Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  Dolly seemed to understand that her husband needed something beyond pulling teeth. She had a small inheritance and encouraged him to quit dentistry and follow his dream to move to a farmhouse on the bank of the Lackawaxen and become a writer.

  “I need this wild life, this freedom,” he told her in a letter. “To be alive, to look into nature, and so into my soul.”8

  By 1907, Grey was living on the Lackawaxen. He had quit dentistry and written an adventure novel about the Revolutionary War, but it was quickly rejected by New York publishers. He kept writing, scraping together something close to a living by penning articles here and there about fishing. That year, he attended a lecture in New York by a Buffalo Bill–type adventurer named Buffalo Jones—a longtime frontiersman who had rounded up some of the last buffalo and was trying to breed them at a ranch north of the Grand Canyon. Jones regaled the crowd with tales about hunting mountain lions and once lassoing an unruly bear. Intrigued, Grey pulled Jones aside after the lecture and asked to go with him to the Grand Canyon to write about his life. Jones agreed. They spent months traversing the wilds of northern Arizona—fording rivers, encountering gun-toting cowpokes, and hunting mountain lions. After the trip, Grey returned home and in the space of a few months wrote what would be his first Western, The Last of the Plainsmen.

  His last chapter included his own retelling of the legend of the White Stallion.

  “He can’t be ketched,” the Buffalo Jones character says. “We seen him an’ his band of blacks a few days ago, headin’ fer a water-hole down where Nail Canyon runs into Kanab Canyon. He’s so cunnin’ he’ll never water at any of our trap corrals. An’ we believe he can go without water fer two weeks, unless mebbe he has a secret hole we’ve never trailed him to. . . . He never makes a mistake. Mebbe you’ll get to see him cum by like a white streak. Why, I’ve heerd thet mustang’s hoofs ring like bells on the rocks a mile away. His hoofs are harder’n any iron shoe as was ever made.”9

  The book ends with the cowboys coursing down a dead-end box canyon at a full gallop, sure that there is no way the stallion can escape. He does.

  After The Last of the Plainsmen, Grey almost immediately headed back west in search of more stories. Though he was gone for long periods of time, his wife encouraged him, knowing that adventure was one of the few cures for his depression. Writing in longhand in his study back in Lackawaxen, Grey began turning out one hit novel after another: The Heritage of the Desert, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Lone Star Ranger. He was on the best-seller list every year for the next decade.

  The books coined the idea of the Western hero who was honest, steadfast, and loyal. Ironically, Grey was anything but. Most notably, he had an unquenchable appetite for sex. At sixteen, he’d been arrested in a brothel. A few years later, he was the subject of a paternity suit. He kept sleeping with other women throughout his courtship with Dolly, and he slept with even more women after they married. Fame only fueled his exploits. For his whole writing life, he traveled with a series of “secretaries” and “nieces”—sometimes as many as four at a time—keeping journals (written in code) of his sexual encounters.

  “A pair of dark blue eyes makes me a tiger,” he once wrote. “I love, I love my wife, yet such iron I am that there is no change.”10 In a way, by creating characters driven by honesty, loyalty, and trust, he was expressing a life he wished he could live.

  If the myth of the White Stallion had originated with men in the West, who were intimately familiar with the power of the western landscape, the myth of the horse as noble companion, which endures today, was one devised in the East, generally by men like Grey, who yearned to be free in the West but were instead entangled in eastern society.

  At first, the heroes of the myth were all explorers, but they were eventually replaced by a more blue-collar hero, the cowboy. For that, we can thank a not very blue-collar eastern blueblood named Owen Wister, who in 1902 published what is often called the first Western novel, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.

  Wister was an even odder choice as father of the Western than Zane Grey. He grew up the privileged son of a doctor and a southern lady whose family had owned hundreds of slaves before the Civil War. He attended the best boarding schools in Switzerland and New England, then graduated from Harvard. In school he excelled at music and theater, and he wanted to become a composer, but his father pushed him into a desk job at a Philadelphia bank. It didn’t take long for Wister to suffer a nervous breakdown. In 1885, a doctor recommended that the best way to recuperate was to go west. Stepping off the train in Wyoming a few weeks later, he encountered the plain-talking ranch hands who inspired the cowboy archetype. Like the wild horse, the man was defined by the freedom of the place, not his lineage.

