I recently interviewed Castle McLaughlin, a cultural anthropologist and Curator of North American Ethnography at Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and founding member of the Nokota® Horse Conservancy (http://www.nokotahorse.org/cms/). I wanted to get her take on the relationship between the wild horses she is working to save in North Dakota and the broader history of the dispossession and repatriation of Native ways of life on the Northern Plains. Here is the first of a two-part transcript of that discussion.
PR: Thanks for talking with me, Castle. How did you get involved in the rescue and preservation of wild horses?
CM: It started when I moved to North Dakota in 1986, originally just for the summer. I had finished my PhD course work at Columbia at that time, and I went out to work for the National Park Service at Knife River Indian Villages, which preserves several village sites of the Mandan and Hidatsa—proto-historic into historic.
Horses grazing at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. This Park Service advertising photo shows Quarter Horses who now occupy much of the park, not the wild horses McLaughlin has worked to preserve.
Early Sept. of 1986 the Park Service was planning round ups at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in southwestern North Dakota, as they do periodically, of both bison and wild horses, and they needed riders for the roundup. Having ridden my whole life, I was detailed over there to participate in that roundup.
That particular roundup turned out to be a life changing experience. Originally, in a very negative way, because it was brutal. They rounded up several bands of horses—stallions and mares and their offspring, and they were taken to a local livestock sales facility and were sold at public auction about ten days after the roundup.
My heart went out to one particular stallion there. He was a seven-year-old blue roan. He was just desperate to escape, and kept climbing the rails of the pen.
McLaughlin’s first rescue—a blue roan black with sweat, in the holding corral at the 1986 auction. [Photo: Castle McLaughlin]
They didn’t even bother to separate the bands in the corral; they just put them all in there together and so these stallions are kind of fighting each other, and there were a lot of injuries and some deaths. But this one roan stallion was trying so hard to get away-he was sweating so much that he looked jet black. He was the subject of special cruelty; every time he would rear, the round-up crew would give him a shot with an electric prod. I decided I was going to buy that stallion and turn him back into the park—partly because no one in the Park Service can tell one horse from another!
When I went to that auction, I was really stricken. All of the horses were very wild. They had never been that close to human beings, and they were all terrified. They had hardly eaten or drunk water since the round-up and many were injured. I knew that the buyers were almost all kill buyers before I went, and so I really wanted to buy that stallion.
PR: “Kill buyers?”
CM: Yes, they bought horses for meat, for dog food, and so the way they sold these horses was by the pound. They would run in, say, three or four stallions at a time and then they would sell the whole group by weight. So, my stallion comes into the arena with four other stallions and I start bidding, and at some point the auctioneer stops in the middle of the whole thing, points me out in front of everybody and says, “Young woman, what are you bidding on?” And I said, “I just want the big one, the blue roan.” So I kept bidding and I finally got the horse. When I went the pens behind the sale barn afterwards, I stood there looking at that stallion, thinking, “How in the hell am I actually going to do this?” Here is a horse that’s never been touched and I didn’t want to ask for any help from the staff, they were a rough bunch.
The 1986 auction barn. [Photo: Castle McLaughlin]
But then these two guys walked up and asked, “What’d you buy that stallion for?” At first, I was kind of hostile because I thought they were kill buyers, but it turned out that they were Leo and Frank Kuntz, from Linton ND, and they were interested in the horses to breed with their horses because they were involved in these cross-country races and the wild park horses had terrific legs and feet and stamina So they were buying them to cross breed, and to save some of them. So my stallion went home with them.
PR: What did you do next?
CM: Soon after, I applied to the Park Service for a research grant to answer the questions raised by this experience: “where do these horses come from? How long have they been there? What’s their management history, and why are they getting rid of them? I was helped by Tom Tescher, a retired national rodeo cowboy and local rancher. He was appointed to be my advisor. Tom had actually been watching these horses for something like 30 years as kind of a hobby.
A wild mare and foal at the Leo Kuntz Ranch, ND. [Photo: Castle McLaughlin]
He would go out once or twice a year with these little spiral notebooks to make notes about the social organization of the herds. He had given different numbers to the stallion bands and had developed a method of numbering to identify the stallions and mares. Tom took me out into the park and taught me where to hide to see these horses when they watered.
PR: What did you discover in your research?
CM: After three years of study, half of it in the field, I concluded that the park had accidently fenced in some of the last wild horses from the region. I found some very interesting historical documentation that suggest that these horses descend in part from the horses that were confiscated from Sitting Bull and other Lakota people who surrendered at Fort Buford in ND in 1881. These were the last of the holdouts who had gone to Canada after the Little Bighorn fight. They surrendered their horses and guns—that was the normal protocol. That happened to all those Cheyenne and Lakota war bands.
Lakota drawing of a “Paint,” circa. 1913. Castle McLaughlin comments, “it is a pattern of Paint (in this case tobiano which is white body with darker