Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  “Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies,” he wrote in a chapter about the whale’s “whiteness”:

  A magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed.5

  The folklorist Frank Dobie spent decades tracking every reference to the legend of the White Stallion and eventually gave up, finding that there were simply too many, and the “Zane Grey assembly line and pulp magazines have published stories on the horse without end.”6 The myth changed and grew over time as other writers and other generations added their own takes, but in the nearly two hundred years since, it has remained essentially the same: The mustang is always pursued by man, and always gets away. He is proud and regal and prizes freedom above all else, including his own life. He stands as a proof that some things can never be had. Despite the many industrious plans of man, there is a certain wild nobility that can’t be captured. This is an idea so linked to wild horses that most Americans know it, even if they know nothing about the myth of the White Stallion, and it has resonated through the generations because it expresses an idea that runs deep in the country’s identity.

  There is no other animal in America that we have heaped with so much meaning. Though the bald eagle is the country’s official symbol, it isn’t as American as the mustang. The eagle is too regal and aloof—a symbol of federal power but not of American grit. Besides, the bald eagle is known for stealing fish from other birds, which prompted Benjamin Franklin to call it a bird of “bad moral character.” The mustang, on the other hand, embodies the core ideals of America. It is not pedigreed. It has no stature. Instead, it derives its nobility from the simple toughness of its upbringing in a free and open land. It is beholden to no one. It will not be subjugated. It is superior to its domestic brethren because it has the one thing Americans say they yearn for most: freedom. It is the hoofed version of Jeffersonian democracy.

  Why the mustang? When the experience of settling North America produced such a menagerie of animal characters—the mule, the oxen, the longhorn, the sheep, the herding dog—why was it only the wild horse that crossed into legend? Why was the story of the White Stallion told and retold, and heaped with so much meaning?

  To try to answer these questions, I made my way, one muggy July morning, down a winding road on the Lackawaxen River in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, where everything was a wall of green—lush and still and close. The Appalachian forest leaned so far over the narrow road along the river that only a few palm-size patches of sun hit the pavement. The thick smell of breathing trees and aging leaves hung on the breeze.

  I pulled my car up to a spot where the lacy riffles of the Lackawaxen emptied into the broad, smooth Delaware River at a place called Cottage Point. It could not have been farther from the vast, dry vistas of Wild Horse Country. There were no long views or mesas, no cactus or sage. That morning, a steady stream of candy-colored kayaks drifted by, slowly turning in the glassy emerald water under galaxies of flies and midges that glowed in the early light. But on a small rise on the riverbank stood a two-story white-clapboard farmhouse with dark green shutters and a broad front porch opening on the river that is so tightly bound to the legend of wild horses in America that you can’t understand what has happened in the West unless you look at what happened in this quiet house in the East.

  I pushed open the oak front door, stepped through the parlor, and walked down the creaky wood hall of the farmhouse. The last door on the left revealed a spacious study. Its walls were covered with Navajo weavings and paintings of Hopi Kachinas. The bookshelves were filled with the adventure tales of James Fenimore Cooper and Rudyard Kipling. And in one corner, near the woodstove, stood a broad armchair with a maple lapboard still leaning against it. Here one of the best-selling Western authors of all time, Zane Grey, spent eight hours a day penning pulp novels.

  If the pueblos of New Mexico are the place that set wild horses free on the West, then this quiet spot in the Appalachian Mountains is the place that set free the icon. Grey helped build the myth of the West from campfire stories into an industry. Along the way, he, more than anyone else, molded the wild horse into an enduring American legend. The riders of the purple sage, the damsel in distress, the lowborn cowboy with a strong moral code. The noble mustang that will only submit to the hero, and, despite a lack of pedigree and a fiery temper, is the best horse under the sun—these are all stereotypes popularized by Grey. One film critic called Westerns the Genesis and Exodus of the American story. Grey’s stories and thousands others like them glorified the Western hero and the idealized Western code of honor as a way of explaining our origins to ourselves.

  Grey didn’t invent the Western genre or the legend of the wild horse. Instead, he was the myth’s Henry Ford. His genius was in designing an attractive, streamlined, accessible product for the masses. Like an assembly line, he was constantly churning out books: The Last of the Plainsmen, The Heritage of the Desert, Riders of the Purple Sage, Spirit of the Border, The Last Trail, Wanderer of the Wasteland, The Thundering Herd. Through simple language, vivid scenery and characters, and sheer output, he modernized, mechanized, marketed, and democratized a myth so powerful that, in a big way, it became a key chapter in the story we tell about ourselves as a nation. In a writing career spanning thirty-six years, he published more than forty books. When he died in 1939, his publisher noted he had sold seventeen million copies, outselling every book but the Bible, and calling him “the greatest selling author of all time.” He has since sold more than twenty million more. You can find copies in nearly every library and bookstore. They were made into magazines, comics, radio plays, and more than 110 movies and television episodes. They inspired countless other Westerns and anti-Westerns. The Lone Ranger and his horse Silver, Randolph Scott in a white hat, Gary Cooper with his six-shooter, John Wayne riding shotgun—all the most famous tall, silent archetypes got their start in stories thought up by Grey. And the myth he popularized led to the law that now protects wild horses.