  “The grim long-haired type,” he called them. Ones that “wore their pistols, and rode gallantly, and out of them nature and simplicity did undoubtedly forge manlier, cleaner men than what our streets breed of no worse material. . . . They developed heartiness and honesty in virtue and in vice alike. Their evil deeds were not of the sneaking kind, but had always the saving grace of courage. Their code had no place for the man who steals a pocket-book or stabs in the back.”11

  That is an interesting idea, because Wister was, among other things, a first-class, Gilded Age bigot. He laid out his feelings clearly in an 1895 essay for Harper’s magazine called “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” which became the blueprint for his version of the cowboy myth. He believed, first off, that the West only worked its magic on Anglo-Saxons. He saw Philadelphia, and America as a whole, as being a flagging “compound of new hotels, electric lights, and invincible ignorance,” infested with Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Or, as he called them, “hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to a hybrid farce, who degrade our commonwealth from a nation into something half pawn-shop, half broker’s office.”12

  THE NOVELIST OWEN WISTER, AUTHOR OF THE VIRGINIAN.

  Democracy was falling apart, he contended. But his visits to the West had inspired him, because out there he had encountered, he said, the most noble breed of man in his natural setting: the rural Anglo-Saxon. He believed the Anglo-Saxon, dropped into the raw, wild West, free of the mongrel horde, reawakened a natural superiority that had been present in Viking warriors, the knights of Camelot, the other brave explorers of yore, but had gone dormant in his deskbound generation. He wrote:

  Watching for Indians, guarding huge herds at night, chasing cattle, wild as deer, over rocks and counties, sleeping in the dust and waking in the snow, cooking in the open, swimming the swollen rivers. Such gymnasium for mind and body develops a like pattern in the unlike. Thus, late in the nineteenth century, was the race once again subjected to battles and darkness, rain and shine, to the fierceness and generosity of the desert. Destiny tried her latest experiment upon the Saxon, and plucking him from the library, the haystack, and the gutter, set him upon his horse; then it was that, face to face with the eternal simplicity of death, his modern guise fell away and showed once again the mediaeval man. It was no new type, no product of the frontier, but just the original kernel of the nut with the shell broken.13

  This was only true of Anglo-Saxons, he observed. “To survive in the clean cattle country requires spirit of adventure, courage, and self-sufficiency; you will not find many Poles or Huns or Russian Jews.”14

  A crucial ingredient, he said, was the horse—specifically, the cow pony, or mustang, or Cayuse—the wild horse of the West:

  A few words about this horse—the horse of the plains. Whether or not his forefathers looked on when Montezuma fell, they certainly hailed from Spain. And whether it was missionaries or thieves who carried them northward from Mexico, until the Sioux heard of the new animal, certain it also is that this pony ran wild for a century or two, either alone or with various red-skinned owners; and as he gathered the sundry experiences of war and peace, of being stolen, and of being abandoned in the snow at inconvenient distances from home, of being
ridden by two women and a baby at once, and of being eaten by a bear, his wide range of contretemps brought him a wit sharper than the street Arab’s, and an attitude towards life more blasé than in the united capitals of Europe. I have frequently caught him watching me with an eye of such sardonic depreciation that I felt it quite vain to attempt any hiding from him of my incompetence; and as for surprising him, a locomotive cannot do it, for I have tried this.15

  In the West, both man and horse had undergone renewal, he argued. And like steel and flint, or bow and arrow, the man needed the horse and the horse needed the man: “Deprive the Saxon of his horse, and put him to forest-clearing or in a counting-house for a couple of generations, and you may pass him by without ever seeing that his legs are designed for the gripping of saddles.”16

  Wister wrote several short stories on this theme, culminating in The Virginian, his only full-length Western novel, about a nameless ranch hand in Wyoming, which announced to the world the archetype of the lowborn natural aristocrat cowboy hero that is still in broad circulation today:

  His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips. He had plainly come many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed. His boots were white with it. His over-alls were gray with it. The weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season. But no dinginess of travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength.17

  Of course the Virginian rode a mustang. His name was Buck.

