HUNTING MUSTANGS

One of King’s top priorities was eliminating competition for his cattle.

Both in terms of water and forage, this meant getting rid of thousands of head of mustangs that ran free throughout southwest Texas from the early 1600s until about 1920.

“Hunting Mustangs,” a sketch by James Pike made in about 1853 and reprinted in his book The Scout and Ranger, Being the Personal Adventures of Corporal Pike of the Fourth Ohio Cavalry. “For myself,” Pike wrote, “I noosed a beautiful strawberry-roan mare, with a white croup covered with black spots, but she was fat and strong and snapped my lariat, carrying away the larger portion of the rope.” Many Anglo cowboys thought little of mustangs. In 1919 Robert Hamilton Williams, sometime Texas Ranger, recalled that “Whilst cattle-driving we often came across big bunches of mustangs, but seldom went after them, for unless you have a very strong party and the best of horses, it is very difficult to run them down. Though the hardest, toughest little brutes in the world, they are very troublesome to gentle, and never are what one would call comfortable mounts; in fact they are more bother than they are worth” (from With the Border Ruffians: Memories of the Far West by R.H. Williams).

Tom East, Sr., and his wife Alice Kleberg East endeavored to save the last of the southwest Texas mustangs during the 1930s and 1940s. This photo shows Mr. East with a favorite buckskin or roan-colored stallion. While the horse shows Iberian or mustang type, to my eye there is Billy blood evident in the width of back and fullness of the hindquarters. This is not surprising since over time, most North American mustang herds have had plenty of opportunity to interbreed with Anglo horses.