The abandoned horses of coal country
Herds of horses now range over former coalfields in West Virginia and Kentucky, said Ashley Stimpson in The Sunday Long Read. But these beautiful animals weren’t meant to live in the wild.
THE HORSE WASN’T just skinny, she was skeletal. Not just thirsty, desperate. Alive, but just barely. When the scrawny filly wandered into Joey Ferris’ yard, he knew exactly where she had come from. Ferris was a lieutenant at the Mingo County Sheriff’s Office, where operators frequently fielded calls about horses like this. In addition to putting out food and water, he decided to use the opportunity to call attention to their ongoing plight.
He began the video he uploaded to YouTube in 2017 with a matter-offact assessment: “Bad things are happening in southern West Virginia.”
“People get a horse,” Ferris says into the camera, eyebrows furrowed, “and they leave the horse on the strip mine.”
Behind him, the cumin-colored filly bowed toward a pan of water, her ombre tail flicking away dogged summer gnats. It had been a few weeks since this one had appeared on his property, he explained. Her ribs were once again beginning to disappear beneath her flesh, but the horse’s hip bones strained against her hide like a pair of blunt arrowheads. “We’ve been feeding her really good, but she’s still bony.”
Ferris posted the video to his YouTube channel and called it Abandoned Horses of WV Need Help. The bony brown horse was content to hang out in his backyard for a meal or two, but she bolted at the first sign of a harness. So he forwarded the video to someone who might know what to do.
If anyone knew that West Virginia’s abandoned horses needed help, it was Tinia Creamer, who had been trying to get people to pay attention to the problem for years. Creamer runs Heart of Phoenix, a West Virginia horse rescue about two hours north of Ferris’ home in the area known as the Southern Coalfields, where decades of strip-mining—removing mountaintops to access the minerals beneath—have turned the undulating topography into flat, grassy prairies ideal for grazing. The consolation prize: for years, locals took advantage of the newly available space.
It was an informal system with implicit rules: Round up your horses in the winter, absolutely no stallions. But when the economy tanked in 2008, many in the region could no longer afford to feed their horses. And so they simply left them—even their stallions—on these sites, hopeful they would survive on the grass that mining companies were legally obligated to plant after operations had shut down.
Within a decade, thousands of free-roaming horses were scratching out a living on abandoned and active strip mines across nine counties in eastern Kentucky and four in southern West Virginia.
When Creamer watched Ferris’ video of the filly, who would eventually be named Phoebe, she knew there was a good chance for a rescue. “A starving horse two weeks from death,” Creamer says, but young. “Age was greatly on her side.”
Creamer figured that Phoebe had been rejected by her herd. At some point— perhaps weakened by parasites or too dependent on her mother’s milk—she had become a liability. Coyote bait. To drive her away, the other horses kicked her, bit her, or ran her down until the only logical thing for the filly to do was seclude herself.
But the complex social instinct that told Phoebe to hide also compelled her to seek companions, in this case a miniature pony that belonged to Ferris’ girlfriend. Phoebe was looking for a new herd. Visiting Ferris and using that friendly pony as a lure, Creamer enticed Phoebe into a trailer and back to the rescue. A couple weeks after Ferris posted his video, Phoebe was off the mountain for good.
HEART OF PHOENIX is located a few miles north of Huntington, W.Va., in the town of Lesage: a smattering of houses, a small grocery, and a hot dog stand perched on the banks of the Ohio River. The rescue currently houses about 40 horses, three of whom had been removed from strip mines.
At 40 years old, Creamer has a mane of dark hair, glassy blue eyes, and a full-throated Appalachian accent that stretches her vowels like taffy. She knows it sounds made up but swears it’s true: her first word was “horsey.” Growing up in Lincoln County, West Virginia, Creamer amassed hundreds of Breyer horse models. By 11, her mom had enrolled her in riding lessons; by 14, she had a horse of her own. She spent her teenage years at auctions with her horse-trader grandfather, who also took her to the Kentucky Derby, where they watched from the infield.
Horses were always there, in real life and in the stories her father used to tell, about growing up a “starving little boy with no daddy in Lincoln County, where having a horse was a luxury.” His voice still caught with emotion when he talked about the family mule that got shot for pilfering a neighbor’s garden, leaving his mother with no way to get to town, no way to pull firewood down from the hills.
But by adulthood, Creamer had moved on from horses and away from West Virginia. At 24, she was living in Florida with her husband and son—most of a literature degree under her belt and plans to become a novelist—when she had an epiphany. “I love West Virginia, I love it in a crazy, mad, ridiculous way,” she says. She missed her dad; she missed her five siblings. “I had to get back home.” Creamer returned to West Virginia in the waning days of 2006, intending to make a fresh start; instead, she got there just in time to say goodbye.
It was a rainy January night around 11 p.m. when a fire broke out at the six-story Emmons apartment building in downtown Huntington. Creamer’s 19-yearold brother Ben, 17-year-old sister Angel, and 14-year-old brother Quentin were
inside. All three were killed. Sixteen years later, Creamer says the loss is “something you don’t get over.”
The first year after her siblings’ deaths, Creamer was “a mummy,” but the next year, suddenly, she found herself wanting a horse. “It was a piece of being a kid. What did I have as a kid? Those siblings and horses.”
