The crowd cheered. The roundup was unanimously voted down.
Johnston gained a friend in Lucius Beebe, editor of the Territorial Enterprise. “Every so often there is put in motion agitation for the destruction of one means or another of the bands of wild horses which still roam the hills,” he wrote in an editorial. “The current pressure is being applied solely for the benefit of two sheep ranchers who claim their grazing lands are being impaired by the horses. In view of the practically unlimited grazing lands in western Nevada and the absurdly small number of the horses, such claims are purely fictional. The wild horses, harmless and picturesque as they are, are a pleasant reminder of a time when all the west was wilder and more free and any suggestion of their elimination or the abatement of the protection they now enjoy deserves a flat and instant rejection from the authorities from within whose province the matter now lies.”9
At the next meeting, Johnston and a few other locals persuaded the county commissioners to ban the use of aircraft altogether in roundups in the county. It was her first taste of success.
Johnston soon started working with a handful of other local wild horse lovers in Reno to draw up a bill for the state legislature that would extend the ban on aerial roundups to all of Nevada. It was a long shot. The only people in the Nevada establishment who were not ranchers were miners, and neither groups were likely to stick up for wild horses. So Johnston started building grassroots support to pressure lawmakers. She assembled a mailing list of anyone she could think of who might be sympathetic: riding clubs, 4-H clubs, humane societies, school groups, editors of papers and magazines of all sizes. To each she sent a hand-signed letter and a small bulletin laying out the basic argument that something had to be done before the greedy dog-food factories and the cruel mustang wranglers drove the last remaining wild horses to extinction. Letters of support started to pour into the Capitol. Before long, the governor of Nevada was getting more mail on the mustang than any other issue.
The BLM, however, continued to round up horses at a frenzied pace. One of their go-to pilots was Chester “Chug” Utter from Reno, who was proud to say he had rounded up forty thousand horses for the agency. “You need every spear of grass for deer, antelope and cattle,” he once said in an interview. “I’d much rather have wild game than a bunch of horses you can’t do anything with.”10
In 1955, at Johnston’s urging, a state senator named James Slattery introduced Johnston’s bill banning the mechanized hunt of wild horses. Many of Nevada’s newspapers began to take up her cause. If the United States passed laws protecting the bald eagle, an editorial in the Nevada State Journal asked, “Why cannot we in Nevada afford some protection to an animal which, more than any other, symbolizes the history, the strength, the progress of Nevada and the west—the wild horse.”11
The BLM fought the proposed ban. The agency had grown out of the United States Grazing Service—a New Deal agency established in 1934 to bring needed order to the free-for-all grazing on the open range of the West. Before the Grazing Service, grass on the public lands belonged to anyone who wanted it, which resulted in disastrous overgrazing and often-violent disputes over territory. In 1934, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act to establish a system of leases to regulate grazing and the Grazing Service to enforce them. The Grazing Service, and then the BLM, was staffed by livestock men who thought only in terms of livestock.
When Johnston showed up lobbying for bans, the BLM and the ranchers were likely at first dumbfounded. They had been playing the same game for decades. BLM was the referee, the ranchers were the players, and everyone agreed on the game: maximizing the livestock that could be raised on the public land in an orderly and somewhat sustainable fashion. There might have been grumbling by both bureau and ranchers over stocking numbers or grazing fees, but no one argued that the game should change. Then here was someone—a woman, no less—who, with the help of other women, children, and various outsiders, wanted to change the grazing game completely. She wanted to let in wildness, wilderness, heritage, freedom. No doubt the old players were at first mystified. Then they were likely dismissive. And then, when Johnston started gaining traction, and was seen as a credible threat, they were pissed. She got threatening phone calls from some ranchers. Others had her followed. “I’m about as popular with these people as leprosy,” she once said about the stockmen. She began carrying her husband’s .38.
The regional BLM director, Dante Solari, when encountering Johnston at a hearing for the proposed state ban, reportedly sneered, “Well, here comes Wild Horse Annie herself.” It was probably meant as an insult, but Johnston wore it like a title, telling and retelling the story through interviews and letters until many people thought Annie was her real name.
The Nevada bill to ban mechanized wild horse hunts passed in 1955, but not before the BLM and ranching interests slipped in a provision that made the state regulation not applicable on federal land. That was a big deal, because almost 90 percent of Nevada is federal land—and virtually all wild horses are found there. So Johnston’s first statewide victory was a hollow one. Despite all her work, she knew the law would not save many horses.
She was not ready to quit, though. Fueled by cigarettes, “go pills,” her love of mustangs, and support from the public, Johnston typed letters late into the night, creating a broad grassroots alliance. She soon had a nationwide alliance of horse lovers, their names all neatly catalogued on index cards. She was also building a stable of sympathetic journalists. The passage of the state bill attracted the attention of the national press. They visited Nevada to meet Wild Horse Annie and see the mustangs firsthand. First came a columnist from the Sacramento Bee, then a correspondent from the Denver Post, then a reporter from the New York Times. Reader’s Digest and Life—two of the most popular magazines in the country, with a combined circulation of millions—both picked up the story. They described Johnston in almost mythic terms as a tiny, tough-as-nails cowgirl fixin’ to stampede a law through Congress, and “the most tireless, outspoken friend the mustang ever had.”12
She was happy to play the part. “I was born on a horse,” she told the Denver Post. “I love horses tame or wild. I just had to do something about the way they were being treated.”
