” a railroad agent in Reno told the San Francisco Examiner in 1894. “And they are increasing so fast that they are getting to be a great nuisance.” The herds were beautiful and included many fine horses as tough as pine knots, he said. “The trouble is, they are eating off the grass, so that sheep and cattle owners are having a tough time of it in some sections.”21
It is up for debate whether there were really more mustangs or whether there were just more settlers after the grass. Regardless, Nevada ranchers started shooting any mustangs that came in range. “They use long-range rifles, however, and ride fleet domestic horses, and in this way pick off a great many,” said the railroad agent. “Every rancher or wild cattle owner in Nevada, when he sees a wild stallion and has a weapon with him, turns loose at it.”22
Hunting pushed horses into rough, remote country. The hunters followed. It was hot, dangerous, difficult work. Most of the hunters were young men who lived outdoors for weeks at a time. But at least one was a woman. “She is a Californian, and a young woman, only 23 years old. Moreover she is respected for her many good qualities,” noted an 1899 newspaper profile of the lady mustang hunter. Her name was Maud Whiteman, and she was “an affectionate mother” and a “hospitable soul.” She would lie in wait at desert watering holes. When a band of horses came to drink, she would shoot the lead horse, aiming not
to kill but to maim. The band would scatter at the crack of the rifle but then return to check on the disabled horse. Maud would then “rush from hiding, shoot as many as possible, and follow fleeing victims until all or nearly all are killed.” She skinned the horses and sold their hides for $2 each in California.23
WHEN WESTERNERS COULD NOT CAPTURE MUSTANGS, THEY OFTEN SHOT THEM, AS THIS 1899 ENGRAVING SHOWS.
Nevada eventually repealed the law allowing open season on mustangs because domestic horses started disappearing, and branded hides showed up in shipments of mustang hides.
The West’s desperation to rid the region of horses was a theme in some areas long before the coming of the railroads. In California, where the Spanish missions had bred horses for centuries, wild runaways flourished in the dry hills until they eventually outnumbered tame stock. One explorer in the San Joaquin Valley in the early 1800s said that “frequently, the plain would be covered, with thousands and thousands flying in a living flood towards the hills. Huge masses of dust hung upon their rear, and marked their track across the plain; and even after they had passed entirely beyond the reach [of] vision, we could still see the dust, which they were throwing in vast clouds into the air, moving over the highlands.”24
These herds, which had evolved to thrive in the dry West, outcompeted imported cattle and sheep. California’s small and isolated human population had no use for so many horses, and no easy way to trade them in the East. So Spanish ranchers simply drove the animals into the ocean. Reports from the missions show that in 1805 the Spanish drove 7,500 horses over the sea cliffs in San Jose. In 1806, another 7,200 were sent into the waves in Santa Barbara. In some roundups, horses were driven into corrals, lanced with long spears, and left to die.25
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