  The gunslinging and galloping adventures made The Virginian—a yearning Easterner’s portrait of time past—a best seller. The strong, silent drifter, an unlikely Sir Galahad of the plains, would live on with Grey and a crowd of other imitators. Grey studied The Virginian before writing his first book. Other writers, in turn, saw Grey’s success and copied him. Fred Faust, a Berkeley dropout, aspiring poet, and practiced alcoholic in Manhattan, writing under the name Max Brand, churned out scores of Western pulp novels in the 1920s and 1930s with names like Riders of the Silences, The Untamed, and The Night Horseman. Ernest Haycox, a beat reporter at the newspaper in Portland, Oregon, in the 1920s, was also inspired by Grey’s work, and a steady stream of titles followed: Starlight Rider, Riders West, Man in the Saddle, The Wild Bunch.

  There were many, many more imitators. Westerns dominated nearly every medium for the next fifty years. The action-packed stories naturally translated into movies and radio. In 1925, Douglas Fairbanks starred in a silent film based on Grey’s 1928 book Wild Horse Mesa, about a rancher, desperate for money, who tries to trap and sell wild horses but is stopped by the hero and a wily White Stallion. After that box office success, more than a hundred films were made from Grey’s work. Hundreds more were inspired by the writers who followed him. By 1950, the golden age of the genre, Westerns outnumbered all other movie categories combined.

  You can see the reach of the myth as it percolated into the rest of America. During World War II, when the Americans developed a tough little one-seater fighter plane that could cover long distances at high speeds, they called it the P-51 Mustang. In 1964, when Ford came out with a little two-seater with surprising power and affordability, a marketing manager who had just read a J. Frank Dobie book suggested The Mustang. At the time, more than stories of the Revolution or the building of cities or the digging of canals, mustangs and the cowboy myth were a way we explained our origins and connected ourselves to the past. Even if it was a past that never was.

  ONE OF THE FIRST ADS TO INTRODUCE THE FORD MUSTANG PLAYED ON THE MYTH OF THE WHITE STALLION.

  After several best sellers, Zane Grey moved from his farmhouse in Pennsylvania to California in 1918. He continued to write feverishly, but he also pressed farther and farther from civilization, looking for adventure. He descended rivers in Mexico, hunting for new fishing grounds. He bought a $250,000 yacht and traveled first to the Galapagos, then out into the South Pacific, where he spent months fishing and became a real-life Captain Ahab as he nearly pushed his crew to mutiny in the hunt to land a world-record marlin. He continued to pursue new women, even while keeping up a relationship with his wife, who reliably, if rarely happily, put up with his affairs and managed the business side of his writing, often signing her letters, “Your wife, in name only.”

  As I walked through the rooms of Zane Grey’s house, looking at carefully labeled fishing rods, camp stoves, and canteens, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. Grey had been born wild and spent the rest of his life trying to break free of a world that was increasingly haltered. He was constantly pushing himself to run farther, to experience more, to bite into life deeply and drink the juices. That is a hard thing to live with for a lifetime. But at the same time I admired him. That constant itch had made him disregard the comfortable life given to him and really live. He wandered the globe drinking life to the lees, hunted mountain lions on canyon rims, and rode mustangs through desert valleys. He spread a cowboy mythology that is still with us. He lived a life of wildness. How long would he have lasted if he had stayed a dentist?

  I doubt Grey thought much about the impact of his stories beyond his own life, but the people who grew up with the myth he helped spread are the people who, as adults, passed the 1971 law protecting wild horses. Would it have happened at any other time, with a population that wasn’t raised with the stories of the Noble Mustang and the White Stallion? I have my doubts.