In 1957, Johnston had a visit from an old elementary schoolmate named Walter Baring, who was Nevada’s lone representative in Congress. Baring was, in the words of a later Las Vegas Review-Journal profile, “a 250-pound bear who liked both his rhetoric and his cigarettes unfiltered.”13 He was a former tax collector and small-town politician who had slipped into office by a razor-thin margin. A Democrat in a Republican state, he reliably voted with Southern Dixiecrats against civil rights legislation and believed the United Nations, the civil rights movement, and fluoridated drinking water were all Communist plots. But Baring also had a keen sense of politics. He was elected to ten terms and liked to say, “Nobody likes Walter Baring except the voters.”
And perhaps he saw in wild horses a chance to grab onto a bill voters would love. He offered to introduce a bill that would ban aerial hunting on federal land and close the gaps in the state bill. If having a disfigured secretary from Reno as the wild horse movement’s champion was a bit odd, it was nothing compared to having a congressional ally like Walter Baring.
They made a deal. Johnston and her allies would write the bill, Baring would introduce a bill called HR 2725, and Johnston’s vast grassroots network would pressure every congressman to support it. In July 1959, Johnston walked into a hearing room in the US Capitol wearing white heels and white gloves and carrying a white handbag. Her hair was sprayed up into a bouffant, her small frame was wrapped in a crisp sheath of cotton prints. The newspapers that day described her as a “hardy ranch wife,” but she looked and spoke like anything but.
“By removing this comparatively easy method of capture, we feel it will no longer be worth the while of the professional hunters to operate, either for themselves or for individual ranchers, or for the government, for it has bee
n the practice of the land management agencies which may not be equipped to carry on the operations within their own personnel to turn over the actual roundup to private professional operators,” she told the committee. “My colleagues do not believe that humane herding of the horses and burros can be done by aircraft or mechanized vehicles. We also feel that if they are in such rugged terrain as to preclude the possibility of horseback roundups, then surely that terrain is not usable as range for cattle.”14
So much for folksy.
“Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee on the judiciary,” she continued. “The fight for the mustang has come a long way in the past few years. . . . From a mere handful of fifty or so firm believers in the right of survival, it has come to an awareness throughout the country of his desperate plight, resulting in a mighty plea on his behalf.”
The Bureau of Land Management, fearing that horses would once again spread by the tens of thousands, as they had in the nineteenth century, tried to weaken the bill with an amendment that read, “Nothing in the Act shall be construed to conflict with the provisions of any Federal law or regulation which permits the Land Management agencies responsible for administration of the public lands to hunt, drive, round up and dispose of horses, mares, colts or burros by means of airborne or motor driven vehicles.”15
In other words, it would be business as usual on federal land.
Johnston fired off letters to everyone involved: congressmen sponsoring the bill, groups of animal lovers like the Humane Society, and her grassroots Rolodex of citizens. She let them know the bill must remain as it was written, without interference from the BLM. She pressed her case in newspapers and radio interviews. While a few rural papers opposed her, most of the national papers trumpeted the need to save the mustang. Hundreds of thousands of letters poured into Congress in support of the bill.
At the hearing, a BLM range officer named Gerald Kerr told Congress that the agency needed to keep horse numbers down, and that the horses on the range were not truly wild, but merely unclaimed ranch strays. “Wild horses, as such, do not exist on the public lands today,” he said. “The unclaimed and abandoned horses now using the federal ranges are remnants of extensive horse ranch operations which were conducted on the public ranges of the West until the 1930s.”16
But Johnston eventually prevailed. The bill was passed a few months later without the BLM’s amendment. On September 8, 1959, the final version, known as the “Wild Horse Annie Law” became law. It banned all aerial roundups on federal land. Johnston hoped the law would end the era of mustangs being chased down for dog food. It didn’t.
Ranchers continued to try to purge the public land of wild horses and the BLM did little to stop them. Often mustangers would get around the new law by releasing some branded animals out into the herds, then using them as an excuse to round up branded and unbranded alike. The BLM openly encouraged the practice, saying in a press release at the time, “The rancher may use any method he wishes . . . including driving the animals with trucks or airplanes . . . if someone intends to round up his own animals, he may accidentally take wild horses at the same time.”17
Velma Johnston railed against this practice and continually pressed the BLM and local authorities to crack down. In 1967, she got her first shot. A tip came into the office of the White Pine County sheriff that a Nevada rancher named Julian Goicoechea had hired a famed Nevada mustanging pilot named Ted Barber to round up horses on public land near his ranch. The sheriff and the brand inspector drove out in a Jeep and, from a high ridge, spotted the plane diving after a group of mustangs in a remote spot called Long Valley. The pilot and copilot dangled a rope of tin cans and operated a howling siren to scare the band forward. For good measure, they were also firing a shotgun at any that turned back. When confronted, the men said they had been rounding up horses for weeks, but that the unbranded horses belonged to the rancher and were not wild. An investigation found the men had sent more than 150 horses to slaughter, and only four had brands. The men were quickly charged under the Wild Horse Annie Law.
What seemed like an open-and-shut case quickly fell apart. In court, the mustangers argued that the animals were, in fact, branded, but thick winter hair hid the markings. The horses had been in the possession of the mustangers since their arrest. The defense had the horses shaved, and, lo and behold, they had brands. A local jury quickly acquitted the men.
Johnston was furious but did not give up. She next tried to catch another longtime aerial mustanger, Chester “Chug” Utter. In 1969, tipsters had told her that he had built a trap in the Virginia Mountains, introduced domestic horses into the wild herd, and was ready to bring in a plane to round them all up. Johnston organized volunteers to watch for the plane and had the local sheriff on call, ready to arrest Utter. Word may have gotten out, because Utter never showed. Eventually, as a publicity stunt, Johnston got local school kids to dismantle the trap and called the Associated Press to cover it.18
In the decade after the law passed, it was as if nothing had happened. Aerial roundups were still sending mustangs to the chicken-feed factory. No one had been successfully prosecuted. Horse numbers had continued to decline. BLM leaders still saw themselves as the good guys, fighting for quality range management against an uninformed public. “I think this whole thing is an emotional issue whetted by Walt Disney movies,” Harold Tysk, BLM director, told a reporter in 1967.19 The BLM estimated that by 1970 there were only about ten thousand wild horses left.
But across the country, attitudes were changing. During the 1960s, Velma Johnston’s once-lonely push to save horses turned into a movement. Humane groups brought their thousands of members to the cause. A number of well-connected East Coast women became Johnston’s allies. There were Pearl Twine and Joan Blue of Washington DC, who both had been working already for years to improve treatment for domestic horses in the East. There was Hope Ryden, a fashion-model-turned-documentary-filmmaker for ABC News, who in 1970 published a best seller called America’s Last Wild Horses, which sounded an urgent call for preservation. Popular national magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Life, Time, and National Geographic all published big spreads on the disappearing mustang. School groups across the country baked cookies and sold bumper stickers to raise money for Johnston’s cause.
“How sweet the ride on the bandwagon is,” she wrote to a friend in 1970. “And the politicians are quick to smell out a possible campaign boost.”20
It’s worth taking a step back to realize that Johnston and other horse supporters were not working in a vacuum. Her awakening to the idea of conservation is closely tied to a broader realization among the American public that the wild remnants of the country were nearly gone and desperately needed protection. It was, in a big way, the natural reaction to the abuses of the Great Barbecue.
It had been simmering for decades. In 1949, a year before Johnston encountered the truck of bleeding mustangs, a former US Forest Service game manager-turned-conservationist named Aldo Leopold published the seminal ecology book A Sand County Almanac. “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them,” he argued in the book. “Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.”21
The answer from an increasing number of Americans was “no.”
In the 1950s, the Nature Conservancy was founded and the Sierra Club grew from an outing group into a political force. In the 1960s, laws were passed regulating pollution in air and water and protecting endangered species and wild and scenic rivers. There was a national clamor for more regulation to protect the wild world.
Culture shifted toward environmental ethics, too. In 1942, Disney had released Bambi, one of the first mainstream broadsides against cruelty to animals. The 1961 film The Misfits, the last film made by stars Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe before both died, was an anti-Western that revealed the horror of mustangs being sent off and turned into dog food.
By 1
970, the public drumbeat for conservation was deafening. That year, the United States celebrated the first Earth Day. In 1971, Dr. Seuss published his classic children’s book on conservation, The Lorax. During the first years of the 1970s, Congress, with broad bipartisan support, passed the most sweeping environmental laws in the nation’s history: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Coastal Zone Management Act.
President Richard Nixon recognized environmental causes as a feel-good issue that would distract voters from the Vietnam War and coopt a campaign issue raised by Democratic opponents. He had never pushed for environmental regulation. He saw environmentalists as “hopeless softheads” and privately dismissed environmentalism as a fad. He notably got in a shouting match with the president of the Sierra Club and stormed out of their private meeting.22 But he was happy to step in and take credit for saving charismatic symbols of freedom. “Like those in the last century who tilled a plot of land to exhaustion and then moved on to another, we in this country have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he told Congress in February 1970. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done.”23
It was in this context that Velma Johnston went to Washington in April 1971 to push for the passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act at a hearing of the House Committee on Public Lands. The act had been introduced by her old friend Nevada Congressman Walter Baring. At the hearing, where forty people were scheduled to speak, Baring introduced only Johnston by name, calling her his “lifelong friend.”
The rest of the wild horse bandwagon was there too: the Humane Society, the National Mustang Association, the Sierra Club, the Animal Rescue League, the Citizens Committee on Natural Resources, and the American Horse Protection Association, among others. There were also witnesses who cautioned against the bill, saying that if wild horses were left unchecked, they would soon eat the range to dust.
Wild Horse Country Page 17