American Wild Horses, Cattle & Cowboys

In 1971, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon signed into law the Free Roaming Wild Horse & Burro Protection Act.

That Law (Public Law 92-195), and the ultimate locations of wild horse herd areas, called Herd Management Areas (‘HMAs’) drew upon science from an era (1950-1960’s) that had very little understanding of paleontology and ecology of American wild horses, which today is far more advanced. Back in 1971, that law depended primarily assumptions made using livestock management concepts of domestic horses that were ingrained dogma at the Bureau of Land Management (‘BLM’), which arguably has become a renegade ‘for profit’ fiefdom operating contrary to law and science.

The book *Alkali trails, written by William Curry Holden in 1930, is an amazing accounting of the great cattle drives in and around Texas and the cowboys that lived during the 1800’s. 

Locally, here in Siskiyou County, CA, one our own well-known cowboys, George F. Wright wrote and spoke fondly of our local cultural heritage horses (“the wild Ones”, as George called them) that lived in the local region for time immemorial. I know, because I have George’s personal diary and photo-album. The fossil record of the ancestors of the wild horses on our local landscape is the ultimate truth of their native status.

And what is made clear in the book Alkali trails is that, without wild horses, there wouldn’t have been any such cattle drives. Horses were vital to the enterprise and essential to the lives of all Americans and the economy right up until the middle first part of the 1900’s. So it’s belittling and dishonorable to our American heritage and tradition to disparage or disrespect the surviving remnant descendants of those special American horses. 

For the Love of a Horse 
by  Tom Sheehan

As outspoken as any wrangler could be, was John Joseph “Jack” Meglin, wrangler for the Cross-Bed Ranch in the Texas Panhandle, demanding that his horses be given their honest due and good care, “lest that cowpoke not doin’ so be fixed one way or another. I ain’t raisin’ and runnin’ chickens for the drive, but horses good as men and smarter that some I’ve known.”
Cowboys, we know, can say a hundred ways they’re in love, and here are a few of them:

• He weren’t born, mister, he was made for me. Just for me. My horse.
•    Now tell me that ain’t some critter he’s sittin’ like he’s on top of the world. That’s a horse.
•    You think she’s got a chest. See what my horse brings with her.
•    See how he runs, the way his muscles move him along, like the good Lord took special attention.
•    I’d put everythin’ I own in the kitty, ‘ceptin’ my horse.​
•    I’m sorry, Ma’am, but there’s only one love in my life right now, and it’s my horse.

America is a horse culture. The America that we all enjoy today wouldn’t have been possible without our American wild horses. As Americans, we have a duty to honor and protect our remaining small herds of cultural-heritage horses. We owe these horses at least that much lest we betray our own heritage.

Excerpt from Alkali Trails, page 37, written by William Curry Holden, 1930.

This is important history pertaining to the wild horses and their ultimate distribution across the west when the great cattle drives ended, which resulted in many horses being released into areas that in pre-Columbian times were not their natural habitats. One-hundred years later, when the Bureau of Land Management (‘BLM’) and the United States Forest Service (USFS) were mandated by the 1971 Act to protect and humanely manage wild horses in areas where they were found (as of Dec. 1971), boxes were drawn on maps that defined Herd Management Areas (‘HMA’s) for BLM managed horse areas, and Wild Horse Territories for the USFS horse areas,

Modern paleontological research into some of the BLM’s Herd Areas created under the 1971 Act, don’t contain evidence of horses living there in ancient times. However there are other areas, many in remote vacant wild lands, where there is ample fossil evidence of horses on the landscape.

In 1971, when the Act/Law was passed, boxes were drawn where the horses were at that time without considering that many of them were displaced from their native areas because so many horses were needed for the massive cattle drives in the 1800’s. 

As time marched on, motor vehicles replaced horses and ranches became established and more dependent upon motorized equipment creating excess horses. Those horses were pushed from one place to another and over time, deep into areas used for cattle/sheep grazing. In many of the big production livestock areas, there are no horse fossils that exist in those areas. So it makes no sense to have wild horses commingled and competing with livestock for resources in areas that were never part of their pre-Columbian native habitats. This is especially relevant given the latest science shows there are millions of acres of remote, vacant wild lands where there are no competing enterprises that show a fossil record of wild horses, where horses could be ecologically reestablished.  

This is just one of the many scientific and economically supported reasons we advocate for humanely relocating wild horses away from these economic battlefields and into areas where they are no longer in conflict with livestock, mineral/gas enterprises and into wildfire prone remote wilderness aka vacant lands.

*Holden, W. C. (1998). Alkali trails, or, Social and economic movements of the Texas frontier, 1846-1900. United States: Texas Tech University Press. This book is still available for purchase at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Alkali-Trails-Economic-Movements-Frontier/dp/B00A8XF63U/