In places where the animals are most concentrated-half of the horses live in Nevada-new problems are surfacing. Today, some 37,000 of them roam more than 30 million acres of public land in the West, with large populations in Nevada, California, Utah, Wyoming and Oregon. There were then about 17,000 wild mustangs left. Johnston, later called Wild Horse Annie, spent the rest of her life fighting for laws that culminated in the federal Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which protected mustangs on public lands. In 1950, Velma Johnston, a bank secretary on her way to work in Reno, Nevada, followed a livestock truck leaking blood, then watched in horror as wounded mustangs were unloaded at a slaughterhouse. Perhaps as many as two million mustangs were rambling around the western half of the country by the end of the 19th century, according to Deanne Stillman, who consulted roundup, slaughterhouse and other records for her book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West.īy the early 20th century, mustangs were being sold in Europe as horse meat, turned into glue, pet food and pony fur coats in the United States, herded and harassed by airplanes and shot for sport. troops-including George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry-that battled the Great Plains peoples.Ī ranger in Texas’ Wild Horse Desert in the mid-1800s described a herd that took an hour to pass: “as far as the eye could extend on a dead level prairie, nothing was visible except a dense mass of horses.” Escaped cavalry chargers and other runaways mixed with the original Spanish herds. White settlers also pressed mustangs into service, as did U.S. The Crow and the Sioux tribes mounted spectacular war parties and hunted on horseback. By the mid-1600s, Plains Indians were capturing and taming horses-which the Lakota called sunka wakan, or sacred dog-and the animals revolutionized their cultures. The name comes from the Spanish mestengo, meaning stray. Mustangs are the feral descendants of 16th-century steeds the conquistadors brought to North America. They are living emblems of the Old West, fleet exiles from a fenced world. But mustangs, she realized from spending months among them, are not ordinary horses. Seemingly assured of his own supremacy, the stallion quit snorting and stomping, and before long the photographer found herself being sniffed by mares and foals.įarlow spent part of her childhood astride a one-eyed cow pony in southern Indiana and has photographed the lustrous Thoroughbreds of Kentucky’s Bluegrass Country. “All of a sudden I just sat down,” Farlow said. When Farlow was photographing a herd in Oregon’s remote Steens Mountain area, a pinto stallion charged out of the sagebrush at her, hooves churning. Visiting a South Dakota mustang preserve on a Sioux Indian reservation, she was lost in fog for what seemed like hours at last she heard a soft nicker from a horse just 20 feet away, hidden in the mist. In Nevada’s Jackson Mountains, she slathered on sunscreen in Oregon’s Ochoco National Forest, she wore snowshoes. To create her haunting, intimate photographs of wild mustangs, Melissa Farlow staked out water holes across the West. Horses brought by Spanish explorers in the 16th century bore a dark stripe along the spine, a feature that marks some mustangs today.