Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s Mustangs (review)

On the eve of accepting his party’s nomination to run for president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson had wild horses on his mind. Realizing that French, Spanish, and American traders had been acquiring horses from tribes on the Great Plains and sometimes even capturing wild ones in order to sell them eastward in markets beyond the Mississippi, Jefferson was fascinated. In the Euro-American memory, horses had always been domesticated animals. So famously, and unsuccessfully, he summoned Texas mustanger Philip Nolan to Monticello, so he could learn about the horse “at the only moment in the age of the world” when the horse could be studied “in its wild state.”

Like Jefferson, many Americans have been fascinated by wild horses, and many of us have a difficult time passing up a new book on them. J. Edward De Steiguer’s new Wild Horses of the West is one of the very best overviews of the topic I have seen. This is a volume that proceeds systematically across millions of years of history, from the evolutionary story of the horse, through domestication in Eurasia, and its natural history and social relations of the sort that Jefferson was interested in. Although the author is not a historian, Part Two of the book, “Horses Return to the Americas,” devotes some eighty pages to topics like the Spanish and English introduction of horses to Europe’s American colonies, the animal’s spread across the West and its transformation of Indian cultures, its role in nineteenth-century Great Plains history, and the fate of remnant wild horses into the twentieth century. Although the quality of the author’s treatment of these historical topics varies considerably, all these are good and appropriate chapters for such a book and his simple, plain prose renders the stories clearly.

The author’s heart obviously lies with Part Three, “Protecting Wild Horses,” and this is where this book makes its most useful and original contributions. The politics of contemporary natural resource use in the West—and wild horses are one of the most contentious and vexing of all modern natural resource issues for land managers in the Bureau of Land Management—is a topic the author teaches, and here his expertise shows. This section features original and probing research, and while the author’s position is readily visible, this is undoubtedly the best and fairest assessment of the modern controversies, from the 1950s to the present, surrounding wild horses that I have read. The book is worth having for this section alone.

Wild Horses of the West is not this excellent and up-to-date throughout. The Jefferson story that begins this review is nowhere to be found because De Steiguer is not as thorough and up-to-date in his historical research as he is on contemporary policy. Having topics like the role of the western horse trade in early American geopolitics turn up missing in the book is hardly original sin, but does lead the author to some misses. He has no answer, for example, for the origin of the “Chickasaw horse” (a progenitor of the Quarter Horse), or how southeastern Indians came to possess Spanish-derived horses. Even the modern, politically relevant question of whether horses are actually a native animal (considering their fifty million years of evolutionary history in North America) could have benefitted from the author’s reading of more historians, who have been arguing for a decade that evolutionary adaption explains the horse’s explosive spread across the West. But Wild Horses of the West only discovers this important argument through recent scientific work, and not until its next-to-last page.

While it has no literary pretensions to replace J. Frank Dobie’s The Mustangs, this solid new book has a place on our shelves. It is one of the best horse books...