  Myths live in the mind, not on the land. And where the myth of the West really took root was not in the West but in the East, where a handful of men like Irving and Grey—almost all of them wealthy men in New York City—turned the herds of galloping mustangs into something more than just horses. Through dime novels, pulp fiction, stage shows, and eventually Hollywood movies, they made the mustang an indelible part of the myth of America, forever linked to a set of ideals: quiet toughness, steadfast loyalty, plainspoken common sense, an insistence on independence, the pursuit of certain inalienable rights endowed by the Creator.

  Sure, most Westerns were idealized parodies of the West written for eastern audiences, and they offered a message often designed to resonate with the quiet desperation of urban lives. But Grey appeared to be aware of this, and comfortable with it. When I walked into the old farmhouse in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, which is now a museum run by the National Park Service, I was greeted by this quote from his 1921 novel To the Last Man: “In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age of realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance, no place for romance itself. I have loved the West for its vastness, its contrast its beauty and color and life, for its wildness and violence, and for the fact that I have seen how it developed great men and women who
died unknown and unsung. Romance is only another name for idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living.”

  Another quote on the wall read: “Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is.”

  As I read it, I thought about all the forgotten, yellowing newspaper clips from a century ago that I had tracked down to try to understand the long war between ranchers and horses. How obscure, and even beside the point, those snippets of fact seemed when compared to the story we tell now about the horse as a noble companion. The myth had more weight than the real history. I couldn’t help but remember the last scene of the classic 1962 movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Slumped back in an armchair, a three-term governor of a Western state finally reveals the truth: He had built his career on a reputation for having killed a no-good outlaw, but, in fact, he had never shot the man at all. On hearing this, a newspaperman interviewing the governor rips up his notepad.

  “You’re not going to use the story?” the governor asks.

  “No, sir,” the newspaperman says. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  Myth always tries to find meaning in the past, and, in the process, it often discards many of the facts. A lot of the legend of the West that we now carry in our popular imagination was never true, including aspects of the story of wild horses, but at this point there is so much cultural heft behind it that it hardly matters.

  To find resonance, every myth has to have some foundation in reality. As generations shaped the myth of the wild horse, it slowly changed from one of majestic wildness to one of noble and willing servitude—reflecting changes in the country itself. The men sitting around the campfire with Washington Irving in the 1830s, and the cowpunchers and trappers who came after them, had all left civilization to try to make it in the West. The leagues of endless grass, uncut forests, and tumbling mountain rivers appeared to offer resources without end, but a man had to figure out how to seize them and make them his own. They knew well the raw power of the land and its nobility. In a way, their telling and retelling the story of the White Stallion pacing away was a sign of respect for their place in the West. They admired the land and the bounty it could produce. They pursued its riches, but ultimately they knew they could not possess the one thing they loved most about it: the wildness.

  Of course, the West changed, and, as it did, so did the myth of the wild horse. Railroads cut the plains into pieces; the buffalo and the Horse Nations both were nearly eradicated. Barbed wire was patented in 1874 and rolled out across the West. The stories told about the White Stallion changed too.

  Frank Dobie made a habit of talking to old-timers who had ridden the range back in the 1870s and 1880s. He observed that as the West was settled, the story of the White Stallion slowly changed from a stallion that couldn’t be caught to a stallion that couldn’t be tamed. It would choose death over subjugation. Live free or die. Some men told Dobie the stallion was eventually shot by a group of frustrated cowboys. Some said he was chased ten days and finally caught in the desert hills near Phoenix by a bunch of ranch hands. They penned him in a high and sturdy corral, but he refused to eat or drink. No one was ever able to ride him. He died of starvation after ten days.

  About the same time the White Stallion reportedly died, the Wild West pretty much rode into the sunset too. The last big cattle drives ended in 1886. Geronimo and his small band of Apaches surrendered the same year. The Horse Nations were defeated, their horses confiscated. For decades, the census had been marking the western march of the frontier, but in 1890, the Census Bureau said the frontier was gone. The country was now civilized.

