Saving The Sand Horses: Part 4

I attended my first BLM mustang auction as ignorant as the vast majority of participants there were. Very few of us had ever seen wild western mustangs. I was concerned when Daddy told me that very few of the horses that I would see there were as big as my mother's horse, Cracker Jack. Cracker Jack had been about 14 hands. I never saw him measured but everyone said that he was 14.2. Those two nonexistent inches became one of my first contacts with society's preference for appearance over reality and it was the first time that I remember resenting that dishonesty.

If an animal was at least 14.2 then it was classified as a horse. Less than that made it a pony. Adults were supposed to ride horses. Ponies were supposed to be only able to carry children. Cracker Jack was Arabian/mustang cross and carried adults with no problem.

Therefore he must have been a horse.

I doubt that anyone ever made the conscious decision to lie about his height. The lie just seemed both self propagating and self authenticating. He must be 14.2 because he must be a horse because he carried adults so he must not be a pony.

My weight was under two hundred pounds, but I wondered if a pony, smaller than Cracker Jack could possibly carry me. I was very concerned.

Daddy told me not to worry, that as long as I did not get one of those little Spanish looking mustangs I would be fine.

White people had been hating the little Spanish looking horse/pony for hundreds of years. English kings had ordered the slaughter of ponies and at times had banned the importation of the of the fleet horses of Iberia and the Middle East. The small horses were ridden by Mediterraneans, Africans, Asians, and American Indians. The proper Englishman need no more proof of the inferiority of these horses than the fact that they were ridden by people that were considered so profoundly inferior to the English.

To make matters even worse, the Irish often rode ponies. Enough to give a proper Englishman a case of the vapors.

The same applied to loudly colored horses. People of color often prized horses of color. The English responded by deciding that only solid colored horses of significant size were  fitting for a gentleman. Throughout history the ruling classes have accorded the same social status to breeds and strains of equines that they accorded to the owners of those horses.

Such bigotry proved lethal to the wild Spanish mustang. In the early 1900's up until the late 1940's the United States government implemented the Remount Program, which was designed to insure a ready source of Cavalry horses should America or our allies need them. Agents were hired to go out into the untamed lands of the west and shoot the small Spanish stallions that lead bands of beautiful wild mares and foals. When the stallions were killed the Army released Morgan and Thoroughbred stallions into the bands. The result was a larger  horse much more likely to be of ordinary, bland color.

The army had a secret about these horses that it did not want to get out. The reality was that extermination of the buffalo, European epidemics, and superior weaponry lead the the relatively quick defeat and subjugation of the natives. However, had the tall, bland colored horses of the whites actually been superior to the little Spanish ponies of the Indians, that subjugation would have come much quicker.

The little Indian pony was superior to the Army horses in ever regard but two, they could not jump as high or pull wagons as heavy as could the big ordinary looking horses of the mounted trooper. But this simply could not be. This was the Victorian Era, the beginning of the development of the Scientific Racism movement, it simply could not be that those believed to be genetically inferior could possess something superior to that owned and developed by those who were certain of their genetic and moral superiority over all other races.

It has been said that white people did not invent racism but that they perfected it.

When a tribe was captured it was de rigor for the horses to be confiscated and generally promptly slaughtered. Custer killed many more Indian ponies than he killed Indians.

One of the themes of the hate mail that our program receives is that it is so horrible that we ride these little Spanish ponies. These critics have no science on their side. They have no equestrian knowledge on their side. They have no experience actually riding these horses.

But, like Custer, they have history on their side.

And for a while I was ignorant enough of the ability of these horses to be concerned that they were correct. As has happened so often the horses provided the answer.

Under what conditions could a 12.2 wild Corolla stallion possibly  carry a man who weighed over 200 pounds fifty miles in a day without showing the slightest wear for the effort?

Admittedly certain factors have to exist before this could be done. It is necessary for there to be oxygen in the atmosphere for this to be done.

 If there is oxygen it can be done.

(In the picture above one sees three adopted BLM mustangs from Nevada watching as a storm rolls in).

