The land here is exceptionally empty. The town of Tonopah, too small to have even a traffic light, is crowded compared to the stretches of desert on either side. Going east, the next gas is in the tiny town of Rachel, 110 miles away. In between, there is basically nothing. Nye County, which holds Stone Cabin Valley, is bigger than Maryland but has only about forty thousand inhabitants, and all of them live far from Stone Cabin. No one lives in the four-hundred-thousand-acre basin—at least not anyone I could see.
I followed the BLM pickups up over a jagged strand of rocks called the Monitor Mountains, and down into Stone Cabin, where we turned north onto a dirt road, then northwest onto a smaller dirt road that wriggled up into the hills, then finally turned again onto a rutted track. We finally ended near a broad arroyo that the BLM had chosen as a good place for a horse trap.
Stone Cabin, like a lot of Wild Horse Country, has a history straight out of a Zane Grey paperback. The herds here are thought to be the legacy of a valley resident named Jack Longstreet, a moonshiner who was rumored to have had his ear cut off as punishment for stealing cattle as a boy in Texas. He had killed two men in Nevada and taken shots at a fair number of others. After ranging around several mining boomtowns in the region, he married a Paiute woman and moved to the valley in 1906. He set up a horse ranch, where he introduced Thoroughbred stallions into the native herds and sold his half-wild horses to the US Army. The horses in Stone Cabin have a distinctive gray coat said to be left over from a gray stallion Longstreet brought from Texas. How much is truth or legend is too blurry ever to sort out.
I came to the Stone Cabin Valley to observe not so much the horses as the roundups. Roundups are all you hear about in the world of wild horses. Advocates have been fighting them since the 1970s. They say they are brutal and cruel. Hope Ryden blasted them for needlessly spreading panic and dust-borne pneumonia in the herds. Some horse advocates talk about roundups in language from the Holocaust. The BLM, in contrast, portrays helicopter roundups as the safest, most humane way to control horse herds—a gentle gathering. I wanted to see for myself whether roundups were really that bad.
Opposition has hardly softened since Velma Johnston stood here in 1975. In the months leading up to the roundup, a Los Angeles–based wild horse group was lobbying to shut down the operation, and the Nevada legislature introduced a bill favored by ranchers to change local water law to specifically prohibit wild horses and burros from drinking. Both were eventually unsuccessful, but they have not discouraged similar efforts since then.
Other things have changed a lot. The BLM now uses helicopters instead of water traps. It also has a long, legally required planning-and-comment process for roundups. It no longer relies much on “foster parents” to take wild horses, and instead it has developed a vast system for storing them. A Supreme Court ruling put an end to states’ constitutional challenges of ownership.2 But the fundamental approach has not changed much. It still follows a template created by mustangers a century before: Round ’em up and move ’em out.
For more that forty years the BLM has used roundups as its main and often only management tool for wild horses. It has had one goal in mind: Limit wild horses and burros to twenty-seven thousand on the range. The agency calls this number the Appropriate Management Level, or AML. That golden number—twenty-seven thousand—is what BLM range ecologists say can be sustained on the available land. Plenty of wild horse advocates disagree with this number, saying it is kept artificially low to serve cattle interests, but the BLM has stuck with more or less the same number for thirty years. Agree with it or not, it has steered policy.
The agency has never actually reached that golden number, though. One program director after another has sought to do so. If they could reach AML, they reasoned, then the roundup strategy that has not really been working for forty years would start to work. That is because at AML, the number of extra horses that need to be removed each year could reasonably be adopted out. By adopting horses out instead of storing them, the agency would keep costs down. That number would also keep peace with cattle and wildlife interests on the land. From the agency’s perspective, all would be good.
The agency has been trying to reach AML since at least 1980, but never has. Every time it gets close to twenty-seven thousand, it is overwhelmed by the cost and controversy of the massive roundups needed to reach the number. Then it must give up, exhausted, and let the number of horses on the land begin to increase again. Nonetheless, that has not stopped the BLM from repeating the effort every decade or so.
