In The Land of the Mustangs

The three ambled slowly along the hard scrabble trail, rocky white clumps that crumble underfoot and disintegrate into grainy sand; a landscape peppered with knots of spiny sagebrush.  Looking at the trio you feel desolation; a desperate loneliness;drifting as if looking for something or someplace but you don’t know what or where.  They headed for the ridge that would soon swallow them up taking them to..

A family group of mustangs stops at a water hole

To me they’d always been sort of mythological creatures of the high desert.  I’d vaguely heard about them but didn't know if they were real or like Pecos Bill just romantic fables of the American West.  And so on a recent trip to Reno we decided to bag a day in the casinos and go to the high desert east of the “biggest little city,” to find the wild mustangs.  I’d told some co-workers that we were giving up a day at the casino and the indoor pool to go out in the 20 degree temps looking for horses.  “Horses?” they asked with a look and a tone that wondered if my lights were on, let alone anyone being home.  “What horses?”

We drove northeast out of Sparks when  just after crossing into the Paiute Indian Reservation our guide Tina called out, “There’s two!”  She pulled her gold SUV over to the shoulder and I looked up the slope off to our right but couldn't locate them on the shadow shrouded hill.  I was almost desperate, feeling that this might be the only sighting of the day.  Finally sighting the two young bachelor stallions was an inspiration.  This was Americana embodied.  Not much of a big deal to most folks I suppose but pretty darned heady for someone who just can’t get enough of the American spirit.

The beauty of the wild mustang. 


















The date of origin of Equus Caballus in North America has been bandied about some with the most recent dating placed at some 860,000 years ago.  Equus migrated to Asia until it became extinct in North America about 10,000 years ago after which, the history books tell us, the Spanish re-introduced the horse to the New World as early as the second voyage of Columbus in 1493.  In the middle of the 16^th century the Spanish explorers Coronado and De Soto crossed into what would become the United States.  Coronado crossed from Mexico and made his way to present day Kansas.  De Soto started in Western Florida and explored the region of the present day South Eastern United States.  Both expeditions brought with them the horse and both left it with the indigenous populations.  Horses that escaped the Spanish and Indians spread throughout the American Plains and became mustangs.  The word “mustang” stirs the imagination.  It brings to mind the wild spirit and untamed adventure of the American west.  But the origins of the word forge a double edged sword for these proud beasts.  “Mustang” derives from the Spanish, “mestengo,” which means “animal that strays” from its owner.  And so the wild American horse is saddled with a word that essentially means feral; a stray non-indigenous nuisance.  What is it exactly?  We would find that the answer all depends upon your point of view.   

We drove past a lone stallion standing near a small watering hole that was maybe a bit bigger than my smallish backyard.  Farther up the road on a hillside above a warehouse we saw the three horses walking along the rocky trail.  It was a family; a youngster following a mare with the stallion taking up the rear to keep the young charger in line.  We watched them for a piece as they headed up the ridge to somewhere.   

We backtracked along the road and returned to the little watering hole and saw a small band of horses approaching the brackish little pool.  Tina got her SUV within walking distance and we got out and approached slowly.  The group, Tina explained, was a family band.  She told us that they wouldn’t linger long at the water’s edge; just long enough to get refreshed and then they would move on.  The lead stallion having noticed the lone male we’d seen earlier remained on the periphery of the band and kept a wary eye on the stranger, who began to approach the group.  The leader followed suit and as the two stallions approached each other Tina told us that some equine drama was in the offing.  As the two males closed the rest of the band moved away to safety.  One young horse galloped across the path of the stranger.  The stallions came together.  They sniffed and eyed each other.  If the meeting went badly it could result in the two powerful beasts raising themselves on their hind legs, smashing fore hoof into shoulder, baring teeth and biting; a fight that would continue to the vanquishing of one or the other.  This time there was just a brief pause and the interloper turned and ambled away, apparently deciding this band wasn’t worth the trouble.  As the stranger moved away the band’s leader found the lone stallion’s dung pile and dropped a large load of his own on top of it; a sign that would show all present who the boss was.   

Cora asked why there would be such a confrontation.  “Because that’s what guys do,” I responded only partly in jest.  In some ways I suppose it’s no different than a couple of yahoos in different colored jerseys squaring off in the stands at a football game.  With these two stallions the security of the family band was at stake and no alcohol was involved.  Could somebody please remind me which is supposed to be the higher life form?

A young mustang runs from the path of a strange stallion

After the confrontation the band returned to the watering hole and finished refueling.  The little herd would soon drift away with the lead stallion taking up the rear to make certain that the group was behaving; maybe nip at the flanks of a dawdling youngster. 

Before returning to Sparks, we came upon a family of three; a mare, a stallion and their one offspring.  The mare and the young horse were together feeding on the dry sage brush, while the stallion was stationed a fair piece off to the side.  We quietly got out and approached the two.  They looked up and eyed us warily for a few moments before they went back to their feeding.  I suppose it was the curiosity of youth that made the young horse raise his head and look at us on and off for a few brief moments while mom just calmly continued feeding. 

Mare and her offspring feed on scraggly sagebrush 

We got within about twenty yards of the pair, taking pictures, while I peppered Tina with whispered questions.  The stallion looked up, saw us and approached.  I mentioned to Tina that had we gotten to within a fraction of this distance to a bear or a moose with a baby in tow, events would quickly take a turn for the worse; our worse.  Did we have to fear some aggressive behavior?  I asked.  She assured me that unless our own behavior became in some manner threatening we would be perfectly safe.  The stallion joined his family and the three fed.  After a short time, we got in the SUV and headed back to Sparks.  I was amazed that we could get so close to these beauties.  My layman’s mind tells me that there surely is something in the genes of these wild beasts that tells them that we two legged strangers are in some ways their partners.  Or maybe I’m wrong.