Saving The Sand Horses: part 3

I handled western mustangs for years before I saw my first wild Corolla. I was spurred to get back into horses the same way that many adults are--I lost a great deal of weight. When I was about twelve years old I developed Osgood-Schlatters syndrome in my knees. The condition is well known now among doctors, but that was not the case in the early 1970's. Every few years when the pain would become debilitating I would go to the doctor where I was told that I had strained soft tissue and to put ice on my knees and rest a bit. By the time I as seventeen I could barely walk with out significant discomfort and could not run a step without real pain. I was correctly diagnosed eventually and was told to refrain from riding and running until the pain lessened.

That took about four years to happen. When I entered law school I could run without heavy pain. Law school was about the worst thing that I could have done for my physical and emotional health. I loved being an undergraduate at William and Mary. Law school was such a wretched nightmare that I have not set foot on the campus unless required to since graduation in 1985. My wife and I got married after college graduation. We were in all of the same law school classes together. She did not despise it to the degree that I did, but neither of us even considered attending our own law school graduation.

Attending law school was the worst mistake that I ever made. I spend little time thinking about the past, but I do often wonder how much better my life had been had I been a high school history teacher or a college professor. The only positive thing about becoming a lawyer is that  for  over fifteen years that I have prosecuted I have handled the cases with child victims, victims with mental retardation, and all of the sexual assault cases. In that capacity I have made some people's lives better and I am glad for that.

In law school I became rather sedentary and developed serious problems with my back. When I was only in my late twenties the doctor told me to stop playing church league soft ball. The MRI showed that I had the spine of a man nearly sixty years old. The best thing to do for my back was to walk. I began walking before work each morning. I saw improvement. I began adding weights to each hand which I curled and pumped while walking. I started walking at lunch with weights. By the time I was thirty five I was walking six miles every morning and four miles at lunch. I walked those ten miles with ten pounds in each hand.

My knees no longer hurt. My back was tolerable. But I was extraordinarily overweight. I was in a hurry to accomplish what I was to accomplish because I did not expect to live a long life. Neither college nor law school cost me very much money. I was awarded the Century Three Leadership scholarship as an undergraduate and for law school. I planned to work hard to do what I could to improve our foster care system and adoption laws as quickly as I could before a stroke or a heart attack got me.

And then I lost 52 pounds.

I lost the weight with the Atkins diet and since then I have always kept at least thirty of those pounds off. It felt good to feel good. I could run. I could move anyway I wanted to with minimal pain. Things that did not seem possible fifty pounds ago now were within reach.

My mother had adopted two wild donkey jennies from the Bureau of Land Management. One of them was bred and she gave birth to Nick, a large standard jack. I kept my equine related goals simple. I decided that I was healthy enough to ride a nice, gentle mule rather slowly and carefully through the woods. I thought about how much I used to enjoy training horses. Nick was about 18 months old. I decided to adopt a wild mustang mare and breed her to Nick to get a spectacular mule.

I planned to try to train the mare to saddle. It was that part of the plan that drew the most concern from those who knew me. They realized that regardless of how much weight I lost and how good a condition I was in, I was not up for a rodeo.

I decided to cross that bridge when I got to it and I set out to adopt my first wild horse. I was about to go to my first BLM wild mustang adoption. It was an event that changed my life.

(This is a picture of Ghost Dance the second BLM mare that I adopted and the first horse to hospitalize me).

Saving The Sand Horses: part 2

There is a freshwater cane plant native to Tidewater swamps. Deep in the woods it can grow to be about seven feet tall with only inches separating each plant. It is impenetrable except on the deer trails, which are often no more than six inches wide. The cane shafts stay green until the most frigid temperatures hit. The sun frequently hides in the lead colored skies of our winters, making reckoning by the sun impossible. Some of the biggest patches that I encountered were over twenty acres.

