The killing fields
Jun 26th 2008
From The Economist
Long a symbol of freedom, America's wild horses may soon be no more
In 1964 a new car was launched at the New York World's Fair: the Ford Mustang. Both its name and its galloping horse logo, adapted from Frederic Remington’s portraits of the Old West, epitomised a peculiarly American dream about a land of cowboys and big skies. More than 8m Mustangs have been sold. But on America’s old frontier, the free-roaming wild horses now struggle for survival.
Deanne Stillman, a journalist, began researching this history in 1998 after 34 wild horses were massacred in the Virginia Range of mountains near Reno, Nevada. The horse began evolving on the North American continent 55m years ago, before crossing the Bering land bridge and spreading through Asia and Europe. The word mustang derives from the Spanish. Ms Stillman traces the return of the horse with the conquistadors; its partnership with Native Americans; its use in wars and cattle drives; its role in literature, lore and films; and its demise during the “Great Removal” of 1920-35 when hundreds of thousands of mustangs were sent to slaughter to provide cheap meat.
Her book culminates in the fight against the powerful cattle-ranching lobby which sees the animals as pests and wants them removed from the public (federally owned) land where cattle graze. Yet, as Ms Stillman points out, the area where most of America’s mustangs run free today supplies just 3% of the country’s beef.
The author quotes some startling statistics. In the 1700s there were so many mustangs in Texas that maps marked some areas merely as “Vast Herds of Wild Horses”. In the American civil war, 1.5m horses and mules were killed or wounded. By the turn of the 20th century some 2m wild horses roamed the American wilderness. Only about 25,000 remain today, most of them on Nevada’s vast swathes of public land, where wild horses have flourished beyond the reaches of man.
Legendary mustangs gallop through the book. Comanche survived being shot several times at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and lived out his days at Fort Lincoln begging for sugar-lumps and buckets of beer. Steamboat ejected thousands of cowboys from his saddle and became famous as “the horse who couldn’t be rode”.
Ms Stillman also includes William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West shows, Charles “Pete” Barnham, a 19th-century mustanger whose method of running horses through a jute-lined chute into a trap is still used today, and Velma Johnston, better known as “Wild Horse Annie”, who launched a campaign to give mustangs federal protection. She succeeded in 1971, after a 20-year struggle, when President Richard Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, banning inhumane round-ups of mustangs and donkeys on public lands and preventing their sale for slaughter.
Special interests have since chipped away at that legislation. In late 2004 Conrad Burns, the then Republican senator for Montana, introduced a controversial amendment removing all protection for wild horses over the age of ten (which is not that old for equines) and those that have not been adopted on the third attempt under the government’s controversial Adopt-a-Horse programme. Between 1971 and 2006, 200,000 mustangs were taken from the wild by Department of the Interior agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which administers America’s 264m acres of public land.
“Mustang” makes for harsh reading. The cruel round-ups of the past, famously portrayed in John Huston’s 1961 film “The Misfits”, are more than matched by today’s incidents in which mustangs are surreptitiously shot or fenced off from their water sources. The author argues strongly against the current federal round-ups—or “gathers” as the BLM prefers to call them—where helicopters run exhausted and panicking horses into corrals before they are sent to various fates. Around 30,000 mustangs are now kept in government holding facilities—more than those that still roam free. Some are due to be sold for adoption as “living legends”, some will be sent to long-term pastures in Kansas and Oklahoma, where cattle ranchers are paid by taxpayers to keep them. Thanks to Mr Burns, approximately 8,000 will end up at the slaughterhouse. A sad end for the animal that was revered by Native Americans. “Horses are gods,” a Hidatsa elder once said: “Treat them well. They have minds and understand.”
Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West.
By Deanne Stillman.Houghton Mifflin; 348 pages; $25
(June 9, 2008)
ISBN-13: 978-0618454457
