History of the Herds
Photo credit: Connie Baker
If you are brave enough to read the April 17, 2020 Ochoco Wild Horse Management Plan Environmental Assessment (EA), you will see, on Page 26, that the Forest Service’s origin story establishing the Ochoco (Big Summit) herd, reads as follows:
“Horses originated in the project area around the 1920s according to the existing Herd Management (Territorial) Plan (USDA Forest Service, 1975a). According to this source, these horses escaped from or were set loose by different ranchers in the surrounding areas including Post, Mitchell and Prineville. Ultimately, these free-roaming horses established their territories around Round Mountain and their numbers were kept at around 60 horses by local “horse chasers”, natural deaths and predators (USDA Forest Service 1975a).”
This same narrative has been cut-and-pasted for every BLM and Forest Service wild horse or burro herd in 10 Western states. “The horses are offspring of ranch stock.” To some extent, this is usually true. The untold story, however, is that ranchers had to get these horses from somewhere; off the range; from horse brokers who caught wild horses from the open range and then trained them for specific tasks; or from other sources claiming some special breeding, provenance, or ability, but which were also probably once-wild horses. Also, though never quite acknowledged, Indigenous horsemen raced their horses across the expansive flats of Big Summit Prairie, pre-dating the arrival of European settlers; another likely source of some of the Ochoco DNA. Indigenous horse possession contributing to wild herd origins is probably true with most, if not all, other wild horse herds. The same Environmental Assessment which parroted the unsubstantiated, simplistic explanation of “escaped ranch horses” also cited the genetic analysis of Ketaki Deshphande (Florida International University). Omitted from their citation is the disclosure of the identifiable breed heritage of the Ochoco horses. Not only are the Ochoco horses predominantly of Andalusian and Lusitano descent, with curious evidence of Konik (Tarpan descendants), but the Big Summit branch of the phylogenetic tree is decidedly separate from modern breeds.
Though genetic study has really just begun, what we know thus far leads us to two plausible conclusions, depending on how committed one might be to the “rancher” origin scenario. First, the majority of “ranch horses” which escaped or were turned loose must have been of Andalusian, Lusitano, and Konik descent. Or… these horses were already here. It is possible, as stated above, that both are true. But there is little room for the theory that ranchers arrived here with some manner of completely-domesticated, modern stock, which only then became the wild herds of the Pacific Northwest and specifically, the Ochoco Mountains. And if the Big Summit horses were already here, so were Tribal horses.
Ranch horses of every lineage may have added to the mix, as horses began to decrease in utility, and more recently as locals used the wild herds as a breeding repository; stallions were turned out with the expectation that the wild herds would then be “improved” and the offspring caught and used for various purposes. In the memory of some living today, this harvesting of the wild cash crop was made easier by tying old tires to the lead mare’s legs, or by restricting her air intake by weaving barbed wire through her nostrils. In the end, there is no evidence in DNA analysis that introduced “breeding stock” shaped the Ochoco genotype in a substantive way. Observations of many wild horse herds confirm that horses often select mates based on external traits, or less-obvious but desirable attributes. They also tend to reject outsiders, and domestic horses are not promised survivable conditions that test even the horses adapted to the temperamental Ochocos. And on a site-specific note, as late as 1980, private interests were still showing up at the old Ochoco Ranger Station, actively trying to claim “their” lost horses. Horses that resembled domestic stock, in appearance or behavior, were removed.
An internal Forest Service newsletter from 1932 boasted of the numbers of wild horses rounded up from the Ochoco National Forest and surrounding lands in the preceding four years “to make room for more cattle and sheep”. The number was 2166, with the caveat that this did not represent all the roundups. Of course, the market for these horses was not for adoption prospects; Prineville’s shortline railway was fully capable at that time of shipping great numbers of animals to processing plants. The newsletter documented not only the general sentiment toward wild horses over the decades, but their sheer numbers. Discarded ranch horses multiplying to this extent, when horses were still being used by farms and ranches, is simply not a reasonable explanation for the presence of wild horses in the Ochoco Mountains.
In time, we hope to unravel the threads of the Ochoco Herd’s hidden heritage. We will learn how the DNA of Tribal horses interlaces; whether the drops of Konik blood link to indigenous North American survivors; if the Andalusian is more rightly called the Ochoco – evolved in the Northwest to define the great horses of the “Old World” under the assumption that the Spanish brought them here.
Today, there is so much we still do not know.
