Round-ups

• Round-ups

Diamond Mountains
Nevada, 2004
By Deanne Stillman - pictures courtesy of Wild Horse Spirit

Excerpt from Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (Houghton Mifflin) - click pictures to enlarge

In the summer of 2004, I traveled to the Diamond Mountains of eastern Nevada to watch a series of wild horse round-ups. Such round-ups, or "gathers," as the government calls them, are generally done under the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management, but sometimes other agencies as well, depending on which herd is being culled. To get to the round-up site, a companion and I headed from Reno across highway 50, the officially proclaimed "Loneliest Highway in America," past Misfits Flats, where the Marilyn Monroe movie was filmed, stopping at the Pony Expresso cafe (near an actual stop on the old Pony Express trail), and then arriving in Ely the night before and staying at the Best Western along with the round-up crew. The next morning, we got up early and drove to the site of the gather in the mountains to the north.

A few weeks before the round-up, the crew had already carried out reconnaissance, determining where in the mountains the horses usually congregated, what was the best place for the trap, and from what points the helicopter should take off and refuel. Then a few days later they returned with their considerable team, their ventilated big rigs, their water trucks, their chopper and their portable corral and chute and they set the trap. When I arrived, they had just erected the metal fencing that would form the small pen into which thousands of mustangs had been chased before and thousands were going to follow.

The chopper took off and swept across the boulders and sage and gravel and up into the juniper and pine and then higher where the horses were grazing. Spotting them, the pilot radioed back and dropped altitude, slowing as he approached the band. At 500 feet they started to move and were harried out of their home, down ancient paths used by Indians, Spanish explorers, cattlemen, coyotes, hikers, drivers of jeeps and ATVs. As the horses neared the trap, the chopper peeled off and out raced the lead cowboy on his Judas horse. They galloped in front of the onrushing band, leading it toward the trap, peeling off like the chopper just before the mustangs ran into the dead-end corral.

Panicked, the horses shifted and banged against the fence. Some of the stallions tried to break out, leaping over the pack and battering smaller horses in the frenzy.

After a while, the mustangs tired and lowered their heads. Then they were funneled into trucks and hauled to a nearby gravel pit where they were sorted by gender and numbered with chalk.

In 1830, French scientist Jean Louis Berlandier had come to Texas to observe flora and fauna. Among the things he wrote about was a wild horse round-up. The vaqueros had certain words for what happened to mustangs once they were penned in. Sentimiento meant that a horse had died of heartbreak. Despecho meant that a horse had died of nervous rage. Hediondo referred to a corral that reeked of frightened and dying horses.

In the holding pen at the gravel pit a few miles from the round-up site, I saw many horses that appeared to be on the verge of the first two conditions. I saw a foal trampled by frightened mares and another horse whose leg was bleeding, perhaps injured while being run into the trap. A veterinarian was called and a few hours later he arrived to treat the horse. On the ground near one of the pens was a cattle prod. When I asked some crew members why it was there, they said they didn't know.

Bloodied fence

Electric cattle prod (seen in yellow)

As the sun went down, the horses raced nervously to one end of the pen and back, arching their necks, straining to look beyond the fence, some climbing on the backs of others, looking for an escape. Dusk faded to black and floodlights powered by a generator lit up the corral. It was then that I heard a disturbing sound. In other circumstances, it would have symbolized all that's right with the world. It was the shrieking and laughing of two children - the son and daughter of the crew chiefs - running just outside the fence that circled the horses, spooking the wild animals that only hours ago knew no such sounds, peering through the sheets of jute and calling loudly into the pen as the rest of the crew prepared dinner. The mustangs were scared and had nowhere to run except into each other. After awhile the children moved on and the horses grew less restive. Soon, their heads dropped, lower this time - the spark was fading.

Foal separated from his mother

The following morning, they were loaded onto two big rigs and hauled away, to the government's Pyramid Lake holding facility 240 miles to the east. My companion and I left a little while later and when we arrived at the corrals, the horses were already offloaded and fenced in with a desert view that ran all the way to the sky. Perhaps some of the scents that drifted in were familiar to them, but others - traffic from the highway nearby, diesel exhaust from the tractors that carried their hay - were not. Soon, they would be given vaccinations and freeze brands indicating government registration, year of birth, state of origin, and their own identification numbers - not unlike the information that the war horse Comanche carried on his shoulder.

Within a few months, they would meet varying fates. Many would be marketed as "living legends" through the government's adopt-a-horse program. Some would go to good homes. Others would end up with cruel owners. A few would be returned to the land after being injected with birth control. Over time, hundreds would make their way to the various sanctuaries and conservancies around the country. A small number would become famous, like Nevada Joe, a wild horse used for children's hippotherapy or J. B. Andrew, the dressage star, Eeyore, the mascot at Smoky Mountain National Park, or Montezuma and Peking Luke and the mustang palominos of the U.S. Marine Mounted Color Guard, the last of its kind in the country. Still others would fall victim to a new piece of legislation that unraveled the 1971 law. Passed during the George Bush administration, it sent them straight back to the slaughterhouse; out of the three then operating, two were in Texas, which had purged wild horses from its lands long ago.

Shortly after the mustangs from the Diamond Mountains had been rounded-up, the crew was heading to the next site for another round-up. They would add several more hundred horses to those they had just removed, as well as the 200,000 that they had taken off the range since 1974, when they began working under contract for the government. “Wild horses really fascinate me,” says Dave Cattoor, the cowboy with the craggy face who was in charge of the operation. “They’ve dominated my whole life. I think I must have been reincarnated from one of those old-time mustangers.”

July 6, 2004 - Sheep could be seen overrunning the range the day before the round-up.

2005, private cattle grazing the very range the horses were removed from the previous summer

2005, cattle fencing on the Diamond Mountain range - In some areas of Nevada, wild horses have been excluded from nearly 50% of their legal herd area by illegal fencing.

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