New West Book Review
‘Mustang’: Defending Wild Horse’s Place in West, and in History
By David Frey, 6-10-08
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Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West
By Deanne Stillman
Houghton Mifflin
348 pages, $25
Some 55 million years ago, the ancestor to the modern-day horse, the “dawn horse,” appeared on what would become North America, writes Deanne Stillman. Four million years ago, Equus, the first creature we would recognize as a horse, appeared in what would be the American West. Long after vanishing from the region along with many fellow prehistoric mammals, the horse returned to the continent with the Spanish conquistadors and found its home again on the Western landscape.
Perhaps, Stillman writes in her book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, the horses on that first transatlantic crossing (the ones who were spared being dumped overboard to lighten the load in what came to be known as the horse latitudes) sensed:
that they would soon be home, back on the continent that had spawned them thirteen thousand years after they had dispersed and mysteriously disappeared from their birthplace. In fact, it must have been more than a sensation or a feeling; it must have been a kind of certainty that ran through their bones, down through their legs and into the ground they would soon churn up as they headed for the range. Yes, they had to know, for how else to explain the ease and speed with which they adapted to the American desert? The thing is, they just needed a little help …
Whether they knew or not, the horse made it back, all right, and wild horses have become an iconic emblem of the West. Iconic, but not uncontroversial. Having disappeared with the saber-tooth tiger only to reappear as settlers’ strays, the wild horse is seen by some (who agree on little else), from many cowboys to plenty of environmentalists, as less “wild” than feral, more like a stray cat than a ranging wolf. They are rounded up by government agencies and sold to keep their herds from overpopulating desert landscapes. They are shot by range-hungry ranchers. They are sold for foreign meat markets, and for glue.
Stillman argues that the West is the rightful home of the mustang, and that the wild horse has been intimately tied to the history of the region for as long as history books about the West have written.
However you feel about the first argument, it’s hard to disagree with the second one. In a book that is impeccably researched but often rambles and strays far afield, Stillman tracks the horse from its arrival with Hernando Cortés, when Aztecs believed the animals represented the promised return of the god Quetzalcoatl. She introduces us to the horses that carried Gen. Custer, Buffalo Bill and Gene Autry (not much of a cowboy, it turns out), and to the victims of brutal killings in the Nevada desert a decade ago.
They become symbols of the conflicted politics that still surround the horse. Wild horse advocates abound, but many ranchers still resent the animals, and under President Bush, she writes, horse roundups increased dramatically. Many are sent to slaughter in his home state of Texas.
Mustang is weakest in its tendency to anthropomorphize, or perhaps, deify. Stillman often ascribes supernatural qualities to her subjects. It’s unlikely that the horses in those Spanish galleons were musing about their return to their ancestral homeland. It’s no more likely, as she seems to suggest, that horse and man somehow “were destined to be a pair,” that horses’ mouths evolved to hold a bit or that their bodies were designed to pull a cart. To anthropomorphize a little more, many horses would probably beg to differ, and that might explain their flight from settlers’ corrals to rugged canyon country more than anything.
Horse lovers are nothing if not sentimental, though, and sentimentality aside, Stillman provides an interesting look at the West through the wide “satellite eyes” of horses. They bore both cowboys and Indians, found a home on the range and a place on license plates of Wyoming cars that took their place. They were witness to the opening of the West, and the loss of its wild sense of frontier.
“We owe it all to God, and the horse,” Cortéz wrote to his Spanish lords. Those words would, Stillman argues, in the New World and in the West, for centuries to come.
It gets so wearisome, the battle cry of the objective with their Descartes dissections thrown liberally from the pedestal they have elevated themselves too - as if we are not animals.
Anthropomorphize, declared with such assurance, like this decree is not more of the same.
The sentimental horse lover, a favorite label, as if cold hard facts somehow escape their notice and the lofty realms of reason are far beyond reach, a label often chosen to denigrate, like feral, to segregate the credible from the merely amusing not privy to the circle of trust.
Eagerly rushing to throw it all away; our roots, pieces of ourselves, each other, trading in cars, mates, and houses no longer thought of as homes, outsourcing food, water, and even our own parents – the West was yesterdays news and the horse, no longer of service to the whims and wants of today, struggles to exist on the leftover crumbs of two all beef patties, special sauce and a super size lifestyle called the American Dream – built on their backs.
It is easy to scoff at those who deify animals, they look much smaller on Discovery, their compelling vibrancy and breathtaking power has been satellite scrambled for easy consumption in between the Doritos and the beer.
The history of the horse is so vast, its stride so long that squeezing its journey into coded ink spots must have been a formidable challenge – yet ramble was chosen instead of roam, perhaps because the loss of the wild sense can only be stated by one who has never experienced a Mustang.