This is not the land just east of Sparks that I remember as a kid, when highway 80 was a lonely two lane track that cut through the searing heat of the high desert.  The craggy, ruggedly beautiful face is blemished by distribution and mining.  Out here the mustang shares the landscape with big, flat sprawling concrete and steel warehouses and the pockmarks of mining operations.  Vast tracts of this area now belong to Walmart, EBay, PetSmart and other corporations that have set up massive warehouses which feed their regional stores.  What used to be arid wildland is dotted with the camp followers that make money off of the big corporate warehouses and mines; a filling station here, a Subway sandwich shop there.  Between the big warehouses and occasional burgeoning strip malls are vast tracts that are up for sale.  Make no mistake; this land will be snatched up.  More business will move in and when business is entrenched the home builders will blot the wild beauty with bland, cookie cutter developments; cheaply built, characterless, lookalike boxes made to last 20 years or so.  And the tracts will spawn tawdry, tacky malls.  All of this will have the blessings of politicians.  And when business and politicians come together they form the jaws of a trap that rarely bodes well for the local wildlife. 

I’m a romantic when it comes to the American West.  Oh yeah, I know the history; I know the land grabbing, the genocide and the violence.  I know all of that.  But I also know that the American West is what has captivated the entire world.  The American cowboy captures the fancy that compels tourists from abroad to get some small taste of the American Old West. 

Eye of the mustang

There’s beauty in these horses that goes far beyond their rugged, powerful, physical grace.  They’re equine symbols of the American West and American progress.  The horse helped to build this land.  It carried the pioneers.  It hauled the goods.  It carried the mail.  Where else was there a Pony Express?  It was the unwilling combatant in our nation’s wars.  It lay among the dead at White Plains in the Revolution, at Brandy Station in the Civil War and the Meuse-Argonne in World War One.  The horse carried the Plains Indians who rode with unmatched artistry; skilled horsemen launching an arrow at a buffalo while riding at full gallop on nothing more than a pelt cinched to the horse’s back.  To the American Indian the horse was much more than a mode of transportation.  Among the Sioux, the horse was powerful medicine, a supernatural being of great power.  The horse is in this nation’s DNA.

It often happens in America that national treasures often fall victim to the reality of the real American treasure chests; business, politics and money.  Ranchers, miners, developers and bankers pay the freight and the U.S. Government’s Bureau of Land Management conducts roundups which are notable for their cruelty. 

Terrified horses are herded using helicopters that chase them for miles. (American Wild Horse Preservation video)

In 2013 a federal judge issued a restraining order halting a roundup in which a BLM chopper chased horses through a barbed wire fence.

An NBC report (linked here)documented cases in which horses were herded into undersized pens where the panicked animals kicked and gouged each other or become ensnared in the bars of the pen itself.

The same report documented the instance of a young colt that was chased for so long and so far by a helicopter that it literally ran its hooves off.  It had to be put down. 

Once collected family groups are separated with males, females and young horses sent to separate facilities.

Some of the horses are put up for adoption.  Others have allegedly found their way to the dinner table.  In 2013 it was alleged that the BLM sold 1700 mustangs to a Colorado rancher for 10 dollars a head, who then turned and sold them to a Mexican slaughterhouse just over the border.  In March of 2014 a small herd of horses was rounded up in Wyoming by the BLM and then turned over to the state which in turn sold them to a Canadian slaughterhouse.  

During our drive we explored a winding canyon.  It’s a tortured, weather beaten place.  The trees are gnarled tangles of naked branches; the ground a hard, jagged rocky surface dotted with dry spiky sagebrush.  There is a small spring that bubbles up from the flinty surface forming little more than a lifeless puddle that the horses paw at in order to get to the water.  The temperature that morning was in the mid-twenties.  In the summer the land sears.

     The harsh land of the mustang

You look at these horses and the land that they live on and you feel the paradox.  They epitomize freedom and yet you look at them and feel a loneliness that knows no depths.  The scraggly sagebrush that they eat hangs from un-brushed manes.  These are the beasts that have historically been our partners.  Cora looked at them and felt that nagging desolate sorrow.  “I want to feed them,” she said.  Tina told us that some well-meaning folk do bring the horses food which, not being natural to them makes them sick. 

Walking to nowhere

We came on this trip to see the fabled embodiment of the freedom of the American West.  And that we did.  And we came back inspired by their beauty and majesty and their tenacious existence in the face of the harsh high desert environment.  We also came back saddened with the knowledge that these beasts, as iconic, as free and as lonely as a Guy Clark Western ballad are treated by our government with a blithe, businesslike and abject cruelty.   

In order to best get a chance to view the mustangs we booked a tour with Sonny Boy's Tours.  Tina, our guide, took us to BLM's Palomino Valley Adoptions Center.  Here Cora fell in love with an albino mare. She was a sweetheart who, unlike the other horses skittish at human contact, approached and let us pet her.  Cora talked to the white mare who came wandered away and then came back for more attention.  We noted raw scars on her hind legs which Tina said were likely from the BLM roundup that brought her to the facility.  After visiting Palomino Valley we went to the Paiute Reservation at Pyramid Lake and then to various locations east of Sparks where we viewed and photographed the wild mustangs.  Along the way Tina played an informative CD which told of the history of the mustang and of the state of Nevada.  Sonny Boy's Tours website is: www.renowildhorsetours.com or you can call 775-200-5205.