Yes, one can get, as we called, "turned around", in these little jungles. We could not call it being actually "lost", because we were often no more than a mile from a country road. One is turned around when no matter which way one thinks one is going and no matter how long one tries to do so--that country road just can't be found. Getting turned around in a heavy fog with a bit of rain made it even worse.

The lack of ability to see contrasted with the ability to hear the movement of every creature coming through the reeds. The deer paths were so narrow that even a creature the size of a dog crashed the reeds. When all of your concentration was on the sound of that crashing it would seem as if something the size of a care was crashing reeds towards you. A little deer made a racket. A big buck who crashed reeds with his body, feet, and a huge rack that combed through the reeds the sound was like something the size of a tank crashing in towards you.

If the deer did not pickup your scent and wheel to avoid you it might proceed directly on the deer path where you were sitting. The adrenaline flows like water. Sometimes you even feel your heart racing. The reeds are thick enough so that when you are finally able to see the deer, and he is finally able to see you you might be only a couple of steps from each other.

I had the experience happen several times when I was a kid. And every time, after I calmed myself down, my mind would move in the same direction---Less than a hundred miles from where I was there were thickets that contained wild horses. It would be so wonderful to be as close to a wild horse as I got to the deer. I would think about how much noise a horse would make crashing through the reeds, I rode horses in the woods, but I had never ridden one into the vast cane patches.

I knew that the wild horses made it up into Virginia on occasion. I suspected that some might still survive in the Dismal Swamp. To this day, very little of the Dismal Swamp ever feels the touch of a human. I had hoped that when I was old enough to drive perhaps I could go into the Dismal Swamp and see the wild horses that I hoped still remained in the briers and tangles, living off the same browse the deer ate and being every bit as fleet and wary as a big buck.

I was probably incorrect about there still being wild horses in the Dismal Swamp. Oh, but there were still wild ones on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They were near Nags Head, about the only place we ever went for a summer vacation when I was little. I always kept my eyes open, looking up and down the beach for a mustang. Eventually I learned that the wild ones lived about 20 miles to the north, well beyond where the paved road ended.

I never got to see one of these wild horses when I was a kid. I was in my late forties when I first met these horses. Rebecca and I had been invited to join Tom Norush, Doug Norush, Vickie Ives,  of the Horse of The Americas Registry and representatives of the American Livestock breed conservancy to study the wild herd at Corolla and Shackleford for the express purpose of determining if they remained straight Spanish Colonial Horses. One could only hope they were and the fear was that they  had been mixed with modern horses over the centuries as had those of Chincoteague.

Rebecca and I were slipping though an area of live oak and browse in a very windy brisk late winter day. She had camera in hand. We had seen a pair of little wild pigs and were seeking to get a good picture of them. I slipped through the dense pocket of live oaks and with the sun shining on him so that even in his rough winter coat he glistened, stood a solitary black mustang stallion. The wind made it so he could not hear of smell us coming. He was not one of those who hung around the cottages at Corova. We were in the bush. Those horses were more man shy than the ones who share their summers with hundreds of thousands of tourist.

It did not matter that he could not hear because of the wind--I was speechless. Up to that point in my life he was the most beautiful stallion that I have ever seen. He caught sight of us, snorted, and trotted on out of sight.

Not quite two years later he was found dead. A gun shot to his neck from such close range that the wadding from the shotgun shell was lodged in the dead horse's neck. He was the latest victim of who ever took pleasure in shooting a wild horse.

That is the picture that Rebecca took of him as he slipped away from us.

(Here is a link to the report Vickie Ives wrote of the wild herd inspection tour. it is a must read for anyone who wants to understand what makes these horses significant.)

http://www.corollawildhorses.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/HOA-report.pdf

Saving The Sand Horses: The Beginning

(This is a first in a series of posts that set out the history of the Off Site Breeding program designed to help prevent the extinction of the historic Corolla horses of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.)

My mother's horse was exotic, no ordinary creature--Cracker Jack's father was an Arabian, a breed still fairly new to eastern Virginia in the early 1960's, but it was his mother who was unique. She was a mustang--a wild horse. She represented everything that drew me to the many westerns then on TV. Even more importantly, she embodied the values of our rural farm culture. A mustang was brave--self reliant--uncomplaining--able to work all day and run all night--and free.

A mustang was what every man was supposed to be and what every little boy hoped to become. There could simply be nothing better than training and riding a wild horse. Doing so was not an act of power or dominance--it was proof of having worked oneself up to a sufficient level of self reliance, courage, and resilience to be acceptable to the wild horse. By taming and training a wild horse a little boy could rise to the level of being a wild horse. It was not as much of a matter of subjugating the horse as it was proving one's self to the horse.

The question was simply whether that little boy could prove himself worthy of the trust of a wild horse. It was a world view that made perfect sense to a five year old boy.

It still makes a great deal of sense to me today.

When I was two yeas old I got my first pony, Tanka, a hackney/welsh cross. I was two and he was one. The following year I rode him in the Christmas Parade in Smithfield. Daddy had a Thoroughbred stallion, Flag. Momma's horse Cracker Jack was also a stallion. For all of my childhood I grew up with stallions. I could never understand the fear that so many horse people had of the mere mention of the word. They divided horses into three categories--mares, geldings, and stallions.

We divided horses into two categories--trained and untrained.

The only time that I have ever ridden in an arena was during local horse shows when I was quite young. Our focus was always on riding long distances and riding as much as possible in the woods. We did not trot. Trotting was viewed as something useful for a sulky horse(we also trained them to pull sulkies, carts, and wagons)but a riding horse was cantered--everywhere--until it needed to catch its breath. Then we walked. The only trotting that we did was the few steps some horses made before moving into a canter.

When I was five years old Daddy spent a summer in Tennessee at blacksmith school. For about fifty years, in addition to his job at the meat plants he had a route of horses that he trimmed. Recently KC found a horse shoe in the ditch a few miles from the horse lot. Daddy recognized it as a shoe that he had made in the late 1960's.

I started getting paid to trim hooves when I was about ten years old. I continued until deep in my forties. By the time I stopped trimming for others I realized that nearly every horse I was trimming I was doing so because other farriers could not, or would not, trim the horse. I sometimes spent half a day trimming a single horse. When I stopped trimming I was still charging the same amount that I had in high school, $20.00 per horse.

I do not remember how many horses I trained to saddle as a child and teenager. Most importantly I do not remember ever being thrown by a horse that I was training. I have no doubt that I was thrown many times. I was not , nor am I now, a gifted rider. The point is that being thrown was such a given, such a nothing event, that not once did a tossing stick in my mind. It simply as not significant enough to remember.

If I could give one thing to the kids that I teach today it would be that attitude. Modern parenting has ended that option. When I was four or five my mother's riding instruction to me were things like, "Get your hand off that damn horn and quit riding like a sissy." Or if I would give in to overblown crying or whining for attention, as do so many little ones, Momma would comfort me with statements like, "Shut up whining. Is that what you are going to do when you get big and go to Vietnam--just lay there whining while they are shooting at you?"

Such an upbringing made my adult life much easier. It made it possible for me to be the first person in my direct line to go to college. It made it possible for me, at age 27, to be the youngest elected member of a county governing board in Virginia, and at age 31, the youngest chairman of a county governing body in Virginia. It made it possible for me to realize that I could teach children to train wild horses. It made it possible for me to be able to ignore the edicts of the established horse world.

It made me believe that I could get up and do something instead laying on the ground whining about the plight of wild horses. "Doing something" for me would come to mean showing the world what these horses could do and encouraging their survival through domestic breeding.

(In the picture above Lydia and Jen are riding two formerly wild Corolla stallions. These are two of the stallions at the core of our breeding program. We currently have five Corolla stallions on site and one Shackleford stallion.  We are also privileged to have El Rosio, a Bacca strain stallion and Scoundrel Days, a Grand Canyon strain stallion.)

