“An intimate story of the wild horses of the Southwest and the war waged against them would read like a dime novel romance. In everyday parlance, however, they are a nuisance and a pest,” a reporter wrote in the New York Times in 1912, echoing the growing frustrations that settlers likely had for generations. “As horses they are valueless and useless. They can no more be tamed and domesticated than the hyena. The stallions infest the tame herds of the ranges and taint them with strains of wild blood that make the offspring worthless.”26
Of course, generations of trappers and cowboys knew that wild horses were among the best horses in the world. But their ability to outcompete livestock and their skill in stealing domestic horses is hard to dispute. Often locals felt powerless against these fleet raiders.
“Their hiding places are all but impenetrable,” the Times reporter continued. “Like mountain sheep, no trail is too rough for them. The most intrepid riders have failed to round them up. A mounted man appearing is a signal for them to break for the wilds. No horse with a rider can keep their pace. Their endurance seems to be without limit.”27
As time went on, ranchers tried to improve on the old roundup strategy. They replaced wood-and-brush wings on traps with long swaths of canvas wings that were easier to set up than wood. They introduced tame mares into wild herds to make them easier to corral. A hunter in Utah announced he planned to shoot horses with a drug that would put them to sleep long enough to be roped and hobbled. Another in Nevada filled a water trough with a narcotic that left the horses dazed and easily captured. But he stopped the practice because a number of horses overdosed, and so did a number of cattle.
Then came barbed wire. In the 1870s, farmers and ranchers started stringing it across the West. By 1900, contemporary government statistics said Americans had put up more than 100,000 miles of wire fence. The spread of fences swept wild horses out of the Great Plains and most of Texas. They were pushed back to the broken, jagged country of the intermountain West that could not be easily fenced. This was particularly true in Nevada, where most of the range remained open, and long, rough ranges of mountains provided endless hiding spots for herds.
With increased fences and resources, ranchers redoubled their efforts to finally get rid of the mustang. In 1902, ranchers in Lander County, in the middle of Nevada, organized a massive horse hunt. They hoped that with the help of a hundred riders, “between 4000 and 6000 wild animals will be slaughtered and left as food for the carrion crows.”
“These animals dash wildly about the hills and valleys, destroying crops as well as scattering herded cattle,” a reporter for the San Francisco Call wrote of the planned hunt. “The horses are of no value. They cannot be tamed, and, in fact, cannot even be caught.” Here was the horse not as a natural resource but as a threat—a party crasher at the Great Barbecue. And like mountain lions or wolves or Comanche raiders, the westerners had a way of dealing with their unwanted guests. “Many of the animals will be shot on the run,” the reporter noted. “At the point where a meeting is expected pits have been dug, into which the horses will be run to their death.”28
Rarely were reports of the results of these roundups published, though when they were, the buckaroos—as cowboys are still called in Nevada—often spent way more time trapping far fewer horses than they had hoped. Even so, they kept at it. The largest wild horse hunt ever staged in Nevada was organized in Washoe County in 1909. Five hundred buckaroos swept a swath of territory fifty miles long, bringing horses to a central point near the northern end of the Nightingale Mountains. Desirable young horses were roped and sold. The rest were shot.
Ranchers in Nevada were so desperate to rid themselves of the herds that they lobbied for a federally funded war against mustangs. The manager of the state’s forest reserves asked Washington to call in the Army to kill horses, requesting that “sixty days of each year be set apart for the purpose, and that the horses might be exterminated under the skirmish conditions of general warfare.”29
“No fence is strong enough to stop these horses, and when they appear in force they have even been known to knock down and kill cows and calves,” said a story on the problem in the Los Angeles Herald. “Any one who finally finds an effective method to settle this problem will have done a great service for the stockmen of every state west of the Missouri River. As an old and experienced stockman, now in the employ of Uncle Sam, said of this wild horse problem: ‘Theoretically it seems a very simple matter to handle, but practically it is quite the reverse.’ ”30
The coming of the automobile complicated things further. The ready market for fresh horses to draw wagons and pull plows began to dry up. In New York in 1912, traffic counts showed more cars than horses for the first time. Streetcars went electric. Suddenly no one wanted mustangs anymore. The last horse-drawn streetcar in Manhattan trotted down Bleecker Street in 1917. The horse market collapsed and mustangs on the range were no longer worth the cost of catching. Ranchers decided to just kill them. In 1927, that forest ranger in Eureka, Nevada, reported that he shot 1,046 wild horses to get them off the range.31
But shooting was often time consuming and only marginally effective, so ranchers kept searching for creative ways to rid the West of mustangs. In Oregon, they asked the US Army to fly in with bombers to destroy the state’s wild horse herds. In Utah’s Skull Valley, they tried to recruit tourists to do the work. “Americans who like adventure and excitement in a hunt are advised to try their hand at hunting wild horses,” a 1920 announcement in Popular Mechanics declared. “They will find this sport quite as thrilling as cornering a tiger.” An expedition had shot 102 horses, the notice stated, and “ranchers in Skull Valley invite shooting parties to go after the wild horses and [will] furnish guides and other necessary supplies.”32
Despite these sustained efforts, mustangs did not face annihilation until the rise of meat factories like Chappel Brothers. The mechanized plants started springing up on the edges of the West at the turn of the twentieth century—always next to rail lines that reached into Wild Horse Country like long straws. Their thirst knew no end. And they would eventually nearly drink the West dry. The first reference I can find of wild horse meat processing is from 1895, when a Portland, Oregon, canning factory specializing in wild horses announced its grand opening, noting: “This is a legitimate industry, and there is a large supply of raw material in Oregon, consisting of half-wild horses—the majority of them young, and substantially all of them, presumably, in wholesome condition—for which there is no other market”33
In 1911, there is another reference to a group of cowboys in Colorado who got a contract with California soap factories to round up thousands of wild horses for $5 a head.
In 1919, Congress changed laws to allow for federal health inspection of horse meat, and, along with Chappel Brothers, a number of canneries opened around the West. In Los Angeles, Ross Dog and Cat Food became a destination for horses and burros in the Southwest. In San Francisco, the chicken-feed plant in Petaluma was a pipeline that drained much of Nevada. In Portland, Oregon, the Schlesser Brothers plant feasted on the huge herds in the state’s eastern deserts, packing the remains of hundreds of horses a day into big barrels to be shipped east to New York, then across the ocean to the Netherlands.
With the steady price from canneries, ranchers could plan bigger and more ambitious roundups, knowing that the maw of the meatpacking industry would pay for everything they caught. In New Mexico, ranchers banded together on a drive in 1928 to push thousands of horses to a fertilizer plant in El Paso. One reporter called it “the journey of death.” This was the reality of the mustang that the dime novels of the time often ignored. There were no gallant young men in chaps. With little forage or water on the way, scores of mustangs collapsed and were left in the dust. “Some of the doomed horses were wild and spirited at their start across the desert, but none were at the end. Those that survived death gave little indication of ever being free.”34
Some bemoaned the passing of the West, but the
ir eulogies were hardly enough to hault the liquidation of the open range. It was seen, in a way, as inevitable. “The wild horse—a symbol of pioneer America—is making its last stand,” one easterner said in 1935 on observing the relentless roundups. “The wild buffalo is gone; the traders and prospectors have vanished; the Indian is on his reservation; the blue-coated cavalry-men of the old United States Army are history. Sole survivor of the era which carved out Western America from the wilderness is the wild horse. With the swift flight of the years the bands of wild horses become smaller. Ranges which once thundered to their battering hoofs are silent.”35
The biggest buyer of mustangs by far was the gleaming new Chappel Brothers plant in Illinois, which contracted mainly with cowboys in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado.
“The first chapter has been written in the greatest wild horse roundup ever held in the west,” a correspondent for the New York Times breathlessly reported in 1929. “Hundreds of horses large and small, vicious and indifferent, mustangs, ‘fuzz tails’ and ‘broncos’—are in pastures ready for the first sale and elimination.” In the wide-open plains of central Montana, a young rodeo cowboy and movie actor named Carl Skelton, wearing chaps and a six-shooter, was running the show and invited newspapermen to go along as his cowpunchers gathered wild horses on the range along the Missouri River. “There’s six or seven thousand wild horses on the Cascade range,” he told reporters. “I’ll bring in five thousand or more.”36
Reporters covered the roundup like a real-live Western—a snapshot of the last wild moments of the frontier. What they didn’t report, and perhaps Skelton had failed to mention, was that the main character in this Western was the midwestern meat canner, Chappel, who paid Skelton and his men to do the work.
Chappel Brothers’s big product was its canned dog food, Ken-L Ration, which Phillip M. Chappel had invented. Before Ken-L Ration, most dogs had just eaten whatever scraps owners dropped. Chappel family lore has it that Phillip Chappel got the idea for canned horse-meat dog food from watching dogs fight over horse offal at his slaughterhouse. Another inspiration might have been the canned “trench rations” developed for troops during World War I. Ken-L Ration cans rolling out of the factory featured a colorful label with a picture of dogs playing poker, and emblazoned with the slogans quality made it famous and a horse-meat product.
To get Americans used to the idea of canned horse meat, Chappel enlisted the country’s biggest dog celebrity, the silent film star Rin Tin Tin. When Chappel made the proposal to the owner of Rin Tin Tin, he balked at feeding horse meat to his dog. But Chappel opened a can and ate a piece himself to show how good it was. It worked. In ads on his weekly radio show, the German shepherd plugged Ken-L Ration as a delicious, nutritious treat, and cans flew off the shelves. By the time the factory was at full capacity, it was churning out nearly six million cans a year.
Not everyone celebrated the Chappel Brothers innovation. The local humane society in Rockford complained about the gaunt, stumbling horses coming off the packed railroad cars. Many in the public thought shooting horses for dog food was just plain wrong. The United States has never been much for eating horses. While it was not always necessarily taboo, horse meat was always a sign that something had gone wrong. The public equated it with disreputable butchers selling it as beef. Though many mountain men learned to love the flavor and tenderness of colts from tribes like the Comanche and the Apache, who prized the meat, frontier lore turned eating horses into an example of ultimate desperation—a deed only slightly less ghoulish than cannibalism, done only when all options were exhausted. To turn a trusted companion into chunks of meat was bad enough. To do it for dogs was more than many people could stomach.
Charles Russell, a Montana painter whose vivid scenes of cowboys and Indians on horseback helped create the myth of the West, decried the practice of shipping unwanted mustangs east for slaughter. “If we killed men off as soon as they were useless,” Russell wrote, “Montana would be a lot less crowded.”37
In 1928, a journalist named Russell Lord traveled the West to report on the rapidly disappearing mustang. Writing in the magazine The Cattleman, he started out determined not to be sentimental. “The romantic story of the American wild horse is being brought, of necessity, to an end,” he wrote. “In strict accord with the practical necessities of range agricultures, the work of ridding the Plains of wild horses goes on. They eat too much grass, these horses drink too much from streams which else would sustain peaceful and profitable herds and flocks of cattle and sheep. . . . In a word, the wild horse has become a pest. He must go. Whether you like it or not, there it is,” he wrote.38
But then Lord visited one of the western slaughterhouses—a forlorn, ramshackle place where he found 450 “miserable, slabsided, bedraggled horses.” He sat down with the owner, who complained of the work. Cranks wrote letters accusing him of cruelty. “Sentimental old ladies” came sniffing around, he said. No matter how kind he tried to be, he was a hated man. Worse, by 1928 the easy-to-reach herds had all been ground up. Supplies were down, costs were up. “It’s a rotten business,” the owner said. “It’s on the skids. There isn’t anything in it. It is being overdone. It would soon be over and I’ll be damn glad of it.”
A small band of five mustangers moseyed toward the plant as Lord watched, driving sixty horses gathered from the surrounding country. They were a sorry group, both men and horses silent, shambling, beaten, with their heads down. They’d get $5 a head for their trouble. A railroad brakeman in the yard with Lord looked at them, shook his head, and said, “Three hundred dollars will keep those five birds in liquor for a week or so. Then they’ll ride out again.”
Lord talked to the lead mustanger about his business. He didn’t like it, he said. It was just a dirty job. He would only take the horses as far as the rail yard. “You couldn’t pay me, not for money, to drive a bunch of horses up to the slaughter house,” he said, adding, “All along the line, as one seeks facts, one encounters as to the horse meat business a confusion between hot, instinctive repugnance and cold, calculating common sense.”39
In the end, the journalist was unable to reconcile the myth of the noble mustang and the maw of the meatpacking plant. He still thought horses were a pest on the range, but he decided canneries were a desecration for such a proud animal. “Forget the five dollars a head,” he said. “Shoot the mustangs where you find them. Let them go back to the earth out there in the open, where they lived.”40
The Chappel Brothers factory churned on, despite people’s grousing. More trainloads of mustangs went up the ramp each day. And the Chappel brothers themselves were getting rich. But in October 1925, strange things started to happen. First a fire erupted one night in a corner of the plant, where it appeared someone had splashed gasoline on the back doors. Then a 2,300-volt power line snapped, sending arcs of electricity through the night and making the factory floor go dark. Closer inspection showed the cable had been cut. A few days later, another fire broke out in a different corner of the plant. Workers rushing to put out the flames found cans of gasoline stacked in a corner to feed the inferno.
It was clearly the work of a saboteur, but managers didn’t know what to make of it—perhaps some union agitator from a radical group like the Industrial Workers of the World was bent on bringing them down. But they knew of no labor problems at the plant. If anything, P. M. Chappel, who called nearly everyone in the plant “honey boy,” paid well and was liked by the workers. But there could be little doubt that someone was trying to destroy the factory.
For a few weeks after the second fire, all was quiet. The cannery kept humming. Droves of mustangs went up the chute. Then, on November 21, 1925, an off-duty fireman driving home late at night saw flames leaping from a window in the plant’s west wing. He sounded the alarm, but by the time engine crews responded, fire was bursting from all the windows on three floors. Embers rained into the corrals, causing hundreds of horses to stampede in panic. The glow could be seen from all over town.
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bsp; The thick brick walls of the factory withstood the fire, but the insides didn’t. Flames raged hot, spreading up walls and licking across rafters. The top killing floor collapsed. Then the carving floor. Then the canning floor. Dark cyclones of smoke must have poured out as thousands of pounds of canned meat exploded and burned. Two boxcars loaded with Ken-L Ration caught fire, burning so hot that only their iron trucks remained. Firefighters fought to keep the flames from the refrigeration wing, where enough ammonia gas was stored to level half the town. They succeeded, but it was one of their few victories. When the flames were finally doused the next day, most of the slaughterhouse was gutted. The Chappel Brothers firm had lost more than $75,000 in horse meat.
But if the saboteur thought he had stopped the factory, he was wrong. P. M. Chappel told the local newspaper that he would reopen again in a matter of weeks.
Though investigators could not find sure signs of arson, Chappel was convinced someone was trying to destroy his factory. He ordered workers to build a ten-foot fence around the grounds, and he hired private detectives to patrol with shotguns. For weeks, armed guards walked the complex at night, searching the shadows with flashlights for a saboteur. Managers interrogated the workers, looking for anarchists or union radicals, but found nothing.
Then one night in early December of 1925, well past midnight, a guard on his rounds came around the power plant and saw an inky figure slink into the shadows beneath the huge KEN-L RATION smokestack. When the guard crept over for a closer look, he saw the figure crouched in front of a bulging shape at the base of the smokestack. “Stop! What are you doing?” the guard yelled. When there was no answer, the guard raised his shotgun and ordered the prowler to come out.
A shot rang out as the prowler fired a pistol from the shadows and then turned and ran. The guard fired his shotgun, then fired again. When the intruder stumbled at the edge of the darkness, the guard took a few steps forward. But then the prowler sprang to his feet, fired back, and disappeared into the night. The guard sounded the alarm and men poured out along the perimeters, checking the fence and sweeping the shadows with flashlights, but the trespasser was gone.
Wild Horse Country Page 11