With flashing eyes and thundering hooves a newly-escaped mare,
a rancher’s rope still hanging from her neck, joins a swift moving
herd racing across an open valley. Mustangs are a mythic symbol
of freedom, heroism, romance, limitless possibilities and the
vanishing West where it was estimated that two million wild horses
roamed the largely unfenced American West in the early 1900s.
Some of those mustang herds descend directly from horses brought
over by Spanish Conquistadors in the late fifteenth century. Other
herds’ ancestors escaped or were let loose by settlers, ranchers
or Native Americans.