“I live on the top of the world. In the never-summer mountains of Wyoming, 8,000 feet closer to the sky, when spring finally comes to save me from a perpetual winter, and the world comes to life again, I remember what it is I am here for. I’m the only daughter in a long line of ranchers. And when we let our horses out every spring, I love to watch them rediscover the world. I can see in them an expression of my own restless spirit. Charged with an appetite for adventure, they take to the land without hesitation. They are pure power. When I see them running free, I often think of the first horses and how they were the true pioneers of America.
The stories we hear about how the West was won are all lies. The history of the West was written by the horse. Where ever a settler left his footprint, there was a hoof print beside it. Men came further and further to stake their claim in the great American wilderness. But they encountered a strength that couldn’t be tamed. Wild horses. Mustangs. The settlers called them parasites that stripped the land and starve their own herds. They couldn’t domesticate them so they destroyed them. Isolated and hungry, they were on their way to disappear from the face of the earth. Sometimes when light goes away an afterimage remains, just for a moment. Mustangs are an afterimage of the West, no better than ghosts hardly there at all. No one really wants them, not ranchers, not city people. That’s their destiny. Let them disappear once and for all, along with the other misfits, loners, and relics of the wilderness no one cares about anymore. Lucky for us, a few Mustangs survived, hidden away in the mountains. We need to protect them, for they are the hope for some kind of living memory of what the promise of America used to be… and could be again.”
Skamp, me Skamp; Shotgun – Oh how I miss them, especially Shotgun
Living Greenland 