Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  She asked the driver where the horses had come from, and why they were in such ghastly shape.

  He pointed to the Virginia Mountains and said the horses had just been rounded up by plane out there and were headed for the slaughterhouse in California.

  Johnston began to weep.

  “No use crying your eyes out over a bunch of useless mustangs,” the driver said. “They will all be dead soon anyway.”

  That moment forever changed Johnston’s life. She decided that day to work on saving Nevada’s remaining mustangs. Within a few years, she had built a national movement. Tens of thousands of people were demanding protection for wild horses. They began calling Johnston by a nickname, “Wild Horse Annie.” And she eventually, after an effort that lasted more than twenty years, led them all to victory.

  When the Chappel Brothers plant stopped slaughtering horses in the 1940s, the slaughter business never really recovered, but it didn’t entirely go away. The remaining herds were too small and too hard to reach to be viable for big factories. There was no money in it. But then a new efficiency came along that kept mustanging viable: airplanes.

  A plane could skim low over the roughest terrain, flushing herds out of rough country. One pilot could see for miles and the plane never grew winded. It did the work of a hundred men and erased the problem of sending “good horses after bad” through perilous country.

  A California pilot named Floyd Hanson, described as “a tall, gangling, cheerful fellow,” became one of the first sky wranglers in 1938, when he took an old open-cockpit biplane to the Owyhee Desert of southeastern Oregon. He was getting $5 a head, as men had done decades before, but he could gather many times more horses in a day. He claimed to have collected ten thousand wild horses in Oregon.

  He swept over the sage, coaxing the animals out of the canyons, looping, diving, sideslipping like a “skidding billiard ball,” according to a writer who flew with him for a profile in Popular Mechanics. After ten miles, the writer reported, “the herd has been run to the verge of exhaustion. Their most heroic effort just can’t match the ‘bird that never tires.’ ”1

  Once on the ground, Hanson related to the writer a modern version of the legend of the White Stallion. There was a horse called Silver King, he said—pure white and uncatchable by even the fastest riders. Every rancher in the area had tried, but no one had come close. One day Hanson scared up Silver King with his plane. He chased him for miles, but the stallion seemed never to tire. Then, just as the plane was about to push Silver King into the corral, the horse reared and broke back, escaping into the badlands.

  Eventually, during another flight, Hanson said he managed to catch Silver King, but he held him only long enough for the other wranglers to see him, before turning him loose again. It was, in a way, a fitting update for the legend of the White Stallion. Man, bolstered by technical innovations, could finally tame nature. And yet, he let it go. It was the first inkling of a budding ethic of conservation that later spurred Velma Johnston to pursue her work.

  But the airborne mustangers of the 1930s and 1940s gave little actual thought to conservation. A cowboy named Frank Robbins in the Red Desert of Wyoming also started using planes. By his telling, he at first tried to round up horses the old-fashioned way when a band he was pursing on horseback got scared by a mail plane in 1938. He hired one plane, then two. At times, he was pulling in three hundred horses a month, which he mostly shipped east to slaughter. He worked the open range of the Red Desert for twenty-seven years, claiming to have gathered more than thirty thousand horses. “Eleven years we worked on the Red Desert, which is about 150 miles by 150 miles,” he later said in an oral history. “We pretty well cleaned out the area except for a few. Then they outlawed the plane for roundups and since then the horses have had it easier. I’m kind of glad, because if they hadn’t there wouldn’t be a one left.”2

  After World War II, small-time mustang operations using army veterans as pilots traveled Wild Horse Country, subsisting on a combination of what they could get from the meatpackers who desired the horses and what they could get from the ranchers who didn’t. By the 1950s, the Department of the Interior estimated there were only twenty thousand horses left, almost all pushed into the driest, most forbidding, and most inaccessible corners of the West.

  It was, many thought, the end of the wild horse. A few more years would see its extinction. When Frank Dobie published The Mustangs in Texas in 1952, he reckoned that the only true mustangs that remained were those that still roamed the American imagination. On the very last page, he broke into poetry:

  I see them vanishing, vanishing, vanished,

  The seas of grass shriveled to pens of barbwired property,

  The wind-racers and wind-drinkers bred into property also.

  But winds still blow free and grass still greens,

  And the core of that something which men live on believing

  Is always freedom.

  So sometimes yet, in the realities of silence and solitude,

  For a few people unhampered a while by things,

  The mustangs walk out with dawn, stand high, then

  Sweep away, wild with sheer life, and free, free, free—

  Free of all confines of time and flesh.3

  What Dobie could not foresee was that at the same time he was finishing his manuscript, a thousand miles away a young secretary in Nevada was about to throw a saddle and bridle on the legend of the mustang and make everything change.

  Rarely does anyone encounter a single, crystalline moment that abruptly alters the course of life—not just one life, but the whole country’s. But the morning Velma Johnston peered into that truck full of mutilated mustangs, she suddenly forgot about getting to work on time.

