As we drove around the ranch on narrow dirt tracks that rose and fell through the hills, we talked about the long history of roundups, and the future the BLM faced. Bolstad had grown up in Montana, the son of a ranch hand, and had worked for the BLM since college. He was working in Burns, Oregon, when the Animal Liberation Front burned down the corrals. He was in Nevada in 2001, when the program made the big push to bring the herds down to AML. And he took over as head just as the cost of storing horses had paralyzed the program. Looking out at the hundreds of horses grazing on the ranch, he seemed happy to see that the creatures were healthy and well cared for, but he said the program was in crisis. The agency was spending about $49 million a year to warehouse horses, and looking at liabilities of more than $1 billion to care for the horses it had already gathered. There was no more money to gather more horses.
The holding system was, he said, “an absolute anchor around our neck.”
“We are spending nearly everything we can on holding,” he said. “We have almost no money for other programs.”
That means range improvements and development of springs and wells that might improve the carrying capacity of range in Wild Horse Country can’t be done. Building the adoption program to get more horses out of storage and into homes can’t really be done either. Developing new ideas that might eliminate or at least limit the need for roundups can’t be done. There is just no money.
By 2016, even roundups had basically ground to a halt. In 2013, the BLM cut its roundup numbers to only about twenty-five hundred animals a year—a third of its historic average. It rounded up only thirty-eight hundred animals in 2013, and twenty-four hundred in 2015. Basically, it now only rounds up horses on the range when horses in storage die or are adopted. There is no more room.
With roundups down, the population on the range has shot up. In 2016, it sat at seventy-seven thousand—about three times what the agency says the land can sustain. Just to keep the population at that level, the BLM would have to remove ten thousand horses per year. It can’t afford to come even close. The agency has 270 Herd Management Areas where wild horses roam. Almost all of them are now way over the target population.
You can argue about what the sustainable number of horses on the range is, and plenty of people do. Is it twenty-seven thousand, as the BLM says? Is it fifty thousand, as some advocates claim? Is it one hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? Whatever the correct number, horses will eventually exceed it. No matter the number, we need a better answer for what we should do when we reach it. Rounding up and storing horses has proved to be a failed approach. No one has been able to make a case to the public that slaughter is an acceptable fix—so, politically, that strategy is a nonstarter. But you also can’t just walk away from the problem. Horses on the land have shown in almost all cases that they will increase to destructive levels. If the herds are allowed to increase on the range long enough, all of Wild Horse Country suffers, not just ranchers and cattle, but also antelope, bighorn sheep, native plants, butterflies, toads and salamanders that live around springs, jackrabbits and kangaroo rats that depend on grass seeds. And the horses themselves. When the damage is done, it will take generations for the West’s dry and delicate land to recover. Something needs to be done, and quickly.
Mismanagement could also do lasting damage to the legend. When a bureaucracy is trying to preserve a symbol of freedom by spending more than a billion taxpayer dollars to keep it in captivity, while benefiting a few wealthy ranchers, the story of the wild horse starts to change. Animals that once were the embodiment of grit and self-reliance begin instead to symbolize waste, fecklessness, and inept bureaucracy. How long before this damage affects the legend? The White Stallion must always run free. He can’t exist in long-term holding. If the legend is undermined, how long before people question why the nation protected wild horses and burros in the first place?
Already mismanagement is shaping the wild horse’s image. You can see it in the way people now talk about wild horses. In 2009, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Republican Doc Hastings, called them “welfare” horses that were taking away resources from hardworking Americans. In 2015, a pair of biologists called wild horses a “scourge” that had no place on the land and didn’t deserve the protection afforded by their romantic past. No doubt, if the holding system gets bigger and more expensive, criticism will only grow louder.
Weeks before I met Bolstad in the fall of 2016, the BLM’s citizen advisory board—a nine-member volunteer group set up to have a balanced representation of horse advocates, the livestock industry, wildlife conservation, the scientific community, and other interests—voted eight-to-one to kill the forty-six thousand horses in the holding system. The BLM should either sell the animals to slaughter or humanely euthanize them, they said.
