In Colorado: Chasing the Mustangs

By Richard Woodbury

The narrow gully bakes like an oven in the fall sun, and the canyon that engulfs it is silent, save for an occasional magpie's cry. Under a juniper, two cowboys hunch for shade and wait for a signal.

The faint whine of a helicopter peals from the north. The two-way radio crackles to life: "We're two miles out, coming in with seven horses." That sends Tracy Robison, 16, leaping onto a sorrel mount. He wedges the horse behind a mound of sagebrush and keeps as still as he can. Gil Crawford, 58, dives for cover behind an embankment, grabbing a yellow rope that will release the trap gate on the quarry.

Far up the canyon, the red-and-white chopper hovers into view. Right ahead of it, seven majestic mustangs pirouette across a low ridge, chest-high in the sage, kicking contrails of acrid dust in their wake. It is their last moment of freedom. An airborne chase that began miles and ridges ago is about to end.

Pilot Jim Biggs nudges the stick forward and drops another 50 ft. to goose his prey. The fierce blast of noise and dust sends the horses galloping down a yard-wide path that leads smack into a steel-fenced pen. Just as they reach the gully, Robison digs two silver spurs into his sorrel and charges in behind them. Now the old mare at the head of the pack realizes her mistake. She frantically tries to turn but is swept along by the others.

"Gate!" screams the rider, as the horses enter the enclosure. Crawford releases the rope, but the gate is jammed and does not close. The pack wheels and madly bolts for the 6-ft.-wide opening. But Robison and his mount block the way. He grabs the hulking steel frame and yanks it shut behind the wild bunch. Confined for the first time, the mustangs bellow with anger. In his fury, an aging stallion throws himself against the steel grating, opening a gash across his forehead.

These are the modern-day mongrels of the range. They bear little kinship with the untamed steeds of frontier America, which traced their lineage to the 16th century ponies of the conquistadors. These are the great nephews and cousins, long inbred, many of them descended from domesticated animals turned loose in the 1930's, when forage was scarce on the Dust Bowl plains. They are being stalked here in Colorado's Piceance Basin and other states because they have been adjudged a peril to the Western range. Since 1971, when free-roaming horses were put under tight federal protection, they have been multiplying with Malthusian consequences, gobbling up valuable sheep and cattle forage and leaving the range threadbare. Complains Colorado Rancher Dean Burke: "The wild horse is a pest. He has been eating us out of house and home."

The Bureau of Land Management estimates that there are upwards of 70,000 horses and burros loose in the West, perhaps a third more than the land can handle. For that reason, the BLM stages periodic roundups and puts the trapped horses up for public adoption. Dale Crawford, 53, an Oregonian who runs down horses for a living, has outbid--at $58 a head--a passel of others for the right to thin the Piceance herd from 346 horses to 166. Along with his wife Shirley, 52, and brother Gil, Crawford has spent hours in the garage perfecting the labyrinthine steel pen. He has spent another two days airborne over Yellow Creek, scouting the precise location to erect it. Crawford chooses a gully at the confluence of three trails near a favorite watering spot. His crew toils for a day under a blistering sun erecting the 10-ft.-high cage, securing it with iron stanchions and braces of lodgepole pine, and camouflaging its sides with sage and chimisa bush.

Finding the quarry in this 100,000-acre expanse requires sharp eyes and unflagging concentration. From the air, both the horses and the forest appear gray. The chopper darts up ridges and down canyons until Crawford, in the copilot's seat, spots a band of bobbing heads in a grove of cedars. The men use their craft as an earthbound cowboy uses his horse at roundup time, circling and feinting and cutting off lines of escape. Biggs sets the rotor low and at the mustangs' tails. When they break again, the copter sets down, Crawford leaps out and waves them back on the trail.

On a second foray, the men light upon five more mustangs picking at strands of Indian rice grass in a boulder-strewn ravine. They manage to move the pack to a clearing but the lead stallion refuses to cooperate. He attempts to bring the others back downhill. Crawford gets the horses moving and then sweeps in suddenly at tree level, splitting off the leader and chasing him down a gully. Quickly he gets the other four moving toward the trap. Better to lose one than the pack.

Even in confinement, the horses refuse to give up easily. They stomp and batter at the grating, and resist every effort to trailer them to a larger enclosure. Robison must cut off the colts from their mothers for the trip to the adoption distribution center. One young upstart sends him flying against the fence, and it takes his best hammerlock to wrestle him down.

More than 22,000 horses and burros have been corralled over the past nine years, but no one is overly happy with the program. The BLM spends more than $300 to corral a horse, yet recoups only a fraction of that in adoption fees, which average $80. About 3% of the horses cannot be placed, and federal law requires that these be returned to the range or shot. Few Piceance Basin horses will meet this fate; most of them are strong, healthy and trainable, and will be snatched up fast.

Dale Crawford will clear $11 on each of the horses he brings in, not much profit for a month of grueling work. He has written to President Reagan, as he did to Jimmy Carter, suggesting a partial return to the days of old, when hunters could stalk horses and sell them to meat factories. "As it is," he says, "thousands of taxpayers' dollars are being poured down the drain." But out on the Colorado range, matching wits and stamina with the proud mustangs, the bottom line seems a faraway concern. "The excitement of bringing those horses in," says Crawford, "is worth more than all the money."

--By Richard Woodbury

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