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128 It was an area replete with western clichés. A cattle rancher moved his stock the old-fashioned way— on horseback. A Basque sheep rancher, situated far enough away from the cattle, called out to his flock. A coyote prowled the region, waiting for a young calf, ewe, or young mule deer that may have strayed from the rest. Swits, mountain bluebirds, sandhill cranes, turkey vultures, and eagles flew overhead. Below the cliffs, the lights of Grand Junction, Colorado, are sandwiched by the red sandstone of the Colorado National Monument on the opposite side of the Grand Valley, nearly on the central Colorado-Utah border. Wild Horse Annie loved the Little Bookcliffs.1 The range above the cliffs contained one of the most picturesque herds of wild horses roaming what was once forty-six thousand rugged acres. Today, following periodic political management plans, a small herd now roams on twenty-six thousand acres. The Little Bookcliffs Wild Horse Area was a special case for Annie. It was the only example of forest-dwelling wild horses in the United States. It was also one of the rare situations where a rancher bought an allotment for his cattle operation because he enjoyed seeing wild horses purely for their historical and aesthetic reasons. It was an area that was ideal to study Annie’s interest in multiple uses of the public land. And it was a situation that yielded a series of administrative errors that reduced the range area by half while keeping the same herd size. The history of the Little Bookcliffs herd can be traced to the 1680s when Ute Indians avoided the desert conditions in the valley below and set up residence above the mountain cliffs. In the vicinity of Red Rock Canyon, archaeologists were able to discern a Ute Indian burial mound and found tepee poles stored in the underbrush. The last wolf in Colorado was also caught in the immediate area. The name Bookcliffs describes the cliff range of mounTHE LITTLE BOOKCLIFFS WILD HORSE AREA 9 T H E L I T T L E B O O K C L I F F S W I L D H O R S E A R E A | 129 tains that begin in Grand Junction and extend west into Green River, Utah. An early visitor to the area thought the area looked like the rough pages of a stack of books haphazardly placed on a shelf. In 1888 western settlers began to move into the Grand Valley as the Utes were forced onto reservations. A few years previously, several Indian subchieftains vented their frustrations against the local federal agent, Nathaniel Meeker, resulting in the “Meeker Massacres” north of the area in 1879. As part of the Utes’ punishment, many of the Indian ponies they owned had to be left behind. Early Grand Junction homesteaders remembered seeing two to three hundred wild horses roaming the highlands of the Little Bookcliffs. One early homesteader, known to history as “Old Man Lane,” built a cabin in a secluded gulch in the middle of the Little Bookcliffs. Several former residents of the area claimed Lane worked with forty to fifty “broom tails” in the same area. There is no explanation as to who Lane was, what he did with the horses, or when he left the area. The remains of his cabin are still located in what is appropriately described as “Lane Canyon,” immediately northwest of the Round Mountain Ridge. Robert “Bob” Brislawn and his brother, Ferdinand, were once mapmakers for the United States Geologic Survey and were familiar with the Bookcliffs Mountain Range. While charting the Utah section of the range in the early 1900s (approximately twenty to twenty-five miles west of the Little Bookcliffs Wild Horse Area), they discovered that wild horses with strong Spanish Barb confirmation were still roaming the area. When the Brislawns established the Spanish Mustang Registry in Oshoto, Wyoming, they returned to the Little Bookcliffs to capture representatives of what would become the foundation stock for their registry. Bob Brislawn once told me that he believed the Little Bookcliffs wild horses included some of the progeny of those horses with strong Spanish Barb characteristics. At approximately the same time, rancher Dave Knight set up camp in the Little Bookcliffs across the canyon from where Old Man Lane lived. Knight brought 30 horses he purchased from Ira Boyce in Peaceance Creek in northwestern Colorado. Ironically, those 30 horses were originally captured out of the Little...

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