Capturing and Harassing Mustangs was Once a Private Practice.   Now It's the BLM's Business

February 1st marks the 50th anniversary of the release of “The Misfits,” the iconic and underrated film about Nevada mustangers who brutally capture wild horses so they can sell them to the slaughterhouse. Although panned by critics, the film is a powerful and enduring deconstruction of the western, although perhaps more play-like than cinematic in its formulation.  Directed by John Huston and written by Arthur Miller, it starred Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift, with Thelma Ritter in a supporting role. To commemorate the film’s release, a special screening of it was held Sunday at the University of Nevada at Reno, in conjunction with the university’s “Honoring the Horse” exhibit. “The Misfits” alerted many people to the then little-known war against wild horses playing out in Nevada, and, in my opinion, contributed to the early demise of three of its four stars—Gable, Clift and Monroe—all of whom died after the film was wrapped; in Gable’s case, 12 days later.

“The Misfits” was based on a short story of the same name, also written by Arthur Miller and published in Esquire in 1957. Shortly after he met Monroe and fell in love with her, Miller went to Nevada to divorce his wife. He took a cottage at Pyramid Lake outside Reno, next to novelist Saul Bellow, who had also come to the quickie-divorce haven to break up with his wife. Every day, they wrote. Bellow was working on his novel “Henderson the Rain King.” Miller had met some cowboys who eked out a living by rounding up wild horses, and decided to write their story. He had just penned a story that was a precursor, called “Please Don’t Kill Anything,” about a couple who throw commercially caught fish back into the sea. “Nevada was full of misfits,” Miller would later recall, “people who did not fit anywhere. They knew it, they made fun of it, of their inability to function in the United States.”

Men like these had been coming to Nevada for a long time, barely managing to wrest a living from the extreme terrain. They were miners, drifters, day laborers, hardscrabble ranchers; at the end of the 19th century, when the frontier closed and old ways of making a living dried up, they turned to mustangs, whose day was over in the eyes of those who saw them simply as a form of transportation or carrier into battle. Vast herds were running the Nevada range and elsewhere across the West. They were descendants of mustangs that had returned to the land of their ancestral origin, linked by DNA, as we now know, to Ice Age horses that had evolved on this continent. They came with conquistadors, lived in the region for generations, mixing with horses that had escaped from or been dumped by ranchers, settlers, the Army, forming their own bands, finally left alone, until one day someone started running them out of the mountains to the slaughterhouse, where they were processed and shipped to dinner tables in France.

The men who waged these captures were called mustangers, and they devised ever more efficient ways to capture wild horses, which now came to be branded as “outlaws” and “demons.” Some mustangers became celebrities, pictured on the covers of adventure magazines. Often they regaled reporters from publications such as The New York Times with tales of hunting down “vicious” mustangs. At first these pursuits were carried out on horseback, but with the invention of the fixed-wing airplane, airborne hunts became the preferred method, and pilots made a tidy living chasing the fleet-footed animals down from the mountains and onto the desert flats of Nevada. Mustangers were so revered in some circles that one woman extolled the virtues of the practice in an article called “My Husband Is a Mustanger,” written for Desert Magazine in 1941:

“Our roping horse, Rainy, short for Rainbow, nickered softly and followed me as I walked across the yard to the barn. He is a privileged character and has the freedom of the ranch. I found a bit of sugar in my pocket and patted his soft nose as he munched on the treat. It has been a long time since he ran on wobbly colt legs with his mother as they tried to escape the airplane that was herding them into a wild horse trap in the Owyhee desert of eastern Oregon. … We are horse lovers. My husband, Lonnie Shurtleff, is one of less than a dozen qualified mustangers in the United States. … When Lonnie first began his horse running career in 1938 there were truly thousands of horses. When we again set up camp in that area there were still great herds in 1946 and through 1951. However, by 1958, the horse herds had dwindled to only a few scattered bunches. … The government decided during the early 1940s that the range land was needed for more beef cattle. The alternative to corralling the wild horses and shipping them for slaughter was to allow hunters to shoot them for $2 per head and leave the carcasses on the desert. We felt that slaughtering them humanely as they do the beef animals was the lesser of two evils. …

Click (HERE) to read this Report in its entirety at TruthDig

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• rtfitch.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/%E2%80%98the-misfits%E2%80%99-at-50-honoring-the-horse-and-an-iconic-western/

Feb. 14, 2011

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