WILD HORSE ANNIE AND THE VIRGINIA RANGE HORSES By Deanne Stillman Excerpt from Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (June, Houghton Mifflin) One day in 1950, Velma Johnston, an intrepid Nevada character who would come to be known as Wild Horse Annie, saw blood spilling out of a truck and followed it to a slaughterhouse outside Reno. From then on, she gave her life over to the horses, winning passage of the first legal protections for mustangs - four times, in county, state, and national battles that endangered her life and raged for two decades. Finally, in 1971, Richard Nixon signed the landmark Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act into law – a gesture that harked back to Ulysses S. Grant, and one that would be undone years later by George W. Bush, a President whose home state presided over two of the country’s three remaining horse slaughterhouses. Although generally overlooked in discussion of the era’s great environmental advocates (like her animal constituents themselves), Annie was as influential and courageous as Rachel Carson in her fight to save songbirds or Dave Brower in his fight for the wilderness: with nothing but a typewriter and a telephone in a Reno office, she launched a discussion of the meaning of “public lands” that continues to this day. And she still stands as an example of how one person can change the course of events – something that seems almost quaint in today’s cynical times. Velma Johnston – aka Wild Horse Annie - was born in Reno on March 5, 1912, the first of Joseph Bronn and Gertrude Clay Bronn’s four children. A pioneer family, the Bronns were intimately connected to the land and wild horses. In fact wild horses once saved Joseph Bronn’s life. The story of how that happened contains the DNA of Annie’s difficult and ultimately victorious journey to protect mustangs. In the 1870s, Annie’s paternal grandfather was the foreman of a silver mine in Ione, Nevada, another boom-and-bust town that now feeds on its ghosts, a shadow of an outpost where tourists pose for pictures in front of boarded up miners’ shacks and stop for a drink at the local watering hole where a famous bartender spins tales of a violent and voracious yesteryear.

Deanne Stillman Velma Johnston

When the silver veins tapped out in 1884, Annie’s grandfather took what was left of his meager earnings, paid his men, and then left for California. “There would have been an early-morning chill in the air that is always a part of the desert climate,” Annie wrote in an unpublished memoir, “and the horses would be frisky, the colt playful.” She was referring to the team of four mustangs that her grandfather had caught in the wild and tamed, the ones he was now feeding, harnessing, and watering, and the foal, still nursing, recently born to one of the team’s mares. “The children, Ben and Ella, would be lifted into the box-bed of the spring wagon, sleepy-eyed and querulous, as children are when they are faced with the unknown. Grandma and Grandpa would climb to the high seat, Grandma with the infant in her arms.” As they trekked across the desert, they refreshed whenever there was a spring and some sparse grass for the horses. After a journey of several days, they camped at Sand Mountain, a giant dune that is now a haven for off-roaders and others who come for its marvels. “The land is cumbered here and there with drifted ridges of the finest sand, sometimes 200 feet high and shifting before every gale,” Sir Richard Burton wrote in his diary in 1860, while traveling with Pony Express riders. At night when the winds dance, the mountain elicits a soft whistle, a desert song – said to carry the stories of all who have passed by - and perhaps when the Bronns rested here, they were comforted by the strains of the whistling sand before they moved on through the lower elevations. Their trip was more difficult now, as the terrain became more desolate; now – in the noon-day heat - they were crossing a desert plateau through valleys pocked with gravel and sage. “The dust would form a mask of discomfort,” Annie recounted. “The sun reflected on the sand and alkali would be blinding; and the cloth cover of the wagon that protected the children and the meager store of possessions would attract the heat and multiply it into a furnace.” Soon the Bronns ran out of food and could not afford to purchase a cow from passing wayfarers. This particular leg of the trip – 35 miles from Sand Springs to Ragtown – was a classic desert joke; there was a shimmer of hope in the distance and the alkali flats continued to throw off a glare that seared the eye as the team plodded along the perimeter of the deadly Carson Sink, a deadly scape littered with the dregs of earlier pioneer crossings. Gertrude’s breast milk had dried up and the baby was shriveling in the desert wastes. But the horses had found succor in the rabbitbrush and sparse grasses along the road, and the nursing mare was feeding her foal. So Joseph milked the mare and nourished the child, knowing that she would not have enough milk for her colt and his boy for much