Vast, indigo nights like this happen only in the Alberta foothills. Underfoot, bunchgrass and sage. Overhead, endless stars. Slim Davis and I wander in the twilight toward his back-forty, in the direction of the western hills. From Davis’s ranch, a few miles west of Red Deer, the bulk of the Rockies rises 100 miles away, looking like the shoulders of some ancient sleeping behemoth. Up through the shadows sails an apparition. A dark equine shape, pony-size. She seems small by any standard.contd Slim Davis :They got a right to live, thats all.Slim Davis 1908-2002 :They got a right to live, thats all. Rare photo of wild ponies near Red Deer, Alta. Theyre small and scruffy.Rare photo of wild ponies near Red Deer, Alta.Theyre small and scruffy. Quiet, quiet. The mare steps through the dark. She whinnies her pleasure at Davis’s familiar scent, flinching for a few seconds, unsure of my presence. Davis reaches out a reassuring hand, running it lightly up her side, over her mottled gray spots, up the quivering neck. Combing his fingers through the tangled shag on her neck, he whispers to me, in the darkness, “These here are witches’ tails, these tangles. They’re from when the witches ride ‘em at night. Only the real wild ones have ‘em. That’s how you tell.” Davis’s wild mare is likely the only true mustang (Mustang - from the Spanish, monstrenco - “roving, rough, wild”) in captivity. True to her spirit, she escapes regularly, but she always comes back to him. “The wild instinct is in her. I never did break her,” he laughs. The species the mare represents is typically small in stature, with a stocky build, large head and flowing mane and tail almost reaching the ground. Her kind are plain rugged, hardly the Hollywood movie version of the Western horse. Their rough-cast stoutness is the very quality that has allowed them to survive the fierce strenuousness of the Old West and the less picturesque cruelties of modern times. Certain wildlife officials and sport hunters have claimed the wild horses of Western Canada are merely feral - just runaway packing horses from old logging and mining camps. But Davis’s lean, scruffy ponies of the foothills are indeed the true item. His mustangs are the tough, rough mares and stallions of legendary Indian days, not at all like the bovine scrags commonly called “mustangs” by some. Unfortunately, Alberta’s population of feral runaway horses hogs the public attention that ought to go to the real mustangs. Most notably, the runaways roaming the fenced-in grasslands of CFB Suffield, northwest of Calgary, have been made famous by highly publicized protests over a 1988 roundup. Protestors mistakenly called the heavy Suffield horses mustangs. In fact, the feral horses of Suffield, with their mixed Shire, Suffolk and Clydesdale bloodline, are no more mustangs than Old Bessie. Their claim on Western heritage is dubious. If anyone knows the mustangs, Davis does. He has been their advocate for decades, having been instrumental in persuading the Alberta government in 1974 to stop issuing seasonal licences to hunt them. Still, he says, “It’s something terrible what they’ve done to them horses. There’s not too many left. They’ve been hunted and chased, and killed. They’re scattered and gone.” Nobody seems to care about the mustangs, says Davis, including even the Humane Society, who, he says, should do something about the condition in which horses often arrive at auction houses. They’re too often delivered to auction bleeding, crippled, and blinded by their frantic struggling against the leg snares hunters use to trap them, says Davis. Davis, born in 1908 to a horseman’s family, grew up alongside the Blood, Blackfoot, Cree and Stoney Indians of Alberta, peoples whose traditional history and culture began and ended with the tough little mustangs of the wild. In 1920, Slim first encountered the wild ponies. In those days wild horses numbered in the tens of thousands in the Alberta foothills. “This ol’ Indian said the little horses had been there as long as the Indians could remember, and probably long before,” he said. The Indians told him no one was certain where the horses had come from, historically speaking, but they knew that the horses figured big in ancient legends. The American West had once been a virtual wild horse dominion. As late as the turn of the 19th century, enormous herds of mustangs, possibly numbering in the millions, roamed the prairies alongside the immense herds of buffalo. Indian Days were Mustang Days. The situation a century later is startling. Only a few hundred mustangs have survived the twentieth century, roving the foothills of Alberta and B.C. Today Western Canada’s wild horses are hunted, scalped, and skinned like muskrats. Nature and history have colluded to make the remaining few mustangs the most aloof of creatures. Their continued survival depends on their need to remain free. They literally can’t survive in captivity, as they “will” themselves to die in conditions of confinement or duress. * Snares used by hunters would sometimes break the mustangs legs Modern archaeology looks to fossil remains from sediments in Wyoming suggesting that Equus Caballus, the horse, was native to North America 60 million years ago. The horse alternately appears and disappears from the fossil record at about one million year intervals. All trace of the horse is lost by about 25,000 years ago. The species was unknown to the American continent when Columbus sailed from Spain on his voyage of discovery. But historians say that Columbus , and even the subsequent Spanish explorers, Coronado and DeSoto, couldn’t themselves have reintroduced the lost species to North America. They argue that, although the earliest Spanish explorers did indeed bring horses with them to the New World, they brought only limited numbers of the animals, and very few of those were mares. Coronado, for example, wrote in his diary that he had brought “five hundred and fifty-eight horses, two of them mares.” Two mares could hardly have stocked the whole continent, say historians. More likely sources for the North American population of ponies, say historians, were stock-raising ranches established by the Spanish in the Santa Fe area between the 1550s and the 1700s. The ranches furnished ideal conditions for the spread of horses to the rest of the continent : friendly contact with the Indians through trade, an ample supply of horses, and plenty of opportunities for the Indians to study possible uses for the new creature. Logically, the movement of horses into the North Americas would have followed established inter- tribal trade routes. From Spanish records we know that, beginning around 1600, southwest tribes such as the Utes, Comanches, Apaches and Kiowas began raiding the Spanish ranches and stealing large numbers of horses. From those tribes, the horses slowly spread across the continent. La Verendrye reported that tribes living northeast of the Black Hills in Montana had no horses when he visited them in 1738. Yet just 16 years later in 1754 Anthony Henday, the Hudson’s Bay Company explorer, met Assiniboines in the same area who had horses, though they used them only for packing, not for riding. By 1766 Henday reported numerous Assiniboines now skillfully riding the horses. Several Indian tribes have oral traditions chronicling their first acquisition of horses : Tetons say they got theirs from the Arikaras; Shoshonis from Comanches, and Nez Perces from Shoshonis. In 1827 an American trader, Robert Meldrum, reported that old Crow people told him their generation was the first generation of Crows to see horses. So it was that the hardy Spanish ponies gradually populated the North American continent, as possessions of the native peoples. Wild herds of escapees were reported by the late 1800s, though they were mostly ignored by the Indians, as domestic ponies were plentiful and easier to handle. Eventually horse- stealing became the foremost means to acquire more horses, and full blown “horse culture” was in full swing among the Indian tribes by the end of the century. The “Indian pony” - small, squat and tough - became the mainstay of Indian life, indispensable in transport, warfare, leisure, hunting, religion and trade. So it was practically inevitable that Indians began to measure wealth by the number of horses a man owned. The number of horses owned by individual Indians grew dramatically. Ute father and son riding their ponies ca.1870. Notice the mustangs fox ears and heavier forequarters, typical mustang conformation . Among the Piegan people the horse-to-people ratio grew from about 1-1 in 1860 to 3.5-1 by 1895. But a wealthy individual might easily have as many as 500 horses in his personal herd. In the Indian economy, if a man had a lot of horses, he had prestige, and could thus attract more wives, have more children, produce more meat and produce more trade goods. A man with a substantial herd was affluent. The summer of 1886 was a hot one on the prairies, just 22 years before Slim Davis’s birth in Carmangay, Alberta. That year saw the last major horse-raiding party of the Old West. Canadian Piegans rode down out of the Calgary area to the Pryor Creek area of northern Montana. They made off with 60 horses stolen from the Crows camped there. To this day a mysterious herd of wild horses is known to exist in the Pryor Mountain area. Some Crows say these horses must be descendants of the surviving stock of the Custer battle at Bighorn, which took place just a few miles away. * Wild Horses spotted in the Chilcotin District of British Columbia, where legal slaughters took place in the 1980s. Maddeningly, it is the argument over the bloodline of the wild horses that is used today by sport hunters and commercial hunters to rationalize their slaughter.”What are you protecting anyway?” asked Gerry Kemp, senior wildlife management biologist with the Alberta lands and forests department in 1974. “So-called wild horses are only the descendants of work animals from farms, or lumbering or mining operations that have been turned into the wild and survived.”The best thing that could be done with wild horses would be to “shoot ‘em all” said Kemp. Mustangs have, accordingly, been shot for target practice, bated with poison for predators, slaughtered for dog food, chased and tormented - subjected to every kind of maltreatment know to man. Objections have been raised on the grounds of cruelty, but professional wild horse hunters shrug their critics off. “Round ‘em up, and shoot a tranquilizer into them, and those horses don’t give a damn whether they end up as dog food or rodeo buckers,” one big game hunter remarked to a Calgary reporter. In the 1950s, the slaughter reached high gear when hunters discovered that the horses could be panicked by dive-bombing airplanes. Terrified horses were buzzed from above, and raced cross-country until, at the point of exhaustion, they could be driven into corals. Frantic, the horses were loaded into waiting trucks for transport to auction or slaughterhouses. Many would arrive at the slaughterhouse already dead, trampled to death in transit. It was not an uncommon sight to see the trucks dripping blood on the highways. Some of the trampled horses had simply dropped dead of fright. Mustangs have this peculiar will to die - so sensitive and vulnerable are they to pursuit and capture. Explorer David Thompson documented this amazing vulnerability of mustangs as early as 1809. He wrote in his diary while crossing the West that wild horses froze as if paralyzed when his men merely “shouted a halloa” and dashed at them. He was only the first of many horse runners to report the phenomenon. Modern hunters still observe that stallions, in particular, commonly seem unable to survive the ordeal of being captured and will to die within hours or days of being deprived of their freedom. Whole bands have collapsed in paroxysms of fear when subjected to the experience of being rounded up and corralled. Chief forester in 1959 , W.R. Hanson said, “They [protesters] talk about inhumane methods, or protest emotionally to the government against the ‘extinction’ of one of the features of the old wild west...[but] there is nothing cruel about the airplane roundup. The only part you might have doubt about is the loading of the frightened animals onto trucks.” Nevertheless, the dive-bombing bloodbaths were brought to an end in 1959. Forest conservation officials felt pressured by public cries for more compassionate treatment of the mustangs, and, magnanimously, decreed that roundup by cattle horse, not by dive-bombers, was the only humane way to go. The numbers of mustangs has been in dispute for more than a century. A 1895 police census showed 42,257 wild horses on the range in Southern Alberta. In 1958 a roundup expert said huge tracts of Alberta land carried vast wild horse herds. “The whole place is a wild horse kingdom,” said Chester Utter in a report in The Albertan newspaper in August, 1958. Utter boasted that he alone had rounded up more than 40,000 horses. One year later, in 1959, the Calgary Herald carried a front-page story saying the horses were “facing extinction.” The next year, 1960, the Alberta Cattlemen’s Association said there were some 3,000 still roaming at will. By 1977, The Herald thought that about 1,000 head of wild horses roamed the foothills. In 1991 Alberta Fish and Wildlife counted 300 mustangs roaming free in Kananaskis Country. In 1974, Calgary Socred MLA Art Dixon agreed with the mid-70s figure of “about 1,000”, but argued that if the annual hunt continued the horses would soon be wiped out. Spurred on by Slim Davis and the thousands of names he had collected on a petition, Dixon successfully lobbied the Alberta legislature to stop the regular issuing of hunting permits for wild horses. With this regulatory move in 1974, horses roaming on Crown lands in Alberta could no longer be legally hunted. But horses straying onto private lands were, and still are, treated as fair game for hunters, in season year- round. A private members’ bill passed by the Klein government in 1993 making the capture of horses on public land more than just a minor regulatory infraction merely re-jigs the 1974 regulation. Mustangs that make the horrible mistake of straying onto private property are still legal prey for hunters in Alberta. In B.C., in 1988 the Vancouver Sun reported three herds of mustangs ranging the Chilcotin district . The largest of the herds, the Red Brush herd, numbered 150. Two smaller herds, theBidwell and Haines Creek herds, were legally massacred in 1988, reducing their combined numbers from well over 100 to 35. Regional wildlife officials authorized the 1988 roundup, claiming the horses were reducing valuable grazing land during a severe drought. Wild horse lovers passionately challenge hunters’ claims that most mustangs are just feral rejects, not living descendants of heritage stock. American wild horse advocate Hope Ryden attacked the “feral” argument in the 1970s. Ryden, who worked as features producer for ABC News from 1966 to 1968, argued persuasively in her book America’s Last Wild Horses that the very fact that these horses have prevailed for so long against so many odds - hunters, bitter weather, rough terrain, extensive grazing competition and high infant mortality - suggests that they must come from exceptionally hardy stock, namely, the Spanish stock of the original Indian ponies. Rejects from domestic herds, she argues, would never have survived over the years under such conditions. “It was the animal that was originally the most ‘Western’ that survived the harsh test of the wild. The big, slow gentle farm horses and the high - strung, grain-fed horses were not creatures that could easily adapt to bleak habitats and rugged winters,” wrote Ryden. Ryden further warranted the purity of the mustang pedigree based on the fact that there has been no genetic break in the continuity of the wild horse bloodline from the last century to this century. Since the West was opened, she pointed out, though the total number of wild horses has dwindled drastically the wild horse population did not at any time vanish. Therefore, she said, the mustang bloodline extends perfectly from the 16th century to present day. From Columbus to Slim Davis’s mare - one unbroken genetic heritage. * In one corner, romantics and heritage advocates; in the other, ranchers seeking to protect grazing lands and hunters serving the horsemeat markets. In the middle, a sparse population of excruciatingly shy broomtails roving the hills of Alberta and B.C. Are there only 300? One thousand? Thirty-five? Really, Slim Davis sums it all up : “I spent a lot of time in the mountains in the last 50 years or so. The wildlife is nearly gone. It’s four years since I seen a mountain goat. There are some mountain sheep left, but with all the trophy sheep huntin’ now, they’ll be gone soon, too. Now it’s the horses. They got a right to live, that’s all.” * One manager of a Calgary slaughterhouse that processes horseflesh confessed to the Calgary Albertan that he “liked” the little ponies. Still, he felt the slaughter was a necessary thing. Nevertheless, he admitted, “Sometimes they look you in the eye and you wonder if you should pull the trigger. But it’s over in a second.”
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 19:20:06 +0000
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