I spoke to a few of the board members. One of them, a cattle veterinarian, had been pushing for slaughter for some time. But the others had been against it until the cost of holding started to overwhelm all other functions of the program. Ben Masters was one of the youngest members of the board. An outdoor guide and filmmaker, a few years earlier he had adopted seven wild horses and made a movie called Unbranded, about riding them from Mexico to Canada. He told me it had been a hard decision, but something had to be done to protect the landscape. We talked on the phone while he was on a tour of a Nevada Herd Management Area he described as “severely overgrazed.” “It kills me,” he said. “I’d love for there to be another way out, but I just don’t see it.”
The BLM responded that it could not comply with the board’s recommendation to kill horses: A congressional rider still prevented the bureau from spending a nickel on killing horses. But its leaders did not put forth any alternatives. “We’re in a real pickle,” Dean Bolstad told me as we drove through the Hughes Ranch. “We have huge challenges ahead of us, and we don’t have the resources to respond.”
We stopped the truck and got out in a field on the ranch to look at the mustangs grazing in the setting sun. Beyond them on the grassy swells were more horses, scattered almost as far as the eye could see. For a few moments, it was easy to imagine I was crossing the prairies with the painter George Catlin 185 years ago, when everything from horizon to horizon was still wild and open and free, standing on a rise with a few Osage braves just before the chase.
The horses swished their tails and munched grass in apparent delight. But it was hard to feel excited about it. This was not the wild. In long-term holding, the horses are separated by sex. There are no more family bands, no more fights for dominance, no natural selection. The horses are by no means tame, but they are not really wild, either. It is a purgatory of sorts where animals wait, year after year, alive but not living, until they finally die. Watching darkness fall on the herds, I didn’t feel the excitement I had many times before encountering wild horses in the West. A crucial element was missing. Taking wild horses out of the West was like dipping a cup of water out of a river. The physical thing was still there, but its wildness was gone.
CHAPTER 7
RANGE WARS
After I left the Stone Cabin Valley roundup, I headed east on US 6. The road is a straight, lonely ribbon of asphalt that climbs out of Stone Cabin to a gap in a long, empty chain of mountains that form a pleat in the undulating cloth of the Great Basin. In the summer, groves of piñon and juniper trees make the mountaintops look chalkboard black from a distance, but as I drove through in February, they were glowing white. As my car neared the top of the pass, I realized that the long mountain range was actually two sister ranges—the Hot Creek Mountains to the north and the Kawich Mountains to the south, with a little notch where the highway squeezed through like a lizard.
Below the mountain summits, the land was brown as usual. Just past the break between the two ranges, a hot spring rushes out of the foot of the Hot Creek Mountains, spitting out such a generous gush of scalding water that it cascades down into the desert, creating a small oasis called Warm Springs. When I came
through not long after dawn, the entire line of the creek running down from the mountains and under the highway was steaming like a cauldron in the winter air. During the gold rush of the 1860s, the springs served as a stagecoach stop, where weary travelers could bathe and horses could recharge on good grass growing along the mineral-caked white banks of the creek. A few doorless and saddle-backed shacks still stand from those days, all but petrified by the desert air. There is also a cinderblock roadhouse, the Warm Springs Bar and Café, built in some optimistic era after the advent of motoring, but long before the interstates sucked all the traffic off of blue highways like this one. It was closed when I arrived. Boards tacked over the café’s doors and windows were faded and buckling. Salt brush grew waist-high in the front walk. It had been a long time since anyone had gotten a drink there. To the side was a concrete pool—deep and sparkling aqua blue. But whoever boarded up the café also fenced the spring. A rusty lock hung on the rusty gate.