longer. The painful decision was made: the next morning, Joseph would sacrifice the colt by slicing its throat. But when the sun rose, the horses were gone. Later that day, a band of Paiute Indians returned, offering to trade back the horses for food. In exchange for the mare, Joseph gave them sacks of sugar and flour. But the Indians would not part with the foal – and they left with the ransom tied to his back. For the rest of the trip, Joseph’s son, Wild Horse Annie’s father, was fed mare’s milk. When the family arrived in the Promised Land and introduced their newborn son to his grandparents, they told the story that would be passed down through the generations: how a little boy in the desert was saved by a wild horse. A few years later, the Bronns returned to Nevada and purchased a small ranch near Reno. Annie’s father was running the Mustang Express, a desert freighting service, using wild horses he had found on the range to haul goods through the Great Basin. Sometimes Annie would pass time with the itinerant desert workers who helped out on the ranch. Some of these men were well-known in the region, such as “Sanitary Bill,” a pole cutter whose name derived from never having taken a bath. Annie got to know them well and years later, when she learned that some of them eked out a living by destroying wild horses, her knowledge of their ways helped her navigate through a dangerous maze of threats and social castigation. In 1923, when she turned 11, she was struck by polio – a scourge of the era which attacked the nervous system and wreaked havoc on the spine, effecting millions. Its debilitated victims were often kept behind doors or sent away to places known only to a few family members. Annie wore leg braces and was ridiculed at school. Her parents sent her away for a special treatment – months of confinement inside a half-body cast at a sanitarium in California. When doctors took the cast off, the polio was arrested but Annie’s face had stuck to the plaster and she was permanently disfigured. No one told her what happened and she found out on her own when she went home. Her parents had removed all the mirrors, but she finally found one, took a look – and was stunned. Afraid to show her face, she retreated into a world of learning and began to write and paint. But mostly, she was healed by the desert. Unbeknownst to her, a newfangled style of mustang round-up was being carried out all over the West by a pilot named Chance Parry. Like Annie, he was from a pioneer family. He grew up in southern Utah and started hunting wild horses when he was 10. He was a World War I vet and a trophy hunter, with a penchant for bagging cougars in the Grand Canyon. But it was mustang fever that really had him in its grip. “Hunting wild horses is the greatest sport in the world,” he said. “The wild horse is not only the swiftest, but the cleverest of animals.” Parry paved the way for the characters Arthur Miller wrote about in “The Misfits,” and other hunters who now penetrated the nooks and crannies of the wilderness. Their tales were often recounted in breathless prose published in high and low-brow journals, from the New York Times Magazine to brochures published by wilderness outfitters. In November, 1925, Popular Science Monthly published an article about Parry, under the headline “How A Cowboy-Aviator Hunts: The World’s Most Thrilling Sport Found in Ridding Western Grazing Land of A Million Outlaw Animals – Adventures of a Famous Buckaroo.” It was a typical adventure piece of the time, using language not so different from that used by those involved in wild horse round-ups of today, framing the mustang as criminal, unwanted, or fugitive. Other cultures had used the same language long ago. In the Middle Ages wolves were tried as killers, said to have stolen babies, and pigs and even monkeys were sometimes placed in the docket and cross-examined, then convicted of being demons, and hung. The Popular Science Monthly article relished the idea of chasing down these outlaw horses. Beneath the lurid headline was an illustration of two rugged cowboys roping a wild stallion on its hind legs. “Breaking a Wild Captive – Desperate Struggle,” screamed the caption, and then the article went on: The great white stallion snorted, wild-eyed, muscles tensed, his gorgeous mane tossing in the breeze that swept across the vast desert of the Colorado Plateau. Behind their leader a shaggy band of mustangs trembled in terror. Out of the mighty depths of the Grand Canyon rose a humming roar that thundered through the spacious silence of the plateau as a great winged creature shot from the chasm at the North Rim and swooped downward, like a giant bird of prey. With a scream of warning the big stallion lunged forward, a flashing streak of white, while the pack of wild mustangs pounded the desert at his heels. Madly they tore across the waste of sagebrush and cactus in a terrified pace to shake off the strange menace from the skies. The pursuer swung lower. Closer and closer it flew, until its great wings cast a shadow over the tossing, straining herd, and its roar