Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  Trainloads of mustangs kept pulling into Chappel Brothers. The operation expanded. It opened new factories. It added new products. It even began leasing ranch land in Wyoming and Montana, where it could gather even more mustangs. It soon controlled 1.6 million acres in the West—an area the size of Delaware. Then, one afternoon in November 1927, a tidy little man with hair parted sharply to the right checked into a hotel in Rockford under the name of Joseph Stewart. He asked for one of the cheap rooms and went upstairs to put away his suitcase. A few minutes later, he came down to listen to the lobby radio, which was tuned to a Notre Dame football game. He leaned back in one of the hotel’s armchairs and eventually fell asleep.

  Some time later, a woman doing the evening shift at the front desk walked into the lobby to start work. Before taking a job at the hotel, she had worked for years as a matron at the county jail, where she took food to inmates and tended to their needs. She passed by the sleeping man and immediately recognized his dark, flat hair; his thin face; and his protruding eyes. It was Frank Litts.

  A few minutes later, Litts was shaken awake by the sheriff’s deputy who had arrested him two years earlier. “Come on, Frank,” he said, “you’re coming with me.” The man looked up at him, politely smiled, looking genuinely perplexed, and said, “Who’s Frank?” Then he made a break for it.

  The deputy tackled him by the door. He put him in handcuffs and searched his pockets, finding a packet of red pepper Litts was carrying in case he needed to throw it in someone’s eyes to escape. The officer also found a bill for 150 pounds of dynamite that had recently been shipped by train. At the jail, the suspect continued to insist he was not Frank Litts, but Joseph Stewart. To end the debate, the sheriff pulled up the man’s shirt and found scars from two years earlier, when a guard at the Chappel plant had hit him with a shotgun. The next day, police found three boxes of dynamite hidden in a pile of lumber near the train station.

  In jail, when a group of newspapermen interviewed Litts, he continued to insist he was a victim of mistaken identity. “Who is this Frank Litts and what has he done?” he asked, appearing befuddled. But when the reporters got him onto the subject of horses, he lost his composure. “The people of this country owe their existences to horses,” he said. “It’s a terrible shame to take these animals that have done so much for us out and kill them. Suppose we take all the old men in our country out and kill them after they have worked hard all their lives? It is just as horrible to kill horses.”

  A little over a week later, the sheriff who had taken him to the asylum less than two years earlier locked Litts in leg irons with a chain on his waist tied to a deputy. Afraid that sympathizers might try a rescue, the sheriff sneaked Litts out of the jail at 4 a.m. On the long drive back to the asylum, Litts said to the sheriff, “Take care of that dynamite, because I intend to be back some day.”

  Litts was a man of his word. Four years later, in 1931, while 175 men were exercising in the walled yard of the asylum, he and eleven other inmates tried to scale a fire escape of a building that made up one of the walls. A guard peppered the group with shotgun blasts and Litts fell back into the yard with a punctured lung. The report of his shooting was the last time his name ever appears in the newspapers.

  Though the warden at the time was unsure whether Litts would survive the night, he lived seven more years, eventually dying of a lung ailment in 1938, at age fifty.

  The moral outrage Litts so explosively expressed in the 1920s has become much more widespread in the United States. You will not find horse meat these days on supermarket shelves. People refuse even to feed it to their dogs. During the 2000s, there were three slaughterhouses left in the United States—two in Texas and one in Illinois—that survived by sending frozen meat to Europe. But they closed down in 2007 after Congress, under pressure from horse welfare groups, defunded the federal horse-meat inspection program, effectively blocking all sales. Today, more than 100,000 American horses are still slaughtered every year for meat, but they are exported to big plants in Mexico and Canada, where most of the meat is packed into frozen containers and shipped to Asia and Europe.