There was no one around, so I stripped down in the frigid air and took a hot bath in the overflow water splashing out into the desert, then got back in my car to cross the valley on my way to visit the Twin Springs Ranch, one of the largest ranches in Nevada.
Twin Springs is a small family operation, but, like many things in the West, geographically there is nothing small about it. It covers 660,000 acres—an area almost exactly the same size as Rhode Island. It stretches from one mountain range to the next and encompasses everything in between. The population is ten or fewer, depending on the time of year and how many buckaroos the family has hired to work on the ranch, and how many family members have come in from out of town to help with branding. There are no other residents in the valley, and there haven’t been for decades. It is just the ranch owner, Joe Fallini, his wife, their daughter, her husband, their children, and usually a few men from the nearby Paiute reservation who help out with the cattle.
I was headed to pay them a visit because you can’t understand the predicament of wild horses without understanding western ranching. The ranchers helped create the herds of wild horses in the century before the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed in 1971, and the ranchers were most responsible for trying to eradicate them. Since the law, ranchers have been a reliable and a united voice of criticism, pushing for the reduction of wild horse numbers. They say locals, and not the federal government, could manage the population best. Often ranchers are painted by wild horse supporters as classic villains—greedy fat cats wrenching their hands as they connive with the BLM about how to kill innocent horses. But they are usually also the people with the closest connection to the herds, and the most nuanced understanding of the land—a relationship forged over generations of earning a living on the grudging desert.
Wild horse advocates perpetually accuse the BLM of doing the bidding of ranchers. But spend much time with ranchers and you soon realize that, far from being in cahoots with the agency, ranchers often see the BLM, which controls many of their grazing rights, as an incompetent and wasteful nuisance. Some even see it as an enemy agent of the coastal elites, bent on destroying their traditional way of life. Most blame the bureau for unleashing wild horses upon them like so many locusts.
The Twin Springs Ranch has been at the heart of the fight over wild horses for almost as long as the 1971 law has existed, so I wanted to see for myself what the world looked like from the rancher’s front porch. I drove across a wide, empty valley dotted with sagebrush and turned onto an unmarked dirt road that led to a small nest of bedraggled trees in the vast bowl of golden desert. I passed through an outer ring of rusted pickups, irrigation pipes, and other farming equipment set out to pasture by generations of stockmen, then through a clutch of old sheds and bunkhouses. At the center was a ranch house surrounded by shade trees, raspberry bushes, and fruit trees, creating a small oasis. In the harsh Nevada atmosphere, I later learned, the trees never gave any fruit.
Two ranch dogs came out barking, and in time a man in worn jeans emerged from the house to assess the racket. The man was about fifty. His broad, barrel chest was stuffed into a snap-button shirt, and both chest pockets were crammed with small notebooks, folded papers, pencils, and pens—the mobile office of a rancher rarely at his desk. This was Joe Fallini.
He had a thick thatch of dark brown hair and skin tanned and creased by the desert sun. His mouth was nearly hidden by a push-broom mustache. He saw me walking up to the house flanked by the barking dogs, but he made no move. Like many people who’ve spent their lives outdoors, he was slow to speak—not only comfortable with silence but generous with it. I had called ahead, and expected him to raise a hand in welcome, but he just stood, watching me approach.
When I finally reached the front step and introduced myself, he nodded slowly, then said, “I guess you found the place OK then.”
He invited me in and led me to a long, polished dining-room table where we sat down. An old pump organ stood against the wall. Above it hung sepia-toned photographs of family members who had worked this land long before he was born. In the living room, hundreds of delicate stone arrowheads, some not much bigger than a dime, were arranged in frames— the heirlooms of earlier inhabitants collected near the valley’s springs by the family over the decades.
“It started with my grandfather a long time ago,” Mr. Fallini said of the ranch.