drowned out the beat of flying hoofs. Mile after mile the relentless pursuit continued. Now a raw-boned mare at the rear of the band faltered, stumbled, and fell. Now a spotted colt wavered and lagged behind, all atremble. The terrific pace was beginning to tell… When Annie graduated from high school, she got a job at the First Mutual Bank of Reno as an executive secretary, where she worked for the next 40 years. On her first day at work, she was introduced to the instrument that would help her wage the coming battle – the typewriter, which she had never used before. “I made so many mistakes that day,” she said, “I was afraid to throw all the ruined letterheads and second sheets into the wastebasket to give proof of my inefficiency, so I tucked them all up my bloomer leg and fairly rustled home that night.” Soon Annie met the love of her life – a tall handsome half-Native American named Charlie Johnston who had come to Reno for a divorce. They dated over five-cent beers, talked about their love of poetry and the West, went square-dancing and on long rides through the desert canyons. They soon married and bought 16 acres in Wadsworth, calling it The Double Lazy Heart Ranch and proceeded to build a ranch with horses and cows. They even registered their brand but never used it, because Annie thought it was cruel. Not able to have children, the Johnstons turned their spread into a retreat for young boys and girls, paving the way for the hippotherapy used in many programs today. The morning in 1950 that changed Annie’s life had started out like all the rest. She put on her customary suit, pumps, and hat, and got in her car and headed for work. Somewhere along the old Kit Carson Trail, she saw a truck carrying live animals, to market, she thought, but then something disturbed her – she noticed the blood. Annie followed the truck to a rendering plant and when it stopped, she was sickened at the sight. The animals were tightly packed horses, suffering from buckshot wounds. There was a stallion whose eyes had been shot out and a badly trampled colt. Some of the horses were bleeding from their hooves, worn down from being chased across hard rocks. Annie asked the driver where the horses had come from and why they were in such terrible condition. He told her they had been run in by plane. “For many years I had heard about the capturing of wild horses by airplane,” she would later say. “I pretended it didn’t exist. After that day in 1950, it touched my life directly and I could no longer pretend. In the decades to come it would reach and change the lives of many others as well.” Annie was up against a very powerful force, an entrenched illness, the old affliction called mustang fever. “Fever” was the appropriate term; what ailed many men of the West was very similar to the gold fever that had driven the conquistadors, the sickness in their hearts that led them to great heights of violence. Yet it differed in one respect. Because wild horses were alive and could run and hide in the vast reaches of the Great Basin, you had to chase them down. With gold, all you had to do was find it. Pure and simple, mustang fever was bloodlust which became its own culture – it made money, it had its own gear, and it provided people with an identity. Often, it drove them mad. Although Annie’s life had changed the moment she saw the trail of blood, she didn’t know how to proceed. In some ways, she was like the hardscrabble ranch hands she had met long ago. She too had come from a pioneer family that eked out a living in the West, proud of making something from nothing on their own. She could handle a rifle and six-shooter and had an iron will. And she did not need outsiders – government – to explain right from wrong. But for her, Nevada was not a place to plunder. Wild horses – which were Nevada – should be left alone. Without them, she said, we have no heritage. So where to start? First, she needed to do some research. Why were the round-ups legal? Poring over documents in the Reno library, she found out about the Taylor Grazing Act – which answered her question. She also learned that although permits to hunt horses were required, they were easy to get. In Nevada, the only thing required was a petition seeking permission and a $2000 bond. Yet the hunts were only whispered about, sometimes boasted about in certain bars – no one wanted to draw attention to what they knew was disturbing. As Annie discovered, during the eight years after World War II, 100,000 wild horses were seized in Nevada alone – for use as pet food. She started writing letters to local papers; best to start slowly and see who else was out there, in her corner. Very quickly Annie began to receive mail in response – a lot of it, often with no address, just her original name, Velma Johnston. Tex Gladding, the Virginia City postmaster, knew exactly where to take it. Cautious coverage of her campaign began to surface in local papers, in favor of what she was doing, but worded so as not to offend old-timers who had been making a living as mustangers. Soon people came to Annie with terrible