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Sunday, June 15, 2008
The Mustang Endures as a True American Icon Despite Man’s Best Efforts to Wipe Them Out
By Fritz Thompson
“Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West” by Deanne Stillman
Houghton Mifflin, $25, 384 pp.
They returned to the New World in the company of conquistadors, strong and spirited steeds coming back to the vast land where their prehistoric ancestors evolved and later went extinct thousands of years ago.
The predecessors to today's big-hearted wild horses at first flourished in the American West, where herds of mustangs still exist, threatened as they are by brutal attempts to exterminate them.
Deanne Stillman has crafted a fascinating narrative with all the grace and power embodied in the wild horses that once populated the Western range by the hundreds of thousands.
There were an estimated 2 million mustangs at the end of the 1800s. Today there are about 25,000.
Juan de Oñate trekked north with 1,500 horses and mules in 1598. His arrival in what is now New Mexico became the seminal event in the life of the mustang. Eighty-two years after Oñate's arrival, the Pueblo Revolt erupted and the Spaniards fled south, leaving behind 3,000 horses.
Soon, practically every Indian tribe in the West had adopted the horse, while thousands of other horses ran free. They became the nucleus of today's embattled mustangs.
The practice of taking mounts from the mustang herds developed especially after 1.5 million horses were killed, wounded or felled by disease during the Civil War.
The most celebrated of these mustangs was Comanche, who was captured and became an extraordinary and battle-scarred U.S. Army mount. He was suddenly a national hero after he was found wandering and wounded — the sole Seventh Cavalry survivor of Gen. George Armstrong Custer's ill-fated campaign and subsequent massacre on the Little Bighorn.
Stillman records the many deaths among the mustangs — between a handful in some instances to many hundreds in others. Frequently, they have been sent directly to slaughterhouses; there are three in the country.
The lives of other mustangs are illuminated, showing how they have shaped the destiny of America.
There are the stalwart horses of the grueling Pony Express; Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show and his beloved horse, Isham; cattle drives with the endless parade of men and horses; the birth of pari-mutuel racing and jackpot rodeos; Crazy Horse on his painted pony dashing through the Badlands; William S. Hart and his bona fide movie star horse, Fritz; the horse as an icon, along with the cowboy and the Indian.
Stillman sees the “epic, sad, grand and still unfolding saga of the wild horse” as an enduring symbol of their threatened freedom.
The mustang is no friend to hard-pressed Western stockmen or to their various and sundry governmental allies or to those who simply revel in the hunt. No matter that killing a mustang resonates somewhat more deeply in the American conscience than, say, stalking a rhino.
There is no “happily ever after” in Stillman's magnificently told saga.
Nevertheless, she sees a glimmer of hope.
“And in the higher elevations of the Nevada desert and in pockets across the West,” she writes, “the mustangs still roam, unfettered, in pretty herds, each with its own story ...
“On they go, but for how much longer, we cannot say.”
Fritz Thompson is a retired Journal reporter and editor.
Deanne Stillman discusses, signs “Mustang” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 17, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW, and at 5 p.m. Wednesday, June 18, at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe.