The Nokota Horse

photo by JZ. All other photos here, save the last one, are by Bill Thompson III.

Perhaps you've seen mustangs running across a ridge against the sky somewhere out West. Maybe you've felt that thrill to the spine at finally viewing this icon of the old West. I can't imagine a better place to experience it than Theodore Roosevelt National Monument in Medora, North Dakota.

Like prairie dogs, wild horses are persecuted, unwanted almost wherever they occur. This makes them tough, wary, and hard to get close to. But they're protected here, sort of. Why the "sort of?"

Well, it's an interesting story. And I'll preface this by saying that these photographs, which Bill of the Birds and I took in North Dakota, are of horses living wild, but not necessarily of wild bloodlines. Here's why:

The wild horses that originally populated western North Dakota were direct descendants of Lakota ponies, which of course derived from Spanish Colonial stock. They were small, slightly scrubby, but strong, intelligent, and willing. They were thought not to be much good, despite the fact that they had survived all on their own in this cruel habitat, made it through Great Plains winters by pawing for dry grass and whatever else they could find. Their hooves were hard as flint and so were their spirits.

In the Great Depression, wild horses were systematically hunted down and exterminated, to eliminate competition for coveted rangeland. Theodore Roosevelt National Park was established in the late '40's, and fenced in. Whoops, some wild horses were inside the fence, having fled to the badlands where no one could find them. By the 1960's, wild horses had been exterminated in North Dakota--except for the ones in the park.

But even those were hunted down. The population dropped as low as 20 individuals within the park by 1979. Public protest caused the park to declare it would maintain a small "demonstration herd" to show what Teddy Roosevelt described in his writing about ranching the Little Missouri area around 1885:

In a great many--indeed, in most--localities there are wild horses to be found, which, although invariably of domestic descent, being either themselves runaways from some Indian or ranch outfit, or else claiming such as their sires and dams, are yet quite as wild as the antelope on whose range they have intruded.

Next: Saving the Nokota Horse