She only wanted one, a horse she could keep on the land she bought outside of town. She turned to Craigslist; it was 2009, a year into the country’s worst recession in a generation, and the online classifieds revealed the grisly fallout. “You couldn’t log on there and not see horses starving to death or being given away everywhere,” she says.
By 2010, Creamer had founded Heart of Phoenix, which she named after one of her first rescues—a neglected horse whose painful hoof condition made her impossible to save. HOP was still a fledgling nonprofit in 2012 when Creamer learned about horses roaming old strip mines. Someone sent her an email with a picture of a horse “that looked like it had been set on fire.” The horse was located in Mingo County, the email said, could she help?
When she wrote back asking for the owner’s name and the address, the person explained that the horse lived on the strip mine. Lots of them did, actually. Even 12 years later, her eyes still get wide recalling this moment. She decided to go see for herself.
They were out there all right. Herds teeming with emaciated horses, some with hides marred by open wounds and lacerations, nosing for something to eat amid rocks and brush, breeding and in-breeding indiscriminately. Swarming local roadways to lick salt off the pavement. She knew even the healthy-looking horses were likely vitamindeficient and full of worms. “They’re domestic animals. They are in no way designed to live out there,” she says.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN human and horse was never a mere partnership, not the sort of practical arrangement we shared with donkeys or oxen. We carved them out of marble, wrote classic novels about them. We braided their manes and took them as dance partners, set their likeness on rockers and placed them beside our babies’ cribs. Today, these beasts of burden no longer carry actual burdens; instead, they bear an arguably heavier load—raw human emotion. Romance, nostalgia, glory. For so-called wild horses, we have reserved our most precious sentiments: those of America itself.
But there are more than a few holes in our mythology. First of all, in the United States there’s no such thing as a wild horse—not genetically, because all horses today are descendants of domesticated stock—and not in any literal sense of the word either.
For instance, perhaps the country’s most famous herd of feral horses, Virginia’s Chincoteague Ponies, are carefully tended by a local volunteer fire department, using funds raised in an annual auction of the island’s foals. The 150 or so horses, made famous by Marguerite Henry’s beloved children’s book, Misty of Chincoteague, are kept safe from their adoring fans with barbed wire and receive regular, year-round veterinary care. On North Carolina’s Outer Banks, herds of feral horses are managed by state and federal agencies as well as a handful of nonprofits.
The coalfields’ feral horse herds, though, have none of this. As the herds grew, grim stories appeared in local papers. Hungry horses chewing the siding off houses, ripping up landscaping, and causing car accidents. In 2016, three stallions were found shot to death on a decommissioned strip mine in Johnson County, Kentucky. And in 2019, 20 horses were shot in Floyd County, Kentucky, the majority pregnant mares. Suddenly, a new narrative threatened to calcify—one that warped Appalachia’s longheld affection for the horses into something negligent, even malicious. So, in recent years, new efforts have emerged to recast the horses into a new role, from ecological crisis to tourist attraction. Locals argued that with a little supplemental care—a salt block here, a hay bale there—not only could they endure, they might actually become a point of pride for the region. Something beautiful in a beleaguered place.
Creamer, who for years argued against using the horses as tourist attractions, has softened her stance on the issue. “But it’s a wonderful life until it isn’t,” she warns. “There’s not a single horse out there that stays in that life. It can look like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. But next year, it could be emaciated, leg broken, hit by a car.” And just because a horse looks healthy doesn’t mean it is. Creamer says most of the horses HOP has rescued from strip mines were malnourished, full of parasites and decaying teeth.
“The land looks lush and green, but it’s mostly actually weeds,” she says. “The water sources are all toxic. They don’t like you to say that around here, but they are.”
SOON AFTER ARRIVING at Heart of Phoenix, Phoebe went from a starving, “pathetic” horse weeks from death to a quirky, curious animal, according to Creamer. “A big dork with gigantic ears.” She grew until she was 17 hands at the shoulder—about 5 feet, 7 inches—a size to match her gigantic ears.
After a year in rescue, Phoebe went to stay with Adam Black, a horse trainer outside Columbus, Ohio. For 100 days, he worked to get Phoebe ready for HOP’s annual competition and adoption event, the Appalachian Trainer Face Off. Black says working with feral horses presents unique challenges. “They’re hypersensitive to body language, eye contact, how you face them,” he explains. “It’s that predator-prey mentality. Years of survival have taught them that.”
Eventually, Phoebe relaxed, her “mule-y, long ears” softened, and Black could slip a harness over her nose. Then a lead. Then a saddle. Then a rider. Then a rider with a pistol who shot balloons while Phoebe dashed confidently. She met dogs and cattle and kids and went for long trail rides at crowded parks.
Phoebe finished third at the event, and was adopted by Lisa Quinlan, a 57-year-old bookkeeper and longtime horse owner who lives outside Akron. Among Quinlan’s other two horses, Phoebe asserted her dominance. The mare once rejected by her band is now the “top-notch girl in the field, the head horse.”
When she sees her owner at the fence line, Phoebe lets out a contented whinny. “She really likes us,” Quinlan says with a smile that comes through the phone. “She wants us to be a part of her herd.” Five years after she wandered into a Good Samaritan’s backyard, Phoebe has exactly what she came down the mountain to find. But thousands more just like her remain.
Adapted from a story that originally appeared in The Sunday Long Read (sunday longread.com). Used with permission.