With Johnston’s encouragement, tens of thousands of children had sent letters to their congressmen. Since the beginning, she had always seen kids as her main ally, and she had courted them strategically by speaking to schools and 4-H groups. “You can almost see the Stars and Stripes waving in their eyeballs when you give them a stirring talk,” she said in a video interview near the end of her life.24
The press jokingly referred to it as a “children’s crusade.” Fittingly, one of the first representatives to appear before the committee, Gilbert Gude from Maryland, asked if he could let his eleven-year-old son Gregory speak, since he was “really involved in me getting involved in the legislation.”
Gregory took the stand. Neither he nor his father had ever been to Wild Horse Country. “Lots of people have read about the wild mustangs,” he said. “My dad and I have gotten about 1,000 letters and petitions supporting the bill. We even got a letter from Brazil.” He held up a letter from a nine-year-old girl in Mississippi and began reading: “Every time the men come to kill the horses for pet food, I think you kill many children’s hearts.”
More than a dozen conservation and animal groups pressed for passage of a horse protection bill. There were also enough livestock and BLM representatives that Johnston quipped while testifying, “I am taking a chance turning my back right now on this whole room full of people.”
Given the years of animosity toward wild horses and Wild Horse Annie, the BLM and livestock interests staged a fairly tepid defense. No one from the bureau spoke at all. An official from the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BLM, appeared to say only that the agency supported protection and could run the program for about $3 million a year. And though livestock and sportsmen’s groups were cautious, none outright opposed protection.
A spokesman for the National Cattleman’s Association spoke in favor. In the past, he said, mustangs were “part of the bounty of our great land to be harvested, as needed, for the benefit of mankind. They have been taken for granted.” He only tepidly pressed for one consideration: that wild horses not affect the number of cattle on the range, and that ranchers be paid if they do.
A spokesman for the Wyoming Wool Growers Association, the only other livestock group, was more dire in his predictions. The law would be so onerous, he said, that it would “turn every private landowner into a crusader to remove all wild horses.” If the “government got into the livestock business,” he said, it would soon find its wild herds increasing, and would have to remove animals to control population, as cowboys in Wyoming had done for generations. Only a few mustangs would be suitable to be saddle horses. “The surplus animals each year would have to be disposed of by burying, burning, or some other sanitary disposal method,” he warned.
The harshest words came from Lonnie Williamson of the Wildlife Management Institute, a fish and game group. He said mustangs were actually “trespass stock of a not-too-impressive ancestry” that did not belong on the land. “It must be remembered that although mustangs are respected and cherished by a great many people, they are aliens which compete with native species,” he said. “To manage wild horses on a priority basis to the detriment of native wildlife would not be in the broad public interest.” Failing to limit their numbers, he warned, would change the mustang from “a symbol of unbridled freedom” into “a symbol of environmental degradation.”25
A few of the committee members from western states were also clearly skeptical, particularly Wayne Aspinall, a longtime congressman from western Colorado who had grown up in Wild Horse Country. “Most of the wild horses are not horses that any of us would look twice at,” he said. He worried about crafting a sweeping federal solution that would take away control from counties and states. “What has bothered me throughout the last many years is the fact that every time we can’t do something at home we want to look far away in order to get the task taken care of. Uncle Sam is the one who pays all of it.”26
Ultimately, the critics were too few and their warnings too weak against the urgent message delivered by Velma Johnston.
She appeared poised and ladylike in her stiff bouffant, with impeccably researched testimony that she had been building for more than a decade.
“Since I was one of those who started the fight long ago,” she said, “I feel adequate to pass along the feeling of our people in America. The wild horse and burro symbolize the freedom, the independence upon which our country was founded. . . . Perhaps it is because the forbearers [sic] of these wild horses and burros were alien to these shores as were our own forbearers. Perhaps it is because they settled in the wilderness, fought off Indian attacks, enforced law and order, brought civilization to this country,” she added. “My mail alone averages 50 letters a day. This fight has captured the interest of young people as no other.”27
With the passage of the 1959 Wild Horse Annie Law, she said, “We thought we had a happy ending,” but the ranchers were determined to continue their campaign against wild horses. “They are fenced off from their grass and water holes. . . . They are indiscriminately shot, trapped or driven off.” Mustangers who had been caught red-handed were acquitted or not charged at all. Just a few months earlier, the commissioners of Elko County had approved the roundup of several hundred horses that were sent to the slaughterhouse.
The law, she said, “has not been effective in areas where it is not in the best interests of the elected officials to see that it is enforced.”
The Department of the Interior had proposed setting up half a dozen preserves for wild horses. It estimated that ten thousand of the remaining seventeen thousand horses were not Spanish mustangs but domestic strays, and should be killed. The rest would be relocated to preserves and protected. Johnston pushed instead for all wild horses to be managed in the places they lived, as integral parts of the land. She rejected the idea that horses had to be of a certain breed to count as a mustang. All that mattered to her was that they were born free.
