IT FEELS LIKE A FAIRY TALE COME TO LIFE: beautiful, wild horses running free in the mountains of Montana and high desert of Wyoming. They are regal, proud, spirited, watchful, wise … and very, very real.
Of all the wonders of the world, the survival of the horse as a species is a particular marvel. It is a story not of a few hundred years on the North American continent, or a few thousand years of domestication. It is a story of millions of years of evolution, adaptation, and survival. Subsisting on the poorest forage, equines can inhabit sparse, even hostile environments. The wild horses of the Pryor Mountains are a phenomenal part of this tremendous epic.
Preserving these animals’ wild habitat and way of life has become a mission for a growing number of individuals who understand the unparalleled value of Nature’s true fairy tales. The words “the horses changed my life” could be their anthem. How sincerely they are spoken. How reverently. How often! For these horses have a profound effect on people. They lift the spirits, quiet the mind, and soothe the soul.
LIVING FREE in a wild land is the birthright of all of America’s mustangs.
To experience these mustangs in the wild is to witness a rare and exquisite example of Nature’s glory. Bright, alert eyes sparkle with intelligence, lush manes and tails tantalize the wind, sinewy flesh and momentous bone gambol over ancient trails. Their very presence whispers an echo of another time. To be among them is to know a wildness unchanged by human will.
In their own way, these wild horses exemplify the best of what we hope for in ourselves: strength, courage, even kindness, forgiveness, and love. They endure and accept. They resolve their differences then move on. But what leaves us most wistful — what we envy most — is their raw, unabashed freedom. They neigh it on the mountain and whicker it from the desert. It races along high ridges and down grassy slopes, lolls in the warmth of the mountain sunshine, and wallows in the red mud of water holes. Joyful, lazy, exuberant and ultimately content: it is the freedom of these exquisite animals that catches our hearts.
To share in their tranquil existence, to realize the perfect order of their natural world, to rejoice in each new foal and yet be able to accept when that perfect order brings suffering or death — to know them on their own terms — is to be transformed.
We hope to convey them to you here as if you were among them, so that you can experience a small part of their world and appreciate their wonder. And hopefully you, too, will be able to say, “the horses changed my life.”
“The Crow Country is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it exactly in the right place; while you are in it you fare well; whenever you go out of it, whichever way you travel, you will fare worse. …
Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow Country.”
— Chief Eelapuash (also called Arapooish) to a fur trader in the 1830s
DARK BAY STALLION Morning Star, with two grulla mares and a light dun. According to Spanish traditions a male horse of this smoky color is grullo, and the female is grulla.
A BAND OF BACHELORS lounges contentedly in the rugged desert of the Dry Head.
