Life and Times of Fargo
The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was a law passed in 1971 and signed by President Richard M. Nixon. Until then, it was legal for anyone to do most anything to any wild horse or burro. When this historic protection was made into law, it applied to wild horses and burros living on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service lands at that time. But out on the desert ranges and in the forests, the problems with managing this new law came quickly.
The very first sentences of the new law said that wild horses and burros were to be protected on lands where they lived in 1971. But things got twisted, and people got greedy and mean, and the law got ignored. The BLM and Forest Service drew boundaries on a map, showing where they wanted the wild horses and burros to be, but not where the horses and burros actually resided. The wild horses and burros didn’t use maps. They continued to live in areas where they had been for generations. That’s what happened in the pine-covered mountains of the Ochoco National Forest.
A family, or band, of five horses stayed in an area that was on the wrong side of the fence from the Ochoco Wild Horse Territory. There was a handsome, copper-colored stallion, and his main mare, who was black with some radical white markings. The true description of the mare’s color would be “bald-faced, blue roan, sabino paint”. But it’s easier to imagine, and easier to recognize out in the forest, if she’s called “black with some radical white markings”. Another mare, a “bay” which refers to many shades of brown but with black legs and a black mane and tail, and two of the black mare’s offspring made up the band who refused to stay home.
This group continued to multiply, and a few other horses found holes in the fence and expanded the outlaw herd in the Coyle Creek area.
In those days, I lived in a cabin at the edge of the Ochoco Wild Horse Territory. Every day, I would take my dogs Dorothy and Hike for a run in the forest where the horses lived. We weren’t exactly swift, like the horses, deer, elk, and pronghorn, but our slow pace allowed me to observe more; like the hoofprints of a stranger.
The tracks were a little larger than most, and they belonged to a lone stallion who kept a safe distance from the rest of the horses in Coyle Creek. He was a phantom. But one morning, up near Garden Spring, he appeared; a rich, dark bay, probably about four years old. He was bold, but not aggressive, as he intently focused on my slightest movement. Something about this horse was different, like a personality too big to be contained in his wild, horse-shaped frame.
He would later become the friend I called Fargo.