  In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in a small lecture to other historians at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, announced that the period of westward expansion that had marked and molded the American psyche since the time of the Mayflower was over. In his “frontier thesis,” the thirty-two-year-old history professor said the frontier had been the defining feature of Americanness. The “Great West,” with its endless wild lands, had created the American identity: practical, inventive, egalitarian, fiercely independent, and distrustful of government. The values he was tying to the frontier were the same ones writers would give to the mustang.

  “The frontier,” he told the audience, “is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” He continued: “Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. . . . Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons.”7

  In a way, though he did not know it, he was arguing that Americans were a lot like mustangs: European imports of various stations, who were defined not by their birth but by the freewheeling life they encountered in the West.

  If the wild period of the frontier, when mustangs and Americans had been created, was ending, the myth was just getting its start. Across the street from where Professor Turner delivered his speech—a speech that largely went unnoticed at the time, and was only later recognized as one of the most significant lectures ever on American history—William “Buffalo Bill” Cody was putting on his Wild West Show to a daily audience of eighteen thousand. It was pure spectacle, the weaving of history into myth, right before the audience’s eyes. Riders on real mustangs reenacted the Pony Express days. Lakota warriors carrying bows and rifles played out the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Cody, who had been an explorer on the plains long enough to have heard the legends of the plains dozens of times, started every show by galloping into the arena astride a regal white stallion.

  It was around this time that a myth of the mustang took a turn. In this new version, the mustang would submit to a man and become a willing servant—but only if the man’s heart was true. It is this version that has largely endured. In radio plays of The Lone Ranger generations later, the ranger’s white stallion, Silver, is wild and untamable until the ranger saves him from a buffalo attack. In gratitude, Silver becomes his companion.

  The new myth got its start with dime novels about Buffalo Bill and other explorers. Buffalo Bill alone was the subject of more than 1,700 pulp novels. Often myth and reality worked side by side in ways that might strike even a reality TV producer as odd. Early on, Buffalo Bill, for example, was a scout in the West in the summers and played himself in musicals in Chicago in the winters. These early accounts were full of stories of tough mustangs and their incredible feats. Buffalo Bill told of riding one little Indian pony named Buckskin Joe nearly two hundred miles while being pursued by plains tribes. The horse never gave out, but he was so exhausted by the end that he went blind.

  In a way, the new version of the wild horse myth, which made the horse into a noble companion, was a melding of the two myths. America had long championed noble adventurers like Daniel Boone and Natty “Leatherstocking” Bumppo. The horse had long symbolized the evasive nature of the wild. In the new myth, they were side by side. The mustang remained noble and independent but was willing to work with the right guy. It was Manifest Destiny, the wild yielding to American exceptionalism.

  Zane Grey grew up reading th0se early dime novels. But he was in many ways an unlikely godfather of the Western myth. He was born Pearl Zane Grey in 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio, the son of a strict and often disapproving dentist. As a boy, Pearl, who maybe not surprisingly eventually started going by his middle name, devoured boys’ adventure books: James Fenimore Cooper’s tales of Leatherstocking, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the constant churn of dime novels featuring Western yarns about Buffalo Bill and Deadwood Dick. Grey’s study still contains volume after volume of these classic adventure books. Growing up, he loved the outdoors, baseball, and wr
iting, but his father insisted he go into dentistry. By age sixteen, Grey was making rural house calls to pull teeth. A smart, athletic kid, he eventually won a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a dentistry degree in 1896. Soon afterward, he opened his own practice in New York City.

  In his old farmhouse, the rooms are now filled with glass cases stocked with relics of Grey’s writing career: pristine first editions, journals, binoculars, fishing rods, and black-and-white photographs. A photo near the door shows him as a dentist—lean, taut, and broad-shouldered like an athlete, but yoked in a black suit and stiff paper collar. His costume is staid, his look is stern, but his eyes blaze under a deep, intense brow, making him look like a caged animal—a maniac desperate to escape.

  THE PROLIFIC NOVELIST ZANE GREY.

  Throughout his life, Grey was stalked by what he called “black moods,” and he had an intensity and wildness that life as a dentist could not satiate. Only outdoor adventure seemed to lift his spirits. When his city life of pulling teeth became too much, Grey would often catch a train out of Penn Station to take fishing trips around Lackawaxen. He dreamed of one day leaving the city entirely to live out in the mountains, writing about his adventures. In 1900, while canoeing on the Delaware, he met a sharp and beautiful seventeen-year-old girl named Lina “Dolly” Roth and fell in love. They had a long courtship, writing letters back and forth as she finished college, and eventually married in 1905.