stories – round-ups they had seen over the years, unreported atrocities involving the deaths of who knows how many mustangs. One night, Annie and her husband Charlie followed up on a tip. There had been another aerial hunt. They tracked the horse thieves to a makeshift corral in a desert canyon seven miles from their ranch. They found four-hundred horses. The next morning, the horses would be heading for the slaughterhouse. With Charlie behind the wheel of their truck, Annie stood on the hood so she could see over the bars of the corral and snapped pictures. “The mustangs were milling around in the dry dust, hysterical with fear,” Annie had told Desert Magazine. “Their hoofs and mouths were bleeding…They emitted strange tortured cries.” The only thing that mattered to their captors was that they were breathing – as required in the contract issued by the pet food company. As Annie clicked the camera, its flash alerted the men. “A set of headlights careened toward the station wagon,” Annie later told Alan Kania, who had dropped out of college and hitchhiked from Boston to work with Annie after he read an article about her battle. “I jumped off the hood and into the passenger side just as the truck swerved off. The men in the truck were yelling things, obscenities, then they turned around and headed right for Charlie. He pulled out his .38 and took aim. The men left.” Back home, Annie and Charlie developed the film and saw that the horses had bloody hooves and mouths. Early the next morning, Annie waited outside the county commissioner’s office until the first official arrived. “Look,” she said, handing him the photos. He followed her back to the corral where he confronted the men, accused them of cruelty to animals, and ordered them to release the mustangs. As word of the horses’ release spread across Storey County, the range war against the horse exploded, and it now had a human target. Annie received death threats and began responding to knocks on her door with a rifle in her left hand. But she didn’t hide – in fact she and Charlie and Tex Gladding would often meet in the local tavern, along with other locals, to talk about the situation. And then Annie got another tip: the Reno BLM office had given permission to two pilots from Idaho to round up wild horses in Storey County, and the County Commissioners were about to meet to consider the pilots’ application for a bond. “You have to testify,” Tex told her. Others agreed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I know I can make a good argument but…” And then her voice would trail off because she was reluctant to show her disfigured face in public and Charlie would tell her not to worry, she was beautiful to him and that was all that mattered. Soon she was aided by local papers; in June of 1952, the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, the paper that Mark Twain had written for, enraged half the town when it announced support for Annie in the following editorial: Every so often there is put in motion agitation for the destruction by one means or another of the bands of wild horses which still roam the Washoe Hills. The current pressure is being applied solely for the gratification of two sheep ranchers who claim their grazing lands are impaired by the horses. In view of the practically unlimited grazing lands available in Western Nevada and the absurdly small number of the horses, such claims are purely fictional. The wild horses, harmless and picturesque as they are, are a pleasant reminder of a time when all the West was wilder and more free, and any suggestion of their elimination or the abatement of the protection they now enjoy deserves a flat and instant rejection from the authorities within whose province the matter lies. A few days later, Annie traveled to the Storey County courthouse, once the battleground for miners’ claims. The famous 19th Century statue of Lady Justice without a blindfold still guarded the front door. She was accompanied by Charlie and a band of supporters, who sat on one side of the courtroom, across the aisle from stockmen who had vowed to shut Annie down. A classic western showdown was underway, and the overflow crowd gathered next door in the Bucket O’Blood Saloon, where local wags would gather years later as they awaited the verdict in the 1998 horse massacre trial that unfolded in the same hallowed hall. “Gentlemen,” Annie said, rising to speak, and immediately, the cattlemen and the owners of sheep and the defenders of animals stopped shouting and jockeying and eyeing each other and got very quiet, for Annie had a way. “I’m fighting to save a memory…” She recited a litany of abuses against the mustang and her gaze did not waver - not because she wanted it that way but because she could not move her neck. When she was finished, others added their voices, including Ted, who testified that he had recently seen pilots driving mustangs down a canyon, shooting them from the air. “Resolved!” said the commissioners; for the first time in local history, “the use of any airborne equipment, including airplanes, helicopters, etc. as