Few things embody the romanticism of the Wild West better than the mustang.
The word “mustang” comes from the Spanish mesteño, meaning “stray.” Today, these equine strays roam in 10 Western states. Modern mustangs are descended from Spanish stock that escaped during the 17th and 18th centuries, and from horses who were brought west by ranchers. On the Plains, ranchers often released their horses in the winter and then recaptured them (or others) in the spring. Some never came home, and others became the property of the Native American tribes that raided European settlements. By the 1700s, mustangs were a staple among Native Americans in the West.
In the 1830s, a smallpox epidemic swept through the Plains tribes. Unable to care for all their animals, the Native Americans released many of their mustangs into the wild. About 50 years later, when the U.S. government was trying to turn the tribes into farmers, officials introduced draft horses to some mustang herds to change the horse stock from a wild to a farming breed. As a result, different herds of modern mustangs can vary widely in appearance.
Mustangs can be any color, and they’re strong and fast . . . often faster than domesticated horses. Catching them was tricky, and early ranchers and Native Americans used a process called “mustanging” to do it—lassoing the horses at a full gallop. (Among the Sioux, a lasso even became the symbol for a wild horse.) The fastest mustangs could easily escape a rider, so usually only the oldest and weakest horses were caught. In the early 1900s, though, cowboys started using motor vehicles, which made mustanging easier.
Mustanging went on until 1971, when the U.S. Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act. The law made it illegal for a private citizen to capture or kill a mustang. (Government agencies do occasionally capture some of the horses to thin herds.) That brought the practice of mustanging to an end, and today, about 41,000 mustangs live in states from Arizona to Oregon, most in Nevada.
There are no albino horses. Why? Because the albino gene is fatal in horses.