  The story of Frank Litts has been all but forgotten. But as the nation struggles to find a sustainable solution for wild horses in the West, we might do well to remember it, because its themes continue to reappear. When Litts was sentenced, the Rockford Morning Star called him “A remarkable example of the insanity that carries a humane and noble impulse a step beyond common sense into psychosis.” But that noble impulse—to treat animals fairly and to love and respect wildness—is one that has defined how people have viewed wild horses ever since. The instinct that drove Litts is the same one that drove people to later pass laws to protect mustangs. It is the instinct that shut down all horse slaughterhouses in the country. It is the instinct now that drives advocates to file lawsuits and block roundups. Any management policy that dismisses this viewpoint as sentimental or unrealistic is a policy that is bound to fail. And as Litts’s story shows, it may fail violently.

  There are still people like Frank Litts out there—likely many more than there were when he was arrested in 1925. One night in 1997, after media reports revealed that the Bureau of Land Management was letting horses secretly go to slaughter, an anonymous group calling itself the Animal Liberation Front sneaked into a BLM corral complex near Burns, Oregon, and set fire to a barn and a tractor. The activists blocked entrances, so fire trucks couldn’t approach, and freed almost five hundred horses. They likely had never heard of Frank Litts, but they were his unwitting comrades. According to a communiqué they later released, they did it to “help halt the BLM’s illegal and immoral business of rounding up wild horses from public lands and funneling them to slaughter.” That same year, the group burned down a horse slaughterhouse in Redmond, Oregon. The plant never reopened.

  One night in the summer of 2001, Animal Liberation Front members sneaked into the BLM’s big corrals in Litchfield, California, and planted firebombs in the barn, the office, and two trucks. Once again, they cut the fences to free hundreds of captured mustangs. The group released a statement saying, “In the name of all that is wild we will continue to target industries and organizations that seek to profit by destroying the Earth.”

  Several members of the group were eventually caught and prosecuted under federal terrorism laws, but the BLM continues its roundups, knowing that the threat of a new Frank Litts or Animal Liberation Front is an ever-present danger. In 2008, in minutes of confidential meetings about what to do with “excess” horses, the BLM explored euthanizing them or selling them for slaughter. While the move would be legal, staff said, it could lead to “threats to BLM property and BLM staff.” After considering the risks, they quietly backed off.

  Frank Litts was never able to destroy Chappel Brothers, but Chappel Brothers eventually destroyed itself—or, rather, burned itself out. The whole mustang slaughter industry declined steadily during the 1930s as the factories depleted the once-innumerable herds. In 1930, the United States processed ten million pounds of horse meat. By 1938, it processed less than two million. Mustangs were increasingly hard to find and expensive to gather. Chappel tried to boost his supply by introducing hefty draft-horse stallions to the mustangs of Montana to make them heavier, but the domestic studs were driven off by the tougher, more aggressive mustang stallions and had little impact on the genetic makeup of the herds. Drought and decades of unsustainable grazing brought numbers even lower. The vast sea of mustangs was going dry.

  Chappel Brothers slipped into debt. During the depression, the factory started slaughtering dust-bowl cattle to can for government relief rations, but it still lost money. Like so many businesses that flourished during the Great Barbecue, it was only designed to function with unbounded plenty. It never invested in sustaining its resources—it just made money while it was there for the making. And when it was over, it closed shop.

  In 1937, the company’s board of directors dismissed P. M. Chappel as president. He moved to Argentina
to start another horse canning factory, drawing from horses on the wide-open pampas, but he died two years later. The Quaker Oats Company bought the Rockford factory and continued to churn out canned horse meat at a much smaller scale, but, after World War II, it turned to beef.

  The horse-meat plant in Portland, Oregon, also eventually shifted over to beef. So did the plant in El Paso. A few small slaughterhouses remained, but in terms of grinding up huge herds of mustangs, by 1950, the Great Barbecue was over.