She knew that numbers would have to be managed, but she thought the right oversight would ensure it was done humanely. “I asked for a management and control program,” she said. “I realized it must be multiple use. The cattle people have contributed greatly.”
Congress continued to be deluged by letters from citizens. After receiving bags of mail from grade-schoolers, one representative from Texas wrote to his constituents: “Am I going to be susceptible to pressure? Am I going to be influenced by a bunch of children? Am I going to support a bill because kids . . . are sentimental about wild horses? You bet your cowboy boots I am!”28
The law passed easily and was signed on December 17, 1971, by President Nixon, who then sent Velma Johnston a personal letter, thanking her for her “splendid efforts over the years.”
In the end, the new Wild Horse Annie Law—officially called the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971—gave Johnston almost everything she had asked for. It protected horses where they were found on federal land, and it imposed stiff fines and jail time for anyone who captured or harassed wild horses. It made releasing domestic horses on public land illegal to end the mustangers favorite pretense for roundups. And, maybe most important, it recognized wild horses’ and burros’ right to exist.
The law began:
Congress finds and declares that wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene. It is the policy of Congress that wild free-roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death; and to accomplish this they are to be considered in the area where presently found, as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.
With the law, Johnston stopped a century-long killing spree and likely saved the wild horse from annihilation. But she also put the mustang on a future course that was far different from anything sh
e imagined: the one we live with now.
CHAPTER 6
LIFE UNDER THE LAW
In the years after passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, horse populations rebounded. Valleys in Nevada where once it was rare to see a mustang soon had bands dotting the sage. In a place called the Stone Cabin Valley in Nevada, where once there had been only a scattering of horses, there were nine hundred. The bands grazed placidly around the valley’s springs and up in its hills, untroubled by mustangers or ranchers. Wild horses had been saved.
But the success of the law was also increasingly a problem. The Bureau of Land Management determined after the law was passed that there were likely far more than the seventeen thousand horses it had originally estimated. Maybe as many as twenty-five thousand. Freed from the pressures of mustangers, the herds were increasing by about 15 percent a year. They were coming out of the hills and canyons where they once hid and grazing on prime cattle land. Ranchers were calling the BLM to complain about horses eating grass that once fed their herds. BLM range specialists on the ground found that some ranchers were not able to graze at previous levels because horses had taken the forage, and that the problem would grow worse if left unchecked.
During the 1971 testimony in Washington, reproduction had gotten scant attention. Ranchers had warned of growing herds, but mustang advocates had generally either ignored the issue or dismissed it. Hope Ryden, the best-selling author of America’s Last Wild Horses and the most prominent voice for mustangs after Johnston, insisted that population growth was a myth ranchers fed to the “gullible public,” adding, “Left to their own devices, the wild horses do not seem to multiply until they eat themselves out of their habitat.”
She and many other horse advocates were sure the talk of multiplying horse herds was yet another ploy by the wild herds’ enemies to get them off the land. “Dire prophecies are made regarding an imminent wild horse population explosion by those who would have them removed,” she wrote in a revised edition of her book. “Because the horses are not ‘culled’ by hunters, the public is told it is only a matter of time before the herds will overpopulate and starve. In the case of the wild horse, an animal that is not being ‘managed’ for game, no such catastrophe has yet been recorded.”1
But on the land, that was proving to be false. In Nevada’s Stone Cabin Valley, BLM range scientists had estimated the land could sustain only about five hundred horses. With nine hundred now in the valley, they said the pasturage would soon collapse. To avoid that, the bureau said, the extras would have to be rounded up.
Velma Johnston visited the Stone Cabin Valley on a blistering day in July 1975. After touring the valley by Jeep and airplane with bureau staff, Johnston agreed to the roundup. The range was in rough shape. Some of the horses would have to go, she said, as long as some of the cattle came off, too.
On the first day of the roundup, Johnston liked what she saw. Wearing a snap-button denim shirt and a mustang belt buckle, and sucking ice cubes to keep cool, she looked out at a tall corral fence set up in a circle around a distant spring with a single gate that could swing shut once mustangs wandered in to drink. It was the same kind of water trap mustangers had used for centuries, but she saw it as a sign of progress.
Where once wild horses were run to death by trucks and planes, mutilated in the pursuit, hunted to the brink of extinction, and sent off to the cannery, now the Bureau of Land Management was protecting and removing the extras humanely. The man they contracted to run the trap—a fireman out of Las Vegas who had been a weekend mustanger before passage of the law—did not chase or abuse the animals. The captives were not sent to the slaughterhouse. Instead, the BLM had found plenty of volunteers it called “foster parents,” who planned to train the mustangs as riding horses and pets. To Johnston, it seemed like sensible, cost-effective management that honored both the horses and the land.
“I feel good about myself,” she told a reporter as she stood in the sun.
But that feeling wouldn’t last more than a few days.
