Wild Horses

 Wild Horses

Ten years have passed since the wild horse sale occurred in Wishek in September of 2013. Rangers at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park thought there were too many horses and decided to thin out about 100 of them. Why was this town, one rather far-removed from the badlands, chosen for the auction location? A sale of wild horses four years earlier in Dickinson proved to be a near disaster with one elderly gentleman injured and several people in the stands experiencing a near miss from a desperate stallion attempting to jump the fence. If memory serves, the Dickinson management refused to host it again. Wishek offered to hold it.

When notice of the new sale became public, I decided to attend. Strangers to the community had no problem finding the sale barn since dozens of cars and pickups surrounded it and filled every available parking space. A carnival-like atmosphere filled the air and there was no free lunch. It cost $10 to get in the door, another $5 to view the animals in their pens, and $10 for a catalog. I entered and found a seat just in time since it soon filled. Latecomers had to drive to the town’s civic center and watch on closed circuit television.

The friendly man sitting next to me who said to just call him Bill proved to be a good source of wild horse knowledge. I learned he was a retired Air Force F-14 top gun pilot and that his wife had followed him all over the world. Now it was his turn to follow her. She was present to buy a horse, train it for riding, and use it on their little ranch in California as a therapeutic animal for PTSD sufferers.

As the sale progressed, a strawberry roan stallion sold for $2000. Bill leaned over and said until then they had paid the top price of $1750 for one in Dickinson. Soon, another stallion brought even more, $2800. High numbers were not the standard, though. Most brought much lower dollar amounts.

The sale managers had learned from that unfortunate accident in Dickinson that there was a better way to handle the horses. To offer comfort to them as they entered the ring in twos and threes, a mounted rider rode slowly ahead and one rode behind them. Even the sights and sounds of a crowd of people did not upset them this day and the SPCA representative had nothing to complain about since the sale proceeded smoothly.

The biggest revelation in Wishek that day was learning how involved some people become in saving wild horses. One lady had traveled here, pockets filled with $28,000, to buy horses. She represented a group named Legacy Mustang in Virginia that raised the money to outbid so-called dog food buyers who might come.

Bill’s wife had started a Facebook page called “Wild in North Dakota” which I recently opened and found still active. The site claims almost 400,000 followers. The history of the 2013 auction event leads us to the present day when we wonder if another sale is in the works. Recently the National Park Service said the estimated 200 head roaming in the park are a non- native species and are not part of the native prairie ecosystem.

In 1965 the Dickinson Press quoted an old cowboy, “For as long as anyone can remember, horses have been an integral part of the North Dakota Badlands.” When the artist George Catlin visited the area in 1832 he made the first written word mention of them saying,

“The horses which the Indians ride in this country are invariably the wild horses, which are found in great numbers on the prairies.”

A year or so ago the language used by park officials seemed to indicate they intended to eliminate the herd altogether. Opposition voices soon rose to the point that our Senator Hoeven and Governor Burgum came out in support of the horses. One is left to wonder why the horses are in there and free to multiply in the first place. One answer is that they were accidentally trapped in the park when the park service built the enclosing fence. This story hasn’t played to its conclusion yet, but it’s a good bet the herd will be downsized once again and that a public sale will be held. By the way, there are nine longhorn cattle roaming around in there, too.

There was a time when we had a superabundance of horses all over the country. Horses used to power the machinery of war were no longer needed when World War One ended. Some of them were shipped back from Europe, but in addition farmers had been raising horses as a cash crop, and roundups of wild horses had accumulated large herds. Suddenly, the market for live horseflesh ended, so ranchers in the West simply opened their gates and let the herds escape to roam freely.

Horses rounded up in the West possessed a wild inclination anyway and relished regaining their unfettered freedom. The domesticated horses that ran through the gates with them soon veered to wild horse behavior. Wild horses still populate parts of the West in large numbers in spite of the BLM’s effort to eradicate them. Take the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming for example where a resident said there were upwards of 10,000 of them in a mostly protected environment.

Groups like the Wind River Wild Horse Sanctuary located in Lander, Wyoming go so far as to track wild horse deaths and injuries due to Bureau of Land Management roundups. But there is a yin-yang force at work. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association promotes removal of the horses because of the unwanted competition for grazing.

Advocating for one side or the other in regards to the elimination or preservation of the herds is not the intent of this article. It does seem though that letting a couple hundred wild horses roam freely in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park is reasonable.