In 2016, I toured one of the thirty ranches the agency rents to store wild horses it has gathered off the range. With me was the director of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. By that point, attempts to reach AML already had failed three times, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite the efforts, the wild horse population in the West was almost triple AML. I asked the director what he thought the program should do. “I really feel,” he said, “if we could just get down to that number, reach AML, it would take care of a lot of our problems.”
Here is what keeps tripping up the agency: Roundups produce thousands of captive horses for which the BLM has to find a place. It has an adoption program that trucks wild horses all over the country in an attempt to find homes. Nearly anyone can adopt a mustang for $125. But the number of adopters has never equaled the number of horses the agency removes from the range. The unwanted horses build up in storage, and storing horses costs a lot of money.
When I arrived at the trap site, I expected to spend most of the day alone, except for the armed guard at the pink-tape public viewing area that has become standard at all roundups. But when the BLM public affairs officer led me to the taped-off rectangle on a hillside of rocks, someone else was there.
Sitting on a cold chunk of basalt was a middle-aged woman with long, reddish blonde hair, camouflage pants, and an oversize Carhartt jacket. In the jumble of boulders, she had managed to set up two tripods, each topped with a small video camera recording the scene. She held a cigarette in one hand and a camera with a long lens in the other. When I scrambled up onto the rocks, she tucked the cigarette between her lips, held out her hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Laura.”
Her full name was Laura Leigh—a name that invokes quick reaction in all corners of the wild horse world. To some advocates, she is a tireless hero, to others a grandstander or sellout. To ranchers, she is a persistent meddler, and to the BLM she is often seen as big trouble because lawsuits she files against the agency seem to arrive as dependably as summer and winter.
“I’m a pain in the ass, but that’s kinda the point,” she later told me. “I make them do their job.”
The day I met her, she described herself with a sly smile as a “wild horse groupie”—one who tours from herd area to herd area and roundup to roundup, recording everything with the zeal of the most dedicated Deadhead bootlegger. I later learned she is much more than that. She has a detailed understanding of the law and a passionate desire to see horses treated humanely, and, because of this, she has dedicated her life to making sure the spirit of the Wild Horse Annie Law is carried out.
Just down from our pink-tape public viewing area, she had a beat-up green Ford Explorer with a tire lashed to the roof. She had bought the used Explorer with a hundred thousand miles on it, and within a few years she had put on a hundred thousand more while driving to the different herd areas. The dashboard was piled with papers and coffee cups. The back was a heap of clothes, tarps, sleeping bags, filing boxes—everything she needed for life on the road. The passenger seat was occupied by an aging Bernese mountain dog. Somewhere in the mess was a 9mm pistol she kept in case of trouble. The tire on the roof was not a spare but a seat—a perch where she could get a good look at the roundups when the BLM’s pink-tape public viewing area was less than optimal.
“The road really has become my life,” she said. “I’ve sold everything I have of value. I have no more jewelry left. I have nothing left except that truck and what’s in i
t. It’s frankly freeing. Possessions never created something of meaning for me. Interaction, conversation, making a difference. That has real value.”
It was still cold in the early morning light. We could hear the whine and THWOP of a helicopter echoing off the distant hills, but we could not yet see it. Below us, about 150 meters away, was a big round corral with wings of canvas opening on one side like a broad beak.
With nothing to do yet but watch our breath condense in the crisp air, I started asking Leigh about where she came from and why she was here.
She had ended up in Wild Horse Country via a long and winding road. She had grown up a dozen miles west of Manhattan in Bloomfield, New Jersey, the daughter of a cop. She had lived a relatively footloose life as an adult—first in New York City, then Haiti, then Maine, then most recently in Puget Sound, where she bred dairy goats, made cheese, and rehabilitated orphaned wildlife.
