Their high-pitched whinnies roll across the plains like a tumbleweed- scatteri ng wind. At dusk one of them rears and paws the air, casting a silhouette that is the very image of freedom. These are mustangs, the legendary wild horses of the American West. Two decades ago, mustangs were headed for extinction. Now, at Mustang Meadows Ranch, a 32,000-acre spread near St. Francis, S. Dak., 1,500 of them have found sanctuary and a managed independence that may help assure their survival.
Descended from horses that escaped from Spanish herds, millions of mustangs roamed the prairie at the start of the 19th century. But as the wildness went out of the West and more and more rangeland was plowed for crops or fenced off ( for cattle, the number of mustangs dwindled. By 1970 only 17,000 were left, despite the passage of federal laws that banned the use of airplanes and motor vehicles to round them up for slaughter. In 1971 Congress responded to a massive letter-writing campaign by enacting the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which assigned the federal Bureau of Land Management the responsibility for protecting these "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West."
Under BLM, the mustangs have recovered: 42,000 horses now run free on the range. But their numbers have greatly surpassed the ability of the land to support them. To ease the overpopulation, BLM in 1976 inaugurated a national Adopt-a-Horse program, under which 90,000 wild horses have been sold to private owners. But the mustangs taken off the range annually include many that are too old, crippled, ugly or mean to make good pets. Until two years ago, thousands of unadoptable mustangs were crowded into dusty feeding pens in Nebraska, Nevada and Texas at a cost to taxpayers of $13 million a year.
Enter Dayton Hyde, an Oregon rancher with a reputation for unorthodox management and a deep interest in conservation. "In my travels I kept going by feedlots seeing these poor creatures cooped up," says Hyde, 64. "I thought, That's no way to treat a wild horse. My dream was to get these horses out of the feedlots and running free again."
In 1988 Hyde founded the nonprofit Institute for Range and the American Mustang in order to create sanctuaries -- retirement homes of sorts -- where unadoptable wild horses could once again roam freely. He convinced BLM that with foundation and public funds he could establish a self-sustaining sanctuary within three years. IRAM's first project was a 12,600-acre sanctuary in the Black Hills of South Dakota that opened last year. Tourists pay $15 to view 300 mustangs running on high plateaus of ponderosa pine. The project makes Hyde smile. "The horses are finally getting over their depression," he says. "They got so bored in the feedlots that they didn't know how to run anymore."
Hyde's ambition went beyond his successes at the Black Hills sanctuary. He next sought to establish a larger range that could accommodate thousands of horses. But since IRAM lacked both money and land, Hyde needed the help of a private investor. He turned out to be Alan Day, an owner of cattle ranches in Arizona and Nebraska. Day, says Hyde, "knew how to manage grass and was not afraid of the immensity of my dream."