And This Happened Six Years Ago This Morning

   

 This old post is about an event that happened nearly exactly six years ago. Yesterday was the first 12-29 that I have gone to court on since then. Turns out that it would have been best not to have gone. There is no symbolism in this post. What I describe is precisely what happened. 

 

I am not as good at showing little boys how to ride as I am with little girls. With little boys who don't try hard enough I never say it out loud but I constantly wonder why Lido could use his severely disabled body to get a job done, but strong, healthy boys can't. When I look at the very accurate comments about Lido that were written by a some program participants I wish all of the participants in our program would be as selfless as he was. 

He worked hard to bring people together.

 

 

 

 

And This is How He said Good Bye

Yesterday morning the sun was shining very brightly and the wind was howling. It was exactly the kind of weather that causes deer to get in the tightest cover they can and stay there until the weather changes or night time falls. I was alone in the pasture waiting for my little riders to come and cheer me up. There was a commotion in the pasture beside me. I looked up and saw, coming from the area where Lido died, a very large buck who, along with two does hopped into the pasture and frolicked along in front of the horses.
The herd of mares fell in behind the buck and they trotted down the fence line behind the buck who also just calmly trotted along. He stopped , looked at me and turned in a profile. Then he lowered his head and began to move towards me just like I have seen so many wild horses do in the round pen when they decide to accept you as a herd mate. I was still quite a distance (maybe 50 yards) from him when he stopped and stared at me. We just stood there looking at each other for perhaps thirty seconds. Finally he turned and he and his does hopped effortlessly over the fence.
I walked over to the spot where they disappeared into the cut over to take a look at the big buck's hoof print. It seemed odd, but I could only find one track in the bare, moist, sandy soil. I looked around the area for a few more moments and started to walk to the tack shed. As I picked my head up I noticed the herd. They were standing on full alert, ears up, nostrils open, backs hollow and looking at me in pure terror. Rolling Thunder snorted and the herd bolted, but only for a short distance before turning to look at me again.
For the next moment or two my herd of warm, loving mares stared at me as if I were something that they could not understand. They stood as if to have seen a Thunder Being.
Now I am just a plain old Methodist Sunday school teacher who is not given to any New Age practices or beliefs. If others hold such belief I respect their views, but I do not share those views. I realize that my ability to understand that which needs understanding is limited indeed. I do not understand life. How could I possibly understand death?
But I do know what I saw. I do know what I believe. I did know Lido and I know that he would have done everything possible, or even impossible to tell me good bye.
(The picture above is of Lido riding in the 2006 Christmas Parade on the fourth horse from the lead)

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Total Pageviews

161,973

About Me

Steve Edwards

In my coat and tie life I am a prosecutor in Smithfield, Virgina. In my boots and blue jeans life am Executive Director of the Gwaltney Frontier Farm, Inc, an non profit organizations which administers Mill Swamp Indian Horses. We raise mustangs, including the rare and endangered Corolla Spanish Mustangs. We teach natural horsemanship to students as young as five years old. I have written several articles on natural horsemanship and recently published my first book, "And a Little Child Shall Lead Them: Learning From Wild Horses and Small Children. I was a recipient of the Keeper of the Flame Award from the American Indian horse Association for our efforts to preserve the Corolla Spanish mustangs and in 2009 we were recognized by the Horse of the Americas Registry with the Carol Stone Ambassador Award. In 2011 we received the Currituck Star Award for our Corolla preservation efforts. My wife, Beth Edwards and I have two daughters and five grandchildren. See our web site, www.msindianhorses.com

View my complete profile

Followers

Subscribe by email!

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Feeds

Posts

Comments

Blog Archive

• ►  2014 (302)

• ►  2013 (385)

• ►  2012 (161)

• ►  2011 (316)

• ►  2010 (236)

• ▼  2009 (174)
  • ►  December (17)
  • ►  November (13)
  • ►  October (18)
  • ►  September (8)
  • ►  August (14)
  • ►  July (20)
  • ►  June (2)
  • ►  May (15)
  • ►  April (20)
  • ►  March (12)
  • ►  February (19)