Her love of animals led her to adopt an old, unwanted domestic horse bound for the slaughterhouse. That led her to learn about horse slaughter, which led her to learn about wild horses. After watching her first roundup, she was hooked. That and a failed marriage put her on the road in 2009. She has basically been there ever since, going from one roundup to another, trying to document the everyday operations of the BLM. She works alone, paid survival wages by a nonprofit she founded called Wild Horse Education, which relies on small donors, mostly other women who follow her journey on Facebook.
The wild-horse-advocate world does not have one unifying figure like Wild Horse Annie anymore, and hasn’t since she died. In 1971, when the law passed, there was a more or less united front under Velma Johnston, and the willingness to unite behind her vision had helped push laws through Congress. But even before Johnston died of cancer in 1977, the movement had started to splinter. At the Stone Cabin roundup in 1975, Johnston was supporting the roundup and her main ally in the East, Joan Blue of the American Horse Protection Association, opposed it. Blue thought Johnston had become a caricature of herself and was too cozy with the BLM. Johnston thought Blue, who lived in the suburbs of Washington, DC, was too eager to bad-mouth ranchers and too quick to turn to the courts instead of compromise. By 1975, Johnston thought Blue was trying to undercut her support.
“I wouldn’t slam an outhouse door the way Joan Blue slams me,” Johnston once said.
Since then, the movement has only grown more Balkanized. Small advocacy groups pick their prize issues, and though they generally are united in bad-mouthing the BLM, they have rarely been in agreement on long-term solutions or presented a united front in a push to guide reforms. There is no broad strategy on when and why groups should take the bureau to court. The worst of the advocates are little more than equine Internet tolls who never set foot in Wild Horse Country. The best of them are good-hearted, hardworking groups who spend time on the ground and have detailed knowledge of specific herds. Most of them have a genuine desire to find workable solutions. But there is no larger, long-term vision of where they want to go and how they will get there. Many are as suspicious of each other as they are of the BLM, and afraid of having donors wooed away by a grandstanding competitor.
I have only met a few who spend as much time on the ground as Laura Leigh. As the sun rose at Stone Cabin, we heard the helicopter coming up over the gray sage. Leigh crushed out her cigarette on the chunk of basalt and slipped the butt into her coat pocket. She lifted her long lens and swept the sage with a practiced glide, then settled on a spot between two low hills where a flash of sun showed the helicopter’s polished white flanks. Her shutter began to click. Just below, eight horses crashed through the sage. Some were mahogany, some light cream. Under the click of her camera, I could hear Leigh whispering, as if talking into a horse’s ear. “Hey pretty girl,” she said. “Hey pretty girl, I know you don’t like it. I don’t like it either.”
The helicopter pushed the horses down into a shallow draw where the trap waited.
“It’s OK, babies, it’s OK,” Leigh whispered. She kept her lens trained on the chase, clicking the shutter every few seconds as the horses were pushed into the trap.
We sat for hours, watching the helicopter bring in one band after another until that corner of the desert was almost swept clean.
In her lawsuits and in her documentation, Leigh has pushed for humane treatment. She is not against roundups per se, though she sees the BLM as biased toward cattle interests. But in her opinion, horses should not be run too long, too fast, or in weather that is too hot. Family bands should not be run when the mares are pregnant or the foals are too young. And horses should not be rounded up unless good science shows it’s really necessary.
“I don’t think that is too much to ask,” she told me. “And I’m going to keep asking until they actually do it.”
In 2009, when she watched her first roundup at the Calico Herd Management Area, just over the border in Oregon, she saw contractors using cattle prods and a helicopter chasing a foal over rough, rocky terrain for miles, until it was near exhaustion. She later tracked the foal to a BLM holding corral and saw that its hooves had detached during the long chase. For days after seeing the foal’s injuries, she kept asking BLM staff about its fate.
A HELICOPTER ROUNDS UP HORSES IN STONE CABIN VALLEY, NEVADA, 2011.
“They told me it was fine, that he had recovered. It was only when I kept digging that I found out they had put it down,” she told me. “To me, that story is everything that is wrong with this agency. It is this old boy buddy system that will lie to your face if you let it. And the horse is the last priority.”
She soon realized that photos and videos were the only way anyone would believe her, and she set about documenting every roundup abuse she saw. She posts the videos and photos to social media. At times, the BLM has tried to shut her out. In 2010, during a roundup of the Silver King Herd Management Area in Nevada, the agency put the pink-tape public viewing area fifteen miles from the trap site. Leigh left, figuring she could find the site on her own, and was stopped by a BLM law enforcement officer who told her the trap was on unmarked private land, and if she tried to approach it, she would be arrested.
Leigh sued, saying the bureau was infringing on her right to freely observe the government’s activities. A federal appeals court agreed. She has sued the agency several times since, always pushing for the humane treatment of animals and access for the public. In 2011, a judge shut down a roundup in Nevada after she filmed a helicopter hitting an exhausted mare with its skid.
“To me, the horses are not just a number,” she told me. “They are not an estimate or a spreadsheet, they are individuals. They live as part of a family. I push to make sure they are treated humanely. But I think the BLM guys just shake their heads and think we are a bunch of tree huggers.” She paused and smiled. “That’s fine, because we can take them to court.”
As we sat in the pink-tape public viewing area, a helicopter brought in six more horses. We watched contractors in big black cowboy hats wave horsewhips tipped with white plastic shopping bags to urge the mustangs out of the corral and into waiting gooseneck trailers. It was as practiced and smooth as the roundup I’d seen in Sand Springs Valley. And just like at Sand Springs, I was struck with how the valley, which the BLM said was over its carrying capacity, seemed so empty. I mentioned this to Leigh and she nodded.
“The BLM keeps talking about how wild horses are so overpopulated and are destroying the range, but how can it be the horse’s fault?” she said. “Horses are on 10 percent of the public land, cattle are on 65 percent. Cows outnumber horses out here by at least 100 to one.”
The 1971 law stipulates that horses are to be the primary management focus in areas where they are found, she told me. “That never happens. Instead, the BLM creates these arbitrarily low numbers of horses that can be on range, then says there is a crisis when there get to be too many and rounds them up.”
In the afternoon, after rounding up dozens of horses, the helicopter crew called it a day. Leigh and I followe
d trailers full of mustangs in a long banner of dust as they rumbled down the desert valley toward the highway. At the highway, our caravan stopped at an old gravel pit, where the contractors backed up the trailers until they clanged against large, square corrals. The doors opened and the horses surged out into the pens. Wide-eyed, they turned and ran, looking for an escape, but there was none, so they settled into slowly milling around the enclosure.
Men with horsewhips and electric prods separated the bands by sex: stallions in one corral, mares in another, colts in a third. Horses reared and shrieked, kicked and jostled, trying to figure out where they were and how to get out. The gravel pit echoed with the ring of hooves against the metal corrals.
The sorting went on for the rest of the day. Near sunset, a long semi-trailer arrived. Three dozen mares were loaded up the ramp. The men in the black cowboy hats closed the big metal doors, and with a sigh the semi took off, going east. Another load of horses for the holding system.
A STALLION TRIES TO ESCAPE WHILE BEING SORTED FOR THE HOLDING SYSTEM AFTER A ROUNDUP IN STONE CABIN VALLEY, NEVADA, 2011.
“I understand the need for roundups,” Leigh said as we stood on a mound of gravel and watched the semi disappear in the distance. “But the more I see it, the more I realize it’s a racket. Those horses don’t make anyone any money when they stay on the range. They begin to make money for someone as soon as they are taken off. Rounding up, processing, holding—it’s people’s livelihood and they will defend it. But who will defend the horses?”
During the weeks of the Stone Cabin Valley roundup, the BLM removed about five hundred horses. In the process, fourteen died. One broke its neck, one its leg, one old mare just gave out. The rest were shot because of deformities or because they looked too weak to survive the holding system. This is not unusual. Federal audits over the years have found that about 1.2 percent of wild horses rounded up are killed in the process—a number the BLM describes as acceptably low.
Wild Horse Country Page 19