The Romantic Nonesense of the Feral Horse

 

 Human being engaged in shocking example of lack of horse appreciation. . . or perhaps an Indian capturing a future mount in a romantic visage of the Old West.

I read in the Tribune that the Federal Government has re-placed, as in placed again, several hundred feral horses, inaccurately commonly termed "wild" horses, on the Federal domain in Nevada.  The local county and a local rancher protested, but to no avail.

And well they should have protested.  Feral horses have about as much place in the natural ecosystem of North America as feral house cats do.  None the less, feral cats, despised by bird lovers and naturalist alike, are detested when wild, while piles of gooey romantic slop are poured out about the feral horse.

I like horses, truly I do. But horses are an introduced animal in North America. There's nothing wild about them whatsoever.  As a protected animal on the public domain, they're busy destroying their range and displacing the native wildlife.  From a natural prospective, they shouldn't be there.  Indeed, feral horses are an environmental disaster.

They are there, as every generation of horse users up into the 1980s lost or dumped a few over the years.  Romance has it that every single wild pony out there is a Spanish Barb, but they aren't.  They're just as likely to bear Percheron genes in their lineage as something that was ridden by a Conquistador from Spain.

In this context, it's interesting to turn a bit to the focus of what this blog is supposed to be about; history.

As "wild horse" advocates like to point out, there were horses in North America in vast antiquity. What they don't like to point out is that those horses were an ancestor of the current horse, and bear about as much resemblance to the modern horse as pre human hominid species bear to us, or less.  I.e., if you saw one, you might not think horse at all, or if you did, it'd be "sort of horse like".  They were, as a rule, quite small and not of the useful riding variety at that.  They were most useful as meat for every meat eating thing.

No, the modern horses' story really starts in Asia and the European Steppes, not North America.

The first horses, as we conceive of them, came over with the Europeans.  Europeans were bringing horses with them from day one for obvious reasons.  It was one of the things that shocked and amazed the native inhabitants, which had no similar riding animal.

Europeans also lost a few pretty quickly.  The Spanish lost some of their various horses, blooded and not, fairly quickly, but then so did the English, Dutch and the French (and, some claim, the  Russians).  Pretty much anywhere you go on a colonizing enterprise, somebody is going to get sloppy or an accident is going to happen.  Horses, therefore, of a multiplicity of types, went feral where they could or went into native hands pretty quickly, for the most part, although usually on an edge of contact basis.  I.e., not continent wide.  Not only horses, it should be noted, but burros and mules as well.

In the American West, where the romantic slop about wild horses is focused, horses were first taken up by the natives in the early to mid 1700s, actually later than often generally supposed.  The location of the "first contact" with horses in some cases is preserved.  Indeed, one such encounter in Wyoming left the name of the location, Horse Creek, in that fashion, although such names should not be immediately relied up on as, after all, there are a lot of Horse Creeks and you need more data than that.  That particular spot was for one of the Sioux bands.  The Sioux and Cheyenne, as is well known, took up the horse enthusiastically.  The Shoshones, however, did not, except for a band that argued for their adoption, mostly made up of young men. That group was called The Arguers, or as we know them by that name in their native language, the Comanche.  Thus bloomed the native "horse culture", the run of which was extraordinarily brief.

By that time, the early to mid 1700s, the natives were largely picking up horses from feral bands of horses.  And those horses did indeed include descendants of mixed Spanish stock.  But that doesn't mean that they were all descendant of fine blooded horses by any means.  Not every Spaniard mounted in North America was a Don of noble lineage, and not all of their horses were of the type a Don would have ridden. That doesn't make them bad by any means, however.

Less well noted, by that time it seems probable that French Canadian horses, of a type called the Canadian, and likely descendant of Norman stock, were also wondering loose and coming down from the north, or just occasionally getting separated from the courier du bois.  Horses, generally oblivious to bloodlines themselves, mix freely and therefore the "pure" line of any one group of horses should be questioned, at least when not presented with greater detail.  And for that matter, to some degree, it doesn't matter.  It's fairly well demonstrated that, in North America, all western feral bands bread towards a grade standard of tough hardy pony.   Most "range horses", as they were typically called, resemble those ridden by Mongolian nomads more than they resembled something we'd imagine a Conquistador riding.

