For most of a century afterward the wild horse was treated as vermin. Ranchers wanted the grass for cattle. Contractors ran the herds with trucks and light aircraft, drove them into traps, and sold them by the pound for chicken feed and pet food. By the 1950s the herds had been cut to a fraction of what they were, and most people who thought about it at all assumed the animal would be gone in a generation.

One morning in 1950 a Reno secretary named Velma Johnston was driving to work behind a stock truck that was leaking blood onto the highway. She followed it to a slaughterhouse and found it packed with wild horses. She gave the next twenty years to what she found there. She wrote letters. She testified in Carson City and in Washington. She got schoolchildren across the country writing to Congress until the mail room ran out of room to put it. In 1971 the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed without a single vote against it. The horses had a legal right to the ground they stood on.

The mustang itself never needed the paperwork. It lives on range that would kill a stable horse in a week. It walks twenty miles a day to water. It stands through winters of thirty below and summers that bake the flats to powder. Its feet are hard because nobody trims them. Its instincts are sharp because nothing has been bred out. Somewhere north of seventy thousand still run free across ten western states, and about half of them are in Nevada.

Wilder Horse puts a horse on everything it makes, and this is the reason. The mustang did not ask permission to belong here. It earned the place by being tougher than the land and more patient than the people who wanted it gone. Velma Johnston did not ask permission either. She saw something wrong on the road to work and did not let it go.

Whatever you are building will spend a long while being treated as a stray. Keep running. The country has a habit of coming around to the animals that refuse to leave.