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Though the Spanish were the first to introduce the horse to America, the English settlers also brought their own horses. In 1609 there is a letter from Virginia to England that shows that the first horses had been introduced there. On July 1, 1630, John Winthrop noted in his journal that of the two ships that arrived that day, that “their passengers were all in good health, but most of their cattle were dead; wherof a mare and a horse of mine.” (Wyman 30)

Once the horses had been reintroduced to America, it took very little for the population of the horses to take off. By the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803, horses existed in large numbers throughout the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. In the decades that followed, “as one enthusiastic writer of the 1930s put it, horses ‘captured the West’ in one of the worlds most ‘momentous’ development.” (Paskett x)

In the years after the Civil War, wild horses ranged in large number throughout the West. They became both a resource and a nuisance to the advancing white settlers. They were seen not as just a symbol of the American West, but as a competitor of domestic livestock for feed. Wild horse numbers surged first on the Plains, as the buffalo were exterminated, and then reduced as livestock and homestead frontiers advanced. Horses had been killed for their hides or for population control as early as Spanish times. “Now a generation-long chase ensued as cowboying Americans gradually forced wild horses into more remote localities.” (Paskett x)

Nevada became one of those “more remote localities” for a number of reasons. First, the ecology of the Great Basin area, of which most of Nevada is the heart, was very inviting to the horses. Nevada was one of the last areas of the West to be explored and settled. And the Indians in this region lacked the social organization of those on the Great Plains. In his book, Anthony Amaral said that it would be more likely that the Indians in this region would devour a horse they found than that they would put it to use. (17) The combination of these factors made Nevada a prime area for the wild horses to live and Nevada’s horses became the epitome of what people called the “American horse”.

Now, what do I mean by “American horse”? Well, there were really three kinds of wild horses: Spanish horses of good quality (from Mexico, California, and Texas), Indian ponies, and American horses, which were the most common in Nevada. Because Nevada didn’t draw the Spanish settlement, it didn’t have a large number of Spanish horses nor was there many Indian ponies as the Indians in the region did not use horses. That left the area open for the American horse. A horse that was a product of the multiple functions desired of a horse on an eastern or midwestern farm. The American horse was a mixture of European breeds, predominantly cold-blooded draft types and because of heavy importation of the draft horse; size became the principal trademark of the American horse.

The pattern of ranching in Nevada also contributed to the wild horse population. It was the era of the open range. There was thousands of square miles of flatlands and mountains, canyons and valleys covered with a variety of grasses, and most importantly, no fences. The attitude of early ranching in Nevada looked at raising hay as “detrimental to the cattle’s initiative to range and find its feed.” (Amaral 23) For instance, in 1880, only 520 acres of hay were cut in the entire state. Horses and cattle simply roamed and many were never claimed in the annual roundups. Ranchers even turned horses out during periods of drought, when they had little of no feed. The horses would then range for feed, and eventually join together to form bands.

As long as horses were loosely ranged they were constant attractions to the wild herds. A rancher named Wilkinson turned out fifteen hundred mares on Diamond A Range of Elko county to range for the winter. When he and his crew returned that spring to collect them, they found that many had joined the wild herds and were virtually impossible to catch. Only a few were actually reclaimed. (Young 17)

Horses were continually being added to the wild herds it seemed. During economic slumps, horse ranchers turned out their stock to be gathered at a future date. Only many of those horses ran wild for the rest of their lives. When mining camps folded or small ranchers went bust, the horses that were not needed were simply turned loose. Numbers of wild horses were largest in Nevada, likely over a hundred thousand by 1900. There were enough of them to warrant legislation in the 1890s to dispose of wild horses which ranchers considered predators of diminishing grass on the range.

With wild horse numbers steadily climbing and the quality of the rangeland steadily diminishing, ranchers in Nevada followed the rest of the West and launched what seemed to be an all out war against the wild horses. A new form of cowboys arose for this time, a group of hard riding horsemen called mustangers who made their living capturing mustangs.

Charles “Pete” Barnum was a well-known early mustanger. He came to Nevada from South Dakota in 1903 and joined the roundup. He was a bright guy, and noticed that the methods of capturing the horses currently used were wasteful. One such method was called “creasing”, where a rifleman would attempt to graze the spinal

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