Range horses were a free resource by the late 19th Century, and by that time, both the Indians and the stockmen were making free use of them. Even the Army did, acquiring them from horse traders, intentionally, or occasionally from captured Indian stock, for supplementing those procured through the established remount system of the time.. The tough nature of the Range Horse, really a tough pony, was appreciated over the more injury prone "American Horse", which was larger and had a different dietary requirement.

 

Cowboy saddling a wild horse during Frontier Days, Cheyenne Wyoming circa 1903.

It'd be tempting to conclude the story here, and often it is, but that would not be historically accurate.  When the Frontier closed, the horse era was still alive and well, and there were plenty of feral horses around free for the taking.  They continued to be regarded as a free resource for ranchers well into the 20th Century, and it became common for some ranchers to supplement their incomes by domesticating a few captured.  Some of these went directly into use on ranches, but others not.  During World War One, more than a few were sold to British Remount agents, which sparked some protests from the British soldier users.  This all went on into the 1950s and 1960s.

 

Wild horse roundup, 1920s.

Just as horses were taken from these bands well into the 60s (and likely the 70s), horses were contributed to them as well.  In the early stock raising days in the west ranch horses were simply turned out to fend for themselves during the winter, and by the spring they were pretty darned wild in their own right.  No doubt not all of them came back into ranch use every spring.  And horses continued to get lost, etc. In the 1930s horses were outright abandoned, as desperate farmers pulled up stakes and moved on.  Plow horses that were very far from wild found themselves in wild bands, as their human owners gave up on them. This repeated itself in the West in the 1980s, when those who had bought pleasure horses during good times abandoned them when times got tough.

 

Stock horses, being roped so their shoes can be pulled before being turned out for the winter.  Montana, 1940s

This is not to say, however, that the use of wild horses remained the same throughout this period.  Indeed, it did not, as better options were available.   The Army moved away from range horses around the turn of the prior century, as it moved towards more blooded stock.  That move created the post World War One Remount system which in turn provided horses for breeding purposes to stockmen, who were eager to acquire the better stock that this allowed for.

By the 80s, indeed by the 1970s, a new era of nonsense had come in.  Driven on by the idea that certain forces were going to extinguish wild horses from the range, and motivated by the efforts of Wild Horse Annie, wild, that is feral, horses became Federally protected, and we've had to live with that ill thought out effort ever since.

The basic problem is that there'd never been a day when new horses weren't being added to "wild" bands, and there'd  never been a day when humans weren't culling them as well.  Federal protection was sold on the "romance" of the West, but in truth, humans had been removing horses from feral populations from the very first day they'd existed. Europeans recaptured horses if they could. Indians captured them as well.  Ranchers did likewise, for use and for sale.  An effective brake, therefore, existed on the expansion of the population. With the Wild Free Horse and Burro Act of 1971, that was no longer true.

And the results were pretty predictable. The population tends to get out of control, and the Federal government has to come in and address it. This brings out the deluded, who imagine these populations to be wild, when they are not, and somehow fails to grasp that the critical element that existed in prior days, human culling, was removed from the act. The horses in turn expand their population and destroy the range, to the determine of everything, including actual wild native animals.  The nonsense associated with them, including a wholly unwarranted Federal expense on a non native domestic animal, also serves to breed contempt for the Federal government in a region where it is little appreciated to start with, fueling such bad ideas as the transfer of Federal lands to the states, as local populations seek to free themselves of such overreaching.

The solution to this is quite simple.  Horses could simply be returned to state management, or lack of it, as they had been in former eras.  In this day and age, it's unlikely that any state would allow them to be wholesale removed, and several of the states that have isolated bands of "wild horses", including Wyoming, are quite proud of them.  But states would manage the matter better, and by inserting the element that made this story so "romantic" to start with, actual horsemen.

Not that this is going to happen. The trend is in the opposite direction. A peculiar example of a domestic animal gone feral, and preserved in a feral state by romanticism, with romanticism being based on human interaction, which is now precluded.