  In the house at Cottage Point, the National Park Service had a volunteer docent working the front desk. He looked to be about sixteen, and the sleeves on his short-sleeved shirt hung down past his elbows. He was probably too young to have had much exposure to the cowboy myth. Baby boomers grew up saturated in cowboys: TV, radio, the movies, toys. I was born in the 1970s. By that time, all the heroes on the screen were mostly in space. Westerns were complex, full of anti-heroes, and no more trusty mustangs. The faithful mustang had morphed into R2-D2 in an X-wing fighter. With younger generations, cowboys are even more obscure. Few people anymore know the story of the White Stallion.

  There was no one else in the museum, so I went up and asked the volunteer to name his favorite Zane Grey book. He paused, mouth half open, then said, “I’ve never really read his books.”

  He explained that he was volunteering not because he had a huge affinity with the author but because he lived nearby. The few people who drifted in and out during my visit all appeared to be in their seventies—people who were young parents when the 1971 law passed. I wondered what the younger generations, who had not grown up surrounded by Zane Grey–style Westerns, thought of wild horses.

  I told the volunteer I was writing about wild horses, and I thought Grey was a pivotal part of why they still existed. He nodded in the way kids do when they are old enough to realize that all adults are really weird.

  “Wild horses,” he muttered. “Are they still around?”

  CHAPTER 5

  WILD HORSE ANNIE

  In the spring of 1950, a thirty-eight-year-old secretary named Velma Bronn Johnston was driving to work at an insurance company in Reno. Cigarette in hand, smoke curling out of the window in the early morning light, she sped down a gravel road through a rocky desert valley in Nevada where a green patchwork of small ranches clung to the Truckee River. The road snaked along the water, following almost every bend, but Velma knew the turns well from weekly trips between the sixteen-acre hobby ranch where she lived with her husband, three horses, and two cocker spaniels on the weekends, and Reno, where she lived and worked the rest of the week.

  If there is a rugged, rural type of person most people would expect to live in a desert valley in Nevada, Velma Johnston was not it. She was well read and well spoken, with none of the Texas twang that in recent years became an affect of many rural westerners. She wore heels, not boots, and painted her nails to a flawless
pearl sheen. She was also jarringly disfigured—the result of a childhood bout with polio that left her back twisted and the left side of her face askew like a Picasso portrait. But her looks had never deterred her. She was confident, smart, and determined to be the best secretary any boss had ever had.

  After a few miles of bumpy dirt road, she turned onto the paved road to Reno. The city was thirty miles away, through a pass in the Virginia Mountains, and she put the pedal down to make time. It was normally open road that early in the day. Reno only had forty thousand people, and the Great Basin in her rearview mirror was almost entirely unpopulated. Traffic was never a problem. But not long after turning onto the highway, she came up behind an old stock truck rolling slowly alongside the river. Its bed had high wooden-slat sides and a canvas roof. She could tell by the way it swayed and sagged that it was fully loaded. Johnston, in a hurry to get to work, came up close behind it. The highway between her ranch and Reno was winding, and there was no easy place to pass, so she was forced to stare in frustration at the back of the tottering truck.

  She noticed something glistening on the back bumper. It was dark, like oil. As she got closer, she realized it was blood. There was a steady dribble leaking out of the truck bed and dripping off the bumper.

  Johnston stayed behind the truck, studying the blood. What was in the back of the truck that was bleeding—was it an injured cow or sheep? Certainly the rancher driving would want to know, she thought, and she decided to alert him as soon as she could.

  The flow of blood increased as the truck rolled down the highway. By the outskirts of Reno, it was a constant stream. The truck pulled off at the stockyards in Sparks, Nevada, and Johnston followed. When the truck parked, she went up to peer through the slats. What she saw stole her breath. The bed was packed full of mustangs, many of them bleeding from wounds as though they had been blasted with shotguns, others bleeding from torn hooves. One stallion had both his eyes gouged out. As the horses jostled and shifted, she saw a colt on the floor, trampled to a pulp by the crowd.