Desert Chrome by Kathryn Wilder

Author:Kathryn Wilder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

WILD HORSES PERSEVERE despite the odds. Their numbers were brutally reduced in the mid-1900s, like bison in the 1800s and Indigenous people since the first day of European contact, and when Velma Johnston of Nevada, who would come to be known as Wild Horse Annie, figured out that truckloads of mustangs were getting sold to slaughterhouses, she incited a campaign to pass into law the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. In December of 1971, under pressure from the public—including letter-writing schoolchildren—Congress approved the bill, which declares that “wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene.” The law directed the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service to manage horses and burros found on lands within their jurisdictions, and to protect them from “capture, branding, harassment, or death.” Today mustangs live in a spiral of high-desert lands in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah.

Horses coevolved over millions of years with the soil, grasses, and other plant and animal species of North America. Then they disappeared from the fossil record (as far as we know to date), returning to North America with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s, when they began repop-ulating those ecosystems their ancestors helped develop. Over time mesteños, the wild descendants of horses brought and left by the Spaniards, mixed with other horses—Indian ponies, cavalry mounts, animals turned loose by farmers and ranchers in poor feed years, stallions turned loose to breed wild mares to “improve” the herds—and that DNA joined the gene pools of Spanish mustang descent.

Some government agencies and individuals still contend that colonizers introduced the modern horse to North America. However, scientists like Dr. Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at University of California–Santa Cruz, have spent years testing DNA and paleogenomic evidence that shows that horses are indigenous to this continent.

“Horses evolved in North America,” says Dr. Shapiro. “They are a North American species. They were a North American species for millions of years.” At the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab, research on how the horses that returned to the continent are related to the horses that left is ongoing. “They are the same lineage of horse,” Shapiro says. When Europeans brought horses back, they were “reintroducing a native species to the North American continent.”

Dr. Ross MacPhee, curator of the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, sums it up by saying, “Reintroduction to North America five hundred years ago is, biologically, a non-event: horses were merely returned to part of their former native range, where they have since prospered because ecologically they never left.”

Equus caballus crossed the Bering land bridge into Siberia and back, establishing themselves on other continents; therefore, unlike mammoths and saber-toothed cats, the species did not die out—they may have gone locally extinct, as Shapiro says, but not globally extinct.

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