“The most fun time around here is branding,” Susan said. She had wandered in to sit with us at the table. “It’s work from dawn until way past dusk, but the whole family gets together and we do what we always used to do.”
She pulled out pictures of her kids herding cows and her grandson asleep in the back of a pickup after a long day. “It really is a good life we’ve made here,” she said, “and we are glad they like it enough to keep it going.”
There have been a few changes over the years. In the 1990s, Joe Fallini learned to fly an old Bell 47 helicopter, which he now uses to round up his cattle. Doing it on horseback used to take more than a month and often meant sleeping out on the range. He laughed as he told me this, adding, “I know how long it takes because I used to do it when I was a kid.”
We walked out to a barnlike hangar across from the house, and he showed me his helicopter. I asked whether he did the maintenance himself. “Nope,” he said quickly, then, with a wry smile, added, “Lot of moving parts in that thing. All very important.”
With the long family tradition in this valley in mind, Fallini said, he tries to operate the ranch in a way that will sustain the land for his grandchildren and their grandchildren. He runs about eighteen hundred cattle, and he said he tries to keep about two years’ worth of grass in reserve on the land in case of drought.
“Dad made sure we always took care of the land,” he said, “and I’ve tried to, too. But these horses, these goddamned horses.” His face grew dark, he shook his head in disgust, and his words trailed off.
If the notebooks stuffed in Fallini’s shirt pockets kept a list of existential threats to his ranching operation, wild horses would probably be at the top. The Bureau of Land Management would probably be second. He will tell you in no uncertain terms, with a long string of expletives attached, that he hates the goddamned horses and he hates the goddamned BLM even more.
“You can’t trust them—you just can’t,” he said, his voice rising and his eyes narrowed to slits. “They’re a bunch of rotten bastards.”
At first, the sudden anger can seem offbeat for an otherwise placid, friendly man who has worked hard his whole life, loves what he does, has done well, and brims with pride when talking about how his children and grandchildren are following after him. But one mention of horses and there it is. To understand it, you have to go back a hundred years to when wild horses roamed the land unprotected.
The Twin Springs Ranch is not just older than the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, it is older than the BLM, and older than the BLM’s predecessor agency, the US Grazing Service. Though almost all of the land on the ranch is legally public land, the public rarely makes an appearance, and there is no one who knows the land as closely as the Fallinis—certainly not the BLM, which often has employees cycle through the region every few years. So, if you have lived and worked and occasionally slept in a bedroll on the land for more than half a century, just as your ancestors did, it is understandable that, while technically the land is federal, it can start to feel like it belongs to you. And you start to care very deeply about what happens to it.
Wild horses have been in the area as long as anyone can remember—whether they came from Jack Longstreet’s herds on the other side of the mountains, or from the miners abandoning the area or the Paiute tribes, or escaped centuries earlier from Cortés himself, no one has any idea. Like most ranchers in the area, the Fallinis treated wild horses as part of the bounty of the land. They gathered mustangs to ride in the same way they gathered wood from the local hills to burn and stone from the local quarry to build. Anyone who needed a horse, they were there for the catching. The family tried to keep the number roaming the ranch at about 120, and occasionally they added domestic stallions to the mix to try to improve the bloodlines.
As a kid, before the 1971 law, Joe remembers the family setting up a water trap with a big corral fence around a spring and a door that swung shut. Then he or one of his brothers, or maybe his dad, would wait out there for the right horses to wander in. “We liked the horses,” he said. “We liked seeing them out there. Every once in a while, there got to be too many and we would need to get rid of them. So we would go get a permit.”
At the time, there was no federal law controlling wild horses. County commissioners gave permission for roundups in Nevada, regulating them much the same way building permits are regulated today. This is the system Velma Johnston encountered when she successfully shut down a roundup in Storey County in 1952.
After the horses were trapped, Fallini said, the buckaroos who needed a horse to ride could pick out the one they wanted, rope it, and break it. The family would also tell other folks in the county to come take a look.
“If anyone wanted a horse to ride, they could come look them over and pick them out,” Fallini said. “And we would chicken feed whatever nobody wanted. That was just normal. It’s how everybody did it.”
Over the years, members of the Fallini family have depended on good mustangs for ranch horses. It was sustainable, he said, it was well managed, and “it didn’t cost anybody anything.” That was the way things were when he was growing up, and to him it was so typical that, as a young man, he didn’t give it much thought. Then the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed in 1971, the BLM got involved, and everything changed.
The law allowed ranchers a limited time to claim horses on public land that were private—domestic horses that had been put out to graze without a permit. For each one gathered, ranchers would have to pay a trespass fee. The idea was to give everyone a chance to take what was theirs before new regulations took effect, but the regulations didn’t make much sense to ranchers in Nevada. For decades they had added domestic studs to wild herds and gathered the wild offspring for ranch work. In their view, almost all of the domestic horses were wild and almost all of the wild horses were domestic. The lines were so blurred that ranchers could easily make a claim that all the horses were theirs or none at all.