Though Wild Horse Annie herself had given the thumbs-up for a roundup, other wild horse groups were opposed. The Washington-based American Horse Protection Association, once an ally of Johnston, filed suit in federal court to stop the roundup, claiming the BLM was misrepresenting the quality of the range and the number of horses in order to do the bidding of a few ranchers in the valley. Its director had once welcomed Johnston to Washington as a friend. Now they were no longer speaking.
The ranchers whose cattle shared Stone Cabin Valley were not thrilled with the new BLM roundup either. They disagreed not with the roundup plan but with the whole premise that the federal government had authority over stray horses on public lands. It went against every bit of local law since the days of the trappers. Wild animals belonged to the states, not the federal government, they said. They saw the roundup as a potential precedent-setting move that could cede local authority to the feds, and they were not fixing to let that happen. The afternoon when Johnston had stood with a mug of ice cubes, looking out at her achievement, the head of the Nevada Department of Agriculture showed up and told the BLM to stop the roundup. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was unconstitutional, he said. The feds were stealing horses that rightfully belonged to the state and local ranchers. He impounded the seventy-five horses that had been trapped and shut down the operation.
Being blasted simultaneously by ranchers and conservationists, facing court challenges on both sides while trying to keep order on the land, was a fitting start for the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. Since that day at Stone Cabin Valley, the BLM’s main management tool—nearly the entire focus of the program—has been rounding up and removing horses. In the process, it has been buffeted constantly by lawsuits from both ranchers and horse advocates. Its budget has ballooned even as it has slipped farther from its goals. It quickly became clear that the roundup policy had serious flaws and was so dysfunctional that no matter who ran it, and how much money they received, it was continually ending up in the ditch. And yet it is still the approach used today.
In 1975, despite lawsuits from both sides, the BLM eventually completed the roundup in Stone Cabin Valley. A federal appeals judge dismissed the lawsuit by the American Horse Protection Association, saying the BLM had discretion to remove horses under the law. The Nevada Department of Agriculture backed off its assertion that states owned the horses, after the regional BLM manager threatened that if the agency wasn’t allowed to take horses, “we’re going to have to take a close look at the numbers of livestock on that range.” Eventually, about 460 wild horses were removed. But that was not the end of the story.
I went to visit Stone Cabin Valley on a sunny but frigid February morning almost forty years after Johnston looked out at the water trap. I wanted to see how the management of wild horses had evolved since the birth of the law.
When I visited the valley, there were about 750 horses. The BLM planned to remove about five hundred through daily helicopter roundups that would span most of the month. Some would be adopted on-site by locals, but the vast majority would go into the maze of feedlots and storage pastures that the BLM calls “the holding system.”
I called the local BLM office in the southern Nevada town of Tonopah (pop. 2,478), to ask whether I could observe for a few days. The staff told me to meet them before dawn at a spot on a lonely highway that shoots east of town, where a missile stands fixed to a pole by the roadside. The Stone Cabin Valley was miles away, but since there were no road signs, no manmade landmarks to go by, no buoy in the sea of sage to help navigate, the staff said the missile was a convenient landmark.
When I got there, early on a chilly but clear morning, the missile’s tip pointed up at an angle, as if soaring off the launch toward an unseen target. A sign underneath the missile read TONOPAH TEST RANGE, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY. It marked the northern edge of a vast section of southern Nevada cordoned off by the federal government in the 1950s. These hundreds of square miles we
re so rocky and hot and dry, so useless and deserted, that during the Cold War the federal government decided they were perfect for nuclear testing, missile experiments, and development of other classified weapons. Area 51, the desert valley where watchers theorize the government is hiding flying saucers, was just down the road. Naturally, a place so harsh, empty, and remote has plenty of wild horses.
The BLM regularly gets requests from the public to visit roundups. Usually the observers are a mix of horse advocates, wildlife photographers, and local reporters who write the same story over and over about how roundups are controversial but necessary. It was going on long before I got involved, and the BLM has developed a cordial but grudging approach to it—the way some people feel about entertaining their least-favorite in-laws. But with the advent of social media, it has become more problematic for the bureau. One wild horse advocate standing in the sage can share what is happening to a worldwide audience of activists. A horse shot or whipped in the middle of nowhere can be seen by a hundred thousand eyes and spur outrage that could alert officials in the head office or members of Congress. Because of this, the BLM has become much more cautious. Public viewing areas are put farther from the trap. It was only after the rise of Facebook and Twitter that the agency began having armed guards at roundups and corralled viewers in small boxes marked off by pink plastic tape.
When the BLM’s pickups pulled up a few minutes after I arrived, only one employee got out, standing at the side of my car just long enough to say, “Are you all set? Then let’s go.” Our convoy headed east on a straight highway that followed the rhythm of all highways that cross the Great Basin—bowing up to a distant mountain range, then cresting through dark and jagged rocks and dropping to the next valley, where the road stretches out again for ten or twenty straight miles to another crest.
Wild Horse Country Page 18