  “I went home that night and I knew I couldn’t live with myself unless I did something about it,” she later told the author and activist Hope Ryden. “I decided right then that I would not rest until I had done everything humanly possible to stop such atrocities.”4

  After recovering from the sight of the bloodied horses in the back of the truck, Johnston dried her eyes, got back in her car, and drove to work. Within a few years, she was leading a movement to save wild horses that eventually reached the halls of Congress.

  No movement probably ever had a more unlikely leader. Johnston was not a trained activist, and she had likely never met one. She had no funding, few connections, and only a high school education. She was often introduced as a “ranch wife,” and she told people she was “more accustomed to a hitching post than Emily Post.” As she was rising to national prominence, a best-selling children’s novel based on her life, called Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West and featuring a girl named Wild Horse Annie, made her out to be a simple cowgirl with a heart of gold straight out of a 1950s Western. The public cast Johnston as the flesh-and-blood protagonist who brought the myth to life. She was the cowgirl, the woman with the white hat, the hero. The White Stallion would escape once again, but this time with the help of a little “ranch wife” and the United States Congress.

  VELMA BRONN JOHNSTON, BETTER KNOWN AS WILD HORSE ANNIE, WITH FELLOW WILD HORSE ADVOCATE DAWN LAPPIN (LEFT) AT STONE CABIN ROUNDUP, NEVADA, IN 1975.

  Johnston, however, was hardly the naive country wife she often pretended to be. She was much more at home behind a typewriter than in the saddle. She was head of her local executive secretaries association and could type a hundred words per minute, but she was allergic to horses. Though she owned a few, she rarely rode. She was clever and funny, sentimental on occasion but practical as a rule. She was aware that in the 1950s and 1960s, she was navigating a world run by men, but she was hardly intimidated by it. “All I need is a tight girdle and a case of hair spray to keep me going,” she once wrote to a friend.5

  She enjoyed stiff cocktails and banging out show tunes on her mother’s piano. She smoked constantly and traveled with a flask of whiskey in her purse. One would think her health alone should have kept her from taking on the momentous wild hors
e issue. Her twisted spine kept her in constant pain and she had trouble sleeping at night. She once told a friend that she was able to keep going with what she called “slow pills and go pills.” None of this even once deterred her.

  “I’m 5'6", 104 pounds, a 62-year-old widow and I’m tired and overworked,” she said in an interview years later. “But I’m unbelievably tough.”6

  Johnston’s story has been told in wild horse circles often enough that it has become a blend of fact and legend that is sometimes hard to untangle. When the fictional story of Wild Horse Annie helped her cause, she went with it. By the end of her life, even people close to her couldn’t for sure say which parts of her past were Velma and which were Annie. And maybe it doesn’t matter. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

  Johnston had the luck to begin her life of activism just when the legend of the mustang was at its cultural peak and the herds in the West were still at a level where swift action could save them. In 1950, when she encountered the truck full of mustangs, Westerns were the main genre in Hollywood. Just that year, she could have gone to the theater in Reno and seen Branded, The Baron of Arizona, Broken Arrow, Comanche Territory, High Lonesome, The Nevadan, Rio Grande, Sierra, John Ford’s Wagon Master, and dozens of other films. The Cisco Kid and The Lone Ranger were on TV. My Friend Flicka, the 1941 novel about a boy and his mustang, had become a classic of children’s literature. The nation was saturated with stories that told and retold the legend of the West, and the mustang played a starring role. Annie was successful not only because she revered wild horses but also because at the time nearly everybody did.

  Johnston’s family arrived in Nevada in 1882, and her grandfather got work in a silver-mining town called Ione, which was tucked in the Shoshone Mountains in the middle of the state. The family had been there six years when one of the major mines closed and they were forced to leave to look for work. The story goes that shortly before they set out for California, two hundred miles to the west, her grandmother gave birth to her father, Joseph Bronn. The family headed out in a covered wagon pulled by two domestic horses and leading a half-tamed mustang mare from a rope on the back. A few days into the journey across the desert, Johnston’s grandmother’s milk gave out, and she could no longer feed Joseph. Unsure what to do, her grandfather milked the mustang mare and gave the milk to the child, saving his life. It’s a story Johnston later told often to show how much she owed to mustangs.

  The town of Ione today is a ghost town, with just a few residents who cater to tourists looking through the abandoned buildings. Wild horses still roam the hills all around it. Johnston’s father, Joseph Bronn, grew up to be a freight driver in Reno, and he used the tough little wild horses captured from the hills to pull his wagons. He had three children in a small, tidy house with a white picket fence on the edge of town. Velma was the oldest, born in 1912. To earn extra money when the kids were small, Joseph would catch mustangs in the hills near town. The start of World War I doubled the price, and he spent his weekends hunting them. Johnston later talked about seeing him gentle them in a small corral in the backyard.

  In 1923, when Johnston was eleven, something happened that might have been her defining characteristic if not for wild horses. She contracted polio. What started as a fever soon changed to throbbing in her joints. Paralysis set in and she was hospitalized. With polio nearly eradicated today, it is easy to forget what a vicious affliction it is. In severe cases, the virus infects the brain and spinal cord, causing muscles to go limp as nerves fail. But this failure is uneven. Some muscles go limp while the complementary muscles continue to pull, so limbs slowly twist into wracked and painful poses. Johnston’s paralysis attacked her back, pulling her spine and neck in different directions.