  A few still haunted the mesas here or there, but the galloping thousands that once made the land appear as if it were moving were gone forever. It was, many thought, the end of the wild horse. A few more years would bring extinction. When J. Frank Dobie published his epic appraisal, The Mustangs, in 1952, the remaining herds were so scant that his book amounted to an elegy. He finished the book this way:

  Well, the wild ones—the coyote duns, the smokies, the blues, the blue roans, the snip-nosed pintos, the flea-bitten grays and the black-skinned whites, the shining blacks and the rusty browns, the red roans, the toasted sorrels and the stockinged bays, the splotched appaloosas and the cream-maned palominos and all the others in shadings of color as various as the hues that show and fade on the clouds at sunset—they are all gone now, gone as completely as the free grass they vivified.43

  CHAPTER 4

  PRINT THE LEGEND

  In 1832, a dusty group of scouts and trappers gathered in the humble glow of a campfire out in the boundless night of the western prairie. They had trekked for weeks upriver into what would one day be Oklahoma but was still at that point simply marked on maps as “Indian country.” Gathered in the light of the fire, they sat talking idly, propped against their saddles as they chewed on buffalo ribs.

  In the circle sat one of the most famous writers of the time, a forty-nine-year-old Manhattanite named Washington Irving. By 1832, Irving had established his literary reputation with popular tales like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, and had spent years living in Paris and London. A well-connected aristocrat, he had talked his way onto an expedition into Indian Country led by the Secretary of Indian Affairs. The group had been traveling west among the warring Horse Nations of the plains, who at the time were at the peak of their mustang-fueled expansion. Wild horses had brought wealth but also near-constant warfare as tribes tried to gain hunting grounds. Stopping to meet with each tribe they encountered, the secretary would give a speech, according to Irving’s later account, saying it was the intention of “their father at Washington to put an end to all war among his red children; and assure them that he was sent to the frontier to establish a universal peace.” (One group of Osage warriors responded that if the great father was really going to impose peace, they had better get moving, because they had many horses to steal.1)

  Around the fire that night, Irving raised the subject of mustangs. He had spied one for the first time that day while riding across the plains. At first his party thought it was a buffalo, and gave chase, but the animal wheeled and galloped, throwing its mane like a horse. The cavalrymen charged off after it, but the horse turned and ran, too fleet to catch.

  Irving watched it go, “ample mane and tail streaming in the wind,” he wrote later in his book A Tour on the Prairies. “He paused in the open field beyond, glanced back at us again, with a beautiful bend of the neck, snuffed the air, then tossing his head again, broke into a gallop.” He added: “It was the first time I had ever seen a horse scouring his native wilderness in all the pride and freedom of his nature. How different from the poor, mutilated, harnessed, checked, reined-up victim of luxury, caprice, and avarice, in our cities!”2

  Irving’s fascination for the animal hinted at the power the mustang would come to have in the American mind—a power that only grew stronger as the great herds were slaughtered and the country grew more urbanized. Even in Irving’s time, when most of the continent was still wild, the mustang evoked freedom and defiance—an antidote to the woes of city life.

  By the campfire that night, after Irving told the other men about spotting the mustang, the men started offering their own stories. There was an especially good one about a legendary mustang that no one could catch: the White Stallion. All the men who had spent any time in the West had heard of him, and some claimed to have seen him. Each man around the fire began offering what he knew about the glorious animal, interrupting one another to pile on their own details. The stallion was faster than any horse in existence. Instead of galloping, he paced. But with his long, muscled legs, his walking gait could still outdistance any pursuer. For years, men had tried to catch him. The best ropers could not get close enough to throw a lariat. Seasoned mustangers had set traps, but the stallion was too smart to enter. They tried to snare him at water holes, corner him in canyons, chase him off cliffs, lure him with the most beautiful mares, but every time, just as it seemed he was finally caught, he slipped away.

  Irving jotted notes on these stories in his journal. Though he did not know it at the time, he was recording the first-ever written account of the myth of the mustang that would be repeated for more than a century.

  The legend of the White Stallion was told in uncounted variations as long as the free and open West existed. And it often grew in the telling. He was tall and noble. Some said he was stark white, others who swore they had seen him said that he had a touch of gray, or black ears. His head and neck were unmistakably Arabian, some said. Others said he was pure Spanish Barb. His mane was like spun silk. It glowed like moonlight. Some called him the White Steed of the Prairies. Some called him the Ghost Horse. Some said he was the devil disguised as a mustang. Some compared him to a god.