a means of chasing, rounding up or spotting during a roundup of wild horses or burros in Storey County” was outlawed. Years later, on April 20, 1971, Annie traveled from Reno to Capitol Hill to make the case for federal protection for wild horses across the West. By then, she was so famous that she had even appeared on the popular game show “To Tell the Truth,” in which celebrities were blindfolded and posed a series of questions to a well-known guest until they figured out that person’s occupation. “Do you save wild horses?” Kitty Carlisle finally asked, to much applause. Yet Annie was not effected by fame, and on her trip to Washington, she traveled with little fanfare and only two people – publicity –shy scientists from the University of Nevada who were studying wild horses. One of them was Steve Pellegrini, who had grown up in mustang country and written the first academic paper on mustang behavior. “Annie told me not to dress like a cowboy,” he remembers years later. They were joined on the Senate floor by James Feist, a Montana biologist who was dressed like Buffalo Bill. Pellegrini spoke of the tightly knit wild horse herd of the Wassuk Range, of their intricate family connections and what happened when those bonds were broken. Feist had been studying the Pryor Mountain horses, and made a persuasive case for their Spanish heritage, which implied that perhaps other herds had the same bloodlines (later, it turned out that they did). Then the reporter Hope Ryden testified. In 1968, she had quit her job as a television news producer to write a book about wild horses after learning that they were under siege. The influential book was published shortly before the hearings and mailed to every Congressman. “I am not normally a crusader,” she said, and as she testified, wheelbarrows overflowing with mail were rolled down the aisles. They contained the thousands of letters sent by the pencil brigade – more mail than Congress had ever received about anything, except the war in Vietnam. Then, it was Annie’s turn. “Today,” she began, “I am here to save a memory.” It was a stirring echo of the very first speech she gave in Virginia City so long ago. A few days later, Congress unanimously passed Public Law 86-234, the Federal Free-Roaming Wild Horse and Burro bill. For the first time since Annie had seen blood spilling out of a truck on a Nevada highway, it was illegal to capture, brand, harass, or kill the wild horses that roamed public lands. And for the first time, “wild” as it applied to horses was legally defined. “Wild free-roaming horses and burros” referred to “all unbranded and unclaimed horses and burros on public lands” They would “be managed in a manner that is designed and maintains a thriving ecological balance” and “considered in areas where presently found, as an integral part of the system of public lands.” Those areas were called “ranges,” referring to the amount of land that was needed “to sustain an existing herd or herds.” The “ranges” were to be devoted “principally but not necessarily exclusively” to the welfare of mustangs and burros, and within a few years, the government would designate three hundred of them for wild horses. Shortly before Christmas, Richard Nixon, the President who has gone down in modern history for spying on Americans, been perpetually mocked for his social awkwardness, for sweating during the debates with JFK, for not being cool, not being a cowboy after all, signed the bill. “We need the tonic of wildness,” he said at a crowded ceremony, quoting Thoreau – a moment that has been overlooked in the annals. “In the past 70 years, civilization and economics have brought the wild horse to 99% extinction. They are a living link with the conquistadors, through the heroic times of the western Indians and pioneers to our own day…More than that, they merit protection as a matter of ecological right – as anyone knows who has stood awed at the indominatable spirit and sheer energy of a mustang running free.” Alas, Annie was still concerned for the fate of wild horses. Enforcement of the act to which she had dedicated her life would depend solely on the desire of those sworn to carry it out. Knowing that certain government agencies were the domain of stockmen, she worried that the war against the wild horse would continue under cover of law, by way of the mustang’s legal guardians. And paradoxically, it rages most fiercely in the Virginia Range, where descendants of the very horses that Annie first tried to save are without federal protection because they live on state lands. They are now surrounded by freeways, making their last stand. Truth is the safest lie. - Old Jewish proverb Continue to Part Thirty Three - Where are all the Horses? Return to Part Thirty One Go back to the Beginning View the Wild Horse Release Video View the NRCS Range Study Read the History of NDoA Screwups on the Range Sign the On-Line Petition The spirit of Thomas Paine lives Return to KBR Wild Horse and Burro News Return to KBR World of Wild Horses & Burros Go to other Wild Horse Links Go To KBR Horse Net