  Unsure what else to do, her parents sent her to Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, where she was put in a body cast to try to hold her spine in place. The skinny girl was covered in white plaster from her hips to her head. With her spindly legs and arms sticking out, she later joked that she looked like Humpty Dumpty. According to one account, during her long days in the cast, she liked to gaze at a painting in the ward that featured a band of mustangs tossing their manes as they galloped across the sage. With their unbound freedom and strength, they were everything her little plaster-encased life was not. Though we don’t know for sure whether that picture is just part of the legend, it’s easy to imagine the little girl looking at those horses and yearning to be home, where she could be healthy, safe, and free.

  When the cast was finally removed, Johnston’s family was shocked. Months of straining against the plaster had disfigured her face. Her jaw was pushed back, making her top teeth jut out. The left half of her face, starting above her brow, slumped down and away from the rest of her face, giving the appearance that she was starting to melt. Her back and neck were twisted in a cruel S shape that made her look forever off balance. Before she went home, her parents hid all the mirrors in the house.

  Polio may have been a pivotal experience for Velma Johnston. It left her disfigured and unable to have children, which at the time was all that was expected of girls like her in Reno. Instead, the fallout of the disease steered her to focus on her studies, her career, and ultimately, wild horses.

  After graduating from high school in 1930, she got a job as the personal secretary to the president of an insurance company in Reno. It was a job she kept the rest of her life. Like polio, secretarial work became an unexpected resource in the struggle for wild horses. Johnston learned to fire off clear, error-free letters at a machine-gun pace. Her smooth voice, given a slight velvety edge by cigarettes, carried none of the shock that her face did, and she became an expert at working the phones. At a time when making copies—or mimeograph copies, as they were known then—was still a specialized skill, she could roll out hundreds in short order. It all sounds so basic, but these skills turned out to be as crucial as a love of horses, because the main obstacle to saving the last remaining mustangs was getting the word out. At the time, before television had really taken over and the Internet was not even a glimmer, an efficient secretary was maybe the best weapon anyone could have in the information war.

  A few days after Johnston encountered the truck of bloody mustangs, she went to alert the BLM about the theft of animals from public land and their mistreatment. According to her account, the regional range manager at the Reno office assumed she had come to complain about wild horses grazing on the land, and he assured her that the bureau was doing as much as it could to rid the land of the pests. Even better, he boasted, because the bureau relied on freelance mustangers who sold the horses to slaughter, the eradication wasn’t costing the taxpayer a penny. This was Johnston’s first indication that the federal agency that policed the range was not going to be an ally in the fight to save the mustang. There was no law to protect wild horses, and no agency to stick up for them. As Johnston later told her biographer, Marguerite Henry, “We had to be our own law.”7

  Faced with the realization that there was no legal way to protect horses, Johnston chose the same path as Frank Litts had done a generation earlier: When the law protects something morally abhorrent, break the law. Though she did not resort to dynamite, she was unwilling to let mustangs go to slaughter, so she and her husband, an incrementally employed construction worker who rolled his own cigarettes and liked to quote Persian poetry, began driving the deserted mountain valleys of western Nevada on the weekends, searching for the corrals the mustangers used to collect their catch. When they found unattended corrals, they slipped open the gates and watched the horses run free into the hills. At the time, mustang roundups were regulated by Nevada county commissioners in the state, and entirely legal. Setting free the legally collected horses was not. This part of Johnston’s story doesn’t make it into most accounts of her life. In Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West, a fictional account of her life written for children, Wild Horse Annie takes pictures of the horses trapped in corrals to alert the world, but she never sets them fr
ee.

  From those first acts of defiance, Johnston became an activist and quickly learned her talents could be better used on the legal side of things. The road between her ranch and Reno cut through the Virginia Mountains in Storey County, Nevada. In 1952, she learned the Storey County commissioners were considering a permit for another roundup, and they were going to take a vote at the next commissioners’ meeting. She showed up the night of the meeting, intending only to take notes. The room was packed with locals who liked having the horses roam the hills and didn’t want a roundup. A mailman from the county seat, Virginia City, stood up and said he had a petition signed by more than a hundred people opposing the mustang roundups. “These roundups are completely against the spirit and tradition of the West!” he said.8

  In fact, they were right in line with the tradition of the West but completely against the legend crafted by so many pulp novels and Saturday matinees. Ranchers in Nevada had been warring with mustangs for generations, but increasingly people in the West didn’t make their living off the land, and many of them wanted protection for the mustang.

  After the mailman finished, he sat down, and it appeared no one else planned to speak. With the commissioners about to vote, Johnston stood up. Using shorthand she had taken during a conversation with local BLM officials—a worthy secretary always took detailed dictation—she laid out the facts as she saw them.

  “Mr. Chairman, I’m just a simple secretary,” she began. The mustangers, she said, were making thousands of dollars by sending public property to the fertilizer factory. The federal managers at the BLM were encouraging it. The mustang was nearly extinct and there was no one to stick up for it. The commissioners had to act, she said, to keep greedy men from wiping out a piece of the West.