Wild Horses?

There is a common misconception in this country with regard to feral horses. There are very few, if any free roaming horses who have not been domesticated at one time and then either released or escaped into the wild. People like to call these horses mustangs, when in reality there is very little if any connection between these types of horses and the horses brought here from Spain by the Conquistadors in the 1500's refered to as mustangs.

In the early sixties in New Mexico there was a rancher in my home town who had a large desert ranch in the area known as the Jornada Del Muerto, the journey of death. This area about one hundred miles long and situated between two mountain ranges was traveled extensively by the early Mexican settlers in New Mexico, because it was safer to travel the Jornada and risk dying of thirst, rather than following the well established trail along the Rio Grande where there was water and risk death by the hand of the Apache.

This is harsh desert land and it suffers no fools, but Pete Graham and his father had operated a re-mount station and raised fine thorobred horses to be sold to the U.S. Cavalry in the late 1800's and early 1900's. When the horse market began to decline in the 1920's and 30's Pete and his dad began to run cattle on their ranch. Pete told me when I was a kid that he could not bear to sell his mare herd so they just let them run wild on the ranch.

By the early sixties the horses on the ranch were so inbred that it was almost impossible to find a solid horse in the herd, there were paints, and grullas and even appaloosas, but few solid colored horses that were worth anything as saddle horses.

Pete allowed us kids to search the herd of horses that at that time amounted to over two hundred animals, and then when we found what we were looking for he would sell us the horse we picked for $25.00., The only trouble being that we had to catch it and get it home. An intimidating job even to us young cowboys with the skills to do it.

My friend Dale and I searched that herd for a long time until we found a nice looking little yearling grulla stud colt that we liked. We set a date to go after him and when the time came we loaded Dale's dad's big gentle stud horse Buttons in the back of their four wheel drive pickup and drove the thirty some odd miles to the Graham Ranch full of anticipation of the thought of trapping this youngster.

Pete Graham built corrals around all of his wind mills for the express purpose of making it easier to trap cattle and horses when they came to water. We went to the well that we knew the herd of horses our little horse belonged to came to water, and there we set the gates open and ready for when the horses came to water in the middle of the day.

We hid the pickup and Buttons the stud in a wash far from the well, and then we hid in the brush ready to jump from hiding and close the gates on the herd when they came in. We didn't have long to wait and when the herd came thundering through the corral gate, we closed the gate and were pleased to find our little horse in the group.

We then sorted out the horses we didn't want back out the gate and they thundered away, the horse we wanted was the only one left in the pen. We retrieved the pickup and backed it up to the loading chute built into the lumber corrals, and then using Buttons we roped the colt by the neck and pulled him up the chute and into the back of the pickup.

We then loaded Buttons into the back of the truck next to the stud colt, and wise old Buttons who had performed this service many times before pushed the much smaller colt against the side of the truck rails and kept him from being able to jump out of the truck as we hauled him down the road.

Dale and I were really excited to return home and begin to work with this young horse, whom we hoped would be trained into a good stock horse. The colt traveled very well down the road with Buttons nudging him when needed and we soon made it back to Dale's dad's place with our prize.

The young horse was perhaps the wildest horse I have ever been around. We were quite concerned that he might try to jump out of the tall corrals at Dale's dad's place. These corrals had been built specifically to contain the wildest horses and cattle, and it seemed that wild horses and cattle were the only kind of animals to be found in this western land.The corrals consisted of ten foot tall tornio posts stacked vertically side by side and then tied into heavy wire stretched between telephone poles that were stuck into the ground two feet deep, the posts shaped into a rectangle about two hundred feet in circumfrance. The pole tied side by side made an inpenetrable barrier that kept in the largest and wildest bulls.

We decided that after we unloaded him from the truck we would then tie a large tire around his neck to stop him from trying to jump out of the corral. We roped the colt, tied the tire to his neck and then let him up. He began looking wildly around the corral for a place to escape, and suddenly when he realized he could move after being confined for so long by Buttons and us, began dragging the tire with him and then backed his butt into the furthest corner of the large corral. He then took off as fast as he could run with the tire around his neck running towards the opposite sides of the corral and then leaping with all of his might straddled his belly on the sharpened tips of the corral poles.

The tips of the poles impaled him, but he struggled until he pushed his whole body over the fence and struc the ground hard, then with his intestines dragging behind him took off in a lope towards the Rio Grande a half mile away. Horrified at what we had just seen, we saddled horses as quickly as possible and went after the doomed colt.

We tracked him by the blood trail he left, but then we lost him in the heavy brush near the river that is almost impossible to ride through on a horse. Dale and I searched all that day, but we did not find the colt and we assumed that he struggled as deeply as he could into the dense brush and died from massive blood loss. We were heart broken and at that time of my life I had never seen anything as horrfying as this happen to an animal.

Although we searched when we could for months afterwards we never found the little colt's body who chose freedom over confinement. Perhaps his death was a freedom to him. Some horses can never be tamed, they will not accept confinement. I have never forgotten the death of this horse and so many times after this event occured I wished that we had never caught the beautiful little colt, and had just let him run free.