Many ranchers at the time simply decided to pay the fee and get rid of the horses, rather than cede control of the resource to the feds. In Montana, they got rid of nearly every wild horse. Only a small herd remains in the Pryor Mountains near Bighorn Basin. The same is true in the Elko District of Nevada and the Lakeview District in Oregon. In both cases, the local BLM district chief, sensing problems with the wild horse law, encouraged local ranchers to round up the horses, assuring them he would charge a low trespass fee that in the long run would be worth it. Lakeview ranchers claimed and removed sixteen hundred horses. Elko got rid of at least thirty-five hundred. In the mid-1970s, when the BLM got around to doing a formal inventory of wild horses, Lakeview and Elko had none left. On maps of Nevada today, you can still see a large void. The whole state is covered with Herd Management Areas except in the northeast corner. That corner is the Elko District.
When it came time for the Fallinis to decide what to do about the new law, Joe and his father disagreed. His father was all for getting rid of the wild horses on the ranch. It would be expensive to pay the trespass fees, he said, but he didn’t trust the federal government, and he didn’t want it interfering on the ranch. He had learned to mistrust the government in large part by ranching land directly north of the Nevada Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site) during the nuclear tests of the 1950s. Clouds of fallout from the tests drifted over the ranch. Cattle started dying, as did a few of the dogs, but officials from the Atomic Energy Commission denied there was any danger. In Joe’s office is a full-page framed black-and-white photograph of his father. He is crouched down on his land, fingering a fist of dirt. The photo ran in Life magazine in 1957, in an article in which the Atomic Energy Commission said nuclear testing was safe. It quoted his father saying, “Until proven different, we view radiation as a threat.”
His father took the same approach with the wild horse law. The government might be saying it would be OK, but he would assume it was dangerous.
Joe, who was thirty at t
he time, had more faith in a good outcome. He remembers telling his father that he liked the horses and didn’t want to get rid of them. He eventually persuaded the family to keep the mustangs around. “Stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he said when we met years later. “They’ve cost me well over a million dollars, and damn near ruined the ranch.”
The problem with horses on his ranch is simple, he said. The BLM has not done what it said it would do. It did not do what the law said it had to do. And it has never faced consequences for its actions.
In the 1970s, he said, the BLM estimated that the area where wild horses roamed on his ranch could reasonably sustain between 150 and 250 horses. Fallini went into a drawer in a bank of file cabinets and pulled out a stack of photos and papers. He keeps meticulous detailed accounts of his ranch, including how the horse herds increased. He began flipping through the photos, all taken in roughly the same spot over time. As he flipped, he read off figures from his annual horse counts. In 1971, when the law passed, his notes show there were 126 horses. By 1974, there were 480. By 1977, there were 703. By 1983, there were nearly 2,000 horses.
This was during the time when the BLM was scrambling to figure out what to do with all the horses captured in its roundup program. Fallini repeatedly wrote to the bureau, demanding they remove the excess horses, but his ranch, so far from everything, was pushed to a back burner.
The photos he held showed the impact. He started out with one taken in the early 1970s, an image of sagebrush intermingled with the platinum-blond tufts of rice grass and other native grasses. As he flipped through the photos, all showing the same general spot, the grasses grew sparser, then began to disappear. Spots of bare earth started to increase, then dominated. By the end, even the sagebrush—a hardy, woody shrub that is barely palatable to most animals—was mangled, and the grass was completely gone.
“Nothing but a moonscape and horseshit,” Fallini said.
According to Nevada Department of Wildlife surveys, deer and antelope herds nearly disappeared from the area during the same period. Horses were also playing havoc with the system of water troughs Fallini had created for his cattle. Horse herds jostling to get water would often break the tanks with their kicks, he said. They drank twice as much as the cattle, and soon the extra money spent on pumping water was running around $50,000 a year.
Laws controlling wild horses require the BLM to set a population for each Herd Management Area that maintains a “thriving natural ecological balance” and immediately remove horses when they exceed that level. But the BLM would not gather the horses in the Herd Management Area at Twin Springs, despite repeated pleas from Fallini. The bureau was too busy dealing with the costs of warehousing already gathered horses and the protests of wild horse groups. Apparently the problems of one rancher in one of the emptiest corners of the country could be ignored.
Desperate to protect the grass on the ranch, Fallini offered to remove the horses himself. The agency told him that if he touched the animals, he would be violating the law.
For Fallini, the BLM’s new role as a protector of horses was an ironic reversal. For decades, the bureau’s main role had been to gather up stray animals and encourage the livestock industry to be efficient and sustainable—at least from a beef and wool production perspective. Wild horses were like tumbleweed to the agency. They were unwanted, unproductive invasives. Getting rid of them was seen as being in the national interest. During World War II, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes proclaimed, “The removal of wild horses would protect the range in the interest of legitimate cattle and sheep production to win the war.” The agency fought horse protection efforts, like those of Velma Johnston, for twenty years before the 1971 law passed. It was making plans to kill horses right up until the 1971 law passed.
Fallini pulled out a two-page mimeographed planning document that the local BLM office had printed in 1971, just a few months before the law passed. He had kept it for decades as a reminder of the agency’s sudden shift in roles. The document was a plan to kill thousands of wild horses in central Nevada. The faint purple type showed that the BLM had listed tools needed: an asphyxiation chamber, a D9 bulldozer to cover the thousands of carcasses, and sharpshooters to take down the animals that couldn’t be caught in the roundup.
“Can you believe this?” he said, shaking the papers. “They were going to annihilate damn near every horse in the country, and a few months later they’re in charge of saving the damn things.”
The Fallini family was careful always to rotate its cattle from place to place, giving pastures plenty of rest so grass could grow back. But the wild horse herds stayed on the land year-round. Legally, the Fallinis were not allowed to herd them out of overused pastures or even shoo them away from water tanks. Slowly, the grass the family had banked for emergencies was eaten away.
In 1983, when the horse population in the West was around fifty thousand—twice the government’s goal—Fallini went to testify before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources at a hearing held in Rock Springs, Wyoming. The BLM had about ten thousand horses in the holding system at the time. The committee was discussing a bill that would allow the horses to be sold for slaughter. It was an idea many ranchers saw as common sense. Several ranchers spoke that day, all basically echoing the same concern: They had no problem with wild horses, but the herds were not being managed and their numbers were out of control.
“Our ranch has been completely devastated by these wild horses, and we’re footing the expense,” Fallini told the committee. “We have not turned a profit on this ranch for three years on account of the horses.” He warned that if the herds were not brought under control, it would put many ranchers like him out of business.
A sheep rancher from Colorado, John Prulis, was grazing his herds in Wyoming on the morning of the hearing when he heard about the meeting on the radio and hurried over. “I want to tell you for sure that us sheep ranchers and cattlemen are not rapists of the land that we have been accused to be,” he told the committee. “We believe in the conservation of our lands for production of food and fiber, which to me I think is a very essential contribution to this country. . . . And we have horses, we use horses, we like horses. We do not advocate for the eradication of wild horses, but we sure need to control them. . . . If it continues this way, it’s going to run not only us out of business, it’s going to ruin our public lands.”
Both the BLM and the ranchers told the committee they supported the bill to sell horses to slaughter. A number of representatives of animal welfare groups testified in opposition, saying it was the cattle that were overpopulated and needed to be reduced. A spokesman for The Fund for Animals, based in Manhattan, told the committee that its thousands of members would fight any move to slaughter horses. The bill didn’t make it out of committee. However dire things looked to western ranchers like Joe Fallini, politicians outside the Great Basin could see little upside to voting to condemn wild horses to slaughter. They could probably imagine the bags of mail flooding in from heartbroken children.
The wild horse herds on the Twin Springs Ranch continued to increase. Hundreds milled around water tanks, pounding the surrounding range to dust. At the peak of the population in the early 1980s, an anthropologist and author named Richard Symanski, who wrote a very thorough book called Wild Horses and Sacred Cows, spent a day touring the ranch with Fallini. Though wild horses had once been found in only one area, they had spread across the whole ranch. Symanski reported seeing “scores and scores of horses kick up dust and take flight at our approach.” Watching the fleeing horses, he later wrote he felt like it was the closest thing in modern times to early reports of the teeming grass sea of horses on the Wild Horse Desert of Texas two centuries earlier. “I was stunned,” he said, “by the number of horses I had seen.”1
Wild horse advocates often blame ranchers for the BLM’s roundup policy. If cattle weren’t eating all the forage, they say, horses would have plenty. Some have suggested it would be cheaper and more h
umane to buy out ranchers.
There is no doubt that cattle get most of the forage in many areas. But simply getting rid of cows won’t solve the problem. Horses, if unmanaged, will still proliferate until there are huge die-offs. There is a rarely mentioned example of this just south of the Fallini ranch on the missile testing grounds of Nellis Air Force Base. The base was the site of the first-ever wild horse preserve, created by the federal government in 1962. Since there were no cattle or other residents, and no mustangers could legally enter the place anyway, it wasn’t politically contentious to suggest that mustangs could have the run of the place. The next thirty years saw no management, no roundups, and no competition from cattle. Horses got what many advocates often wish for: They were left alone. The herds steadily increased until there were more than sixty-two hundred of them. In the late 1980s, a drought came and they began to die off. In 1990 and 1991, an estimated two thousand horses perished. Bleached carcasses dotted the sage. In an effort to try to save the horses from cruel deaths, the BLM began a roundup, removing 1,862 horses over the summer of 1991. Witnesses at the scene described hundreds of gaunt animals trying to drink from a spring no bigger than a puddle, while coyotes circled, ready to feast on those too weak to fight back.
“It was the kind of thing you don’t ever forget,” Dawn Lappin, a close friend of Velma Johnston who helped with the rescue, later told a reporter. “These animals were in a complete state of panic, dying of thirst and hunger.”2 That kind of disaster doesn’t just affect the horses. The whole ecosystem is thrown for a loop and it can take generations to recover.
Wild Horse Country Page 23