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65 Annie did not have much quiet time to contemplate her future without Charlie: she had a full-time job and spent evenings and weekends volunteering for local charities. It was clear that she was not going to heed her doctor’s advice to slow down. While the doctor wanted to protect her heart, Annie was focused on protecting her wild ones. For years Annie was on her own when it came to the protection, management , and control of wild horses. She and Charlie operated their campaign out of their home, keeping friends and strangers updated through correspondence . Newspapers interested in the cause published Annie’s letters to the editor and reported her progress. The Johnstons did not have corporate sponsors or foundation grants supporting them. Small amounts of money trickled in from people willing to donate to the cause. There was no nonprofit organization to assist them. Colonel Ed Phillips of Kansas City, Kansas, followed Annie’s progress and organized the International Mustang Club, offering Annie a lifetime membership . Phillips’s objective was to solicit the federal government to develop wild horse and burro refuges to protect the animals from the roundups that continued on the western rangeland. If Annie could not protect all the wild horses, she briefly considered saving some of them in sanctuaries. Phillips knew that her reputation to get things done as “Wild Horse Annie” would bring greater credibility to his club. John and Helen Reilly agreed with the concept and joined the organization , primarily to help Annie achieve her objectives. Leading the club, which had approximately 250 dues-paying members, were president Ed Phillips, vice president Velma Johnston, and secretary-treasurer Helen Reilly. Without much publicity, the International Mustang Club began making its support of wild horse sanctuaries known to the Bureau of Land Management . If the blm wanted to clear the range horses and livestock from public PRYOR COMMITMENTS 5 66 | W I L D H O R S E A N N I E lands for range-recovery purposes, sanctuaries were one way to preserve the heritage of the wild horses in their native habitat. The Nevada blm was the first to accept the administrative challenge. The 2,209,326 acres of the Nellis Air Force property outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, was a strange location for the creation of a wild horse range. The U.S. Air Force, Bureau of Land Management, and Nevada Game and Fish Commission worked in concert and agreed to establish a refuge in the northcentral part of the air force property. The herd was managed by a cooperative agreement between the two federal agencies. Annie was pleased to have the blm provide a good-faith gesture so soon after the passage of the Wild Horse Annie Act but suspicious too, considering the government’s past animosity toward the wild horses and burros. In 1962 the blm carved out approximately 400,000 acres of the federal weapons testing, flight training, and bombing range, located within a 900-square-mile area of Cactus Flats and surrounded by low, rocky desert mountains. The blm designated the area as the Nevada Wild Horse Range— the first of its kind in the country. Administrators claimed the refuge was their response to public pressure from thousands of wild horse admirers. On the refuge, which is approximately half the size of Rhode Island, officials allegedly counted two hundred horses during the first year. As Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall explained, “Preserving a typical herd of feral horses in one of the nation’s most isolated areas may prove difficult, but we will make the effort to assure those of us who admire the wild horse that there will always be some of these animals.” The Department of the Interior stated in a press release that the horses were mixtures of Spanish mustangs, Indian ponies, and stray domestic horses. “Only one generation is needed to change a domestic-bred horse to a wild one,” Udall said in the press release.1 Annie was particularly encouraged when Secretary Udall stated that this “permanent refuge is the first step to assure that at least one wild herd will be preserved.” Annie appreciated Udall’s gesture of good faith and told him that she hoped this was only the beginning of her long-range plan to reintroduce the concept of “management and control” that was omitted from the Wild Horse Annie Act. She offered the assistance of the people whom she relied upon for their knowledge...

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