Giovanni Fallini, who started the ranch, grew up near Milan and arrived in New York by boat in the 1870s. He arrived in the silver-mining boomtown of Eureka, Nevada, about a hundred miles north of the ranch, in 1874. The twenty-year-old immigrant was saving up to bring over from Italy the woman he had fallen in love with, so they could get married, and he did anything he could to make money. One of his jobs was to haul freight with a pair of oxen between Eureka and another small mining outpost to the south. On his trips, he began stopping at springs, like the one gushing out of the Hot Creek Mountains, and planting vegetables.
“He’d pick the vegetables on the way back on his rounds and sell ’em in town, and I guess he did pretty well,” Fallini said.
As Fallini explained the history of his grandfather, he seemed to warm up to the idea of talking to a writer from the city, because he knew I would hear the whole story, not just the account of the latest roundup. Too often, people who write about wild horses don’t bother to understand the past, and with many ranch families, the past is as present and real as the photos hanging above the organ. Memory is long here. What men did a generation ago, or two, still matters. For the rest of the day, Fallini was welcoming, generous, and open.
Slowly, over the years, he said, his grandfather saved money and bought control of many of the springs along his supply route. “Water,” Fallini said. “That has always been the key. He realized it then, it’s just as true now. This is good land, but you need to have the water.”
That lesson—that water is the key—was embraced by the whole West, and it helped create ranches like Twin Springs. Twin Springs is like few other ranches in the United States, but it is like nearly all ranches in the arid West. It is made up almost entirely of land the ranchers don’t own.
Settlers moving into the West figured out that anyone who controlled the water could control grazing on public land far beyond the property line. After all, no one could graze animals if there was no place to drink. This was a particularly powerful strategy in Nevada, where springs may gush from the foot of a mountain, only to disappear a hundred yards later into the porous sands of the valley bottom. There are few true creeks and rivers. A homesteader could fence off ten acres around a spring and potentially own the only water in a hundred square miles. Even though the homesteader didn’t own the grass on the public land surrounding his spring, he commanded it all by fencing off the water.
That is just what the Fallini family and every other successful rancher in the Great Basin has done. They own a relatively small spread of land around key water sources that allow them to have exclusive grazing on a vast spread of public land. The Fallinis have only abo
ut two thousand acres, all of it around small springs on the flat valley floors where they can irrigate hay, but their grazing stretches for miles beyond in all directions.
During Giovanni Fallini’s life, Nevada was changing. Many of the mines closed, workers left, local markets died out. Ranchers went bust, often because they tried to run too many animals on too little grass, and when a bad drought year came around, and there was nothing for the animals to eat, families had to sell. Over the decades, Fallini’s grandfather saved up to buy out other ranchers and add new springs. A small ranch became a larger ranch. Giovanni’s son Joseph, born in 1904, did the same. By the 1950s, the family controlled the sprawling ranch it has today.
“I guess over the years we’ve put together a pretty good spread,” Joe Fallini said with a chuckle.
He grew up working cattle on the ranch on horseback, then went to the University of Nevada. He learned to fly a plane and got into skydiving. In his office upstairs in the ranch house hangs an old picture of him free falling while dressed in a black witch’s cloak and trying to put a broom between his legs.
“That broom was like a rudder that flipped me all over the place,” he said, grinning. “I never did get it to work.”
After college, Fallini taught himself to drill for water in the desert. He bought a used drill truck and added dozens of new wells to the ranch. He fell in love with his college roommate’s sister, Susan, and persuaded her to marry him and move out to the ranch.
Living miles and miles from anyone, Fallini and his wife, who grew up near Los Angeles, have learned to do a lot for themselves. When it was going to cost too much to bring electricity to the ranch, they strung miles of power lines on their own. They drilled wells for water. An old stone cabin next to the ranch house had once been a stage stop—Susan turned it into a school and taught her three daughters and a scattering of ranch-hand kids. The daughters, now all grown, learned to rope and brand steers and all have graduate degrees. One of their daughters and her husband run the family hay farm a few miles up the valley. Their grandson, Giovanni, the fifth generation, grew up in the saddle and may one day inherit the entire operation.
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