  He inevitably roamed the most open, wild, far-flung places. Some said he frequented the staked plains in the panhandle of Oklahoma. Some said he ran near the mesas on the Wyoming/Colorado border. Some said he haunted the deserts of the Texas border country, or the upper reaches of the Columbia River west of the Rockies.

  He was always spotted on the horizon, tossing his head in defiance. But try to pursue him and you were sure to come back empty-handed, if you came back at all. Men in three relays with packs of hounds chased him across Texas. The best mustanger in the Brazos country set snares near his favorite shade trees. Some hunters tried to catch him in springtime when he was weak, or by the water hole when he was heavy after a long drink. But no rope ever touched him.

  A doctor in San Antonio offered $500 for the stallion’s capture, one story goes. Some say it was actually P. T. Barnum who made the offer, and the price was $5,000. No matter. It couldn’t be done. One group of Blackfoot warriors trapped the stallion in a corral, only to have him leap the seven-foot fence. Some say a group of soldiers, after chasing him eighty miles, were sure they shot him dead along the Llano River, but the next day he returned to his favorite water hole. Another cowboy chased him through a storm near midnight out in the cliffs of the Cimarron country. After hours of pursuit, he cornered the stallion on a cliff a hundred feet above a rocky gully. The stallion, unwilling to surrender, leapt into the void. The next morning, the cowboy came back to look for the body, but the horse was gone.

  In a few cases, the White Stallion led to the pursuers’ downfall. Two gamblers named Wild Jake and Kentuck are said to have set out from Santa Fe in the 1850s, determined to either return to the town riding the legendary stallion or “pursue him until the great prairies were swept by the fires of the Day of Judgment.”3 Dodging Indians and living off buffalo, they searched for weeks without a sign of the mustang. The longer they searched, the more they were consumed by obsession. Talk of the wild steed was always on Jake’s lips, and Kentuck could even hear him muttering about it in his sleep.

  The weeks stretched into months. Winter was drawing near. Kentuck started to wonder whether they should turn back to Santa Fe, but Jake would only snap back that he aimed to find that horse or keep looking until the Day of Judgment. Finally, on a stormy night on the plains, they spotted him—standing only 100 yards ahead
in the moonlight, a glowing white beauty of perfect proportions.

  They charged as though the whole Comanche nation was pursuing them. But the horse paced away, gliding noiselessly into the darkness. No matter how hard they rode, they never got closer. After hours of chase, Kentuck yelled to Jake to stop. They should go back, he urged, it was no use.

  In the moonlight, Jake turned and looked at Kentuck with a maniacal grin. His hat had fallen off and his long hair dangled around his darting eyes. His lips had a thin foam and a hint of blood where he had bitten them. “I’ll follow him—yes—to the Day of Judgment.” Jake sped off after the horse, not seeing a cliff ahead of him. Kentuck watched Jake sail into the canyon below, calling as he fell, “’Till the Day of Judgment!”4

  In a way, the White Stallion is just another larger-than-life folk hero like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill—a way to spin a mythical yarn that was a variation on a theme: How is the horse going to get away this time? But it represents much more. We never made a national symbol out of Paul Bunyan. He is the story of power. The wild horse is the story of independence.

  The White Stallion made it into a number of best-selling accounts of adventures out West, including Irving’s, and soaked into the literary Zeitgeist of the country. It became the basis of Herman Melville’s whaling classic, Moby-Dick—a story of the maniacal pursuit of a legendary white beast that could not be caught.

  Melville—who, like Irving, grew up in New York City—likely heard the tale of the white horse as a young author, either through accounts of frontier yarns that appeared in popular magazines at the time or through the book-length sagas of Irving and another literary explorer, George Wilkins Kendall, who published an account of exploring the area in 1844. He probably also took inspiration from the tall tales of a white whale said to have escaped more than a hundred encounters with whalers off the coast of Chile. And the stories of the white whale and the White Stallion, which both emerged from groups of explorers in the early nineteenth century, may have the same root in the era’s yearning to explore and subdue. In any case, Melville makes it quite clear in Moby-Dick that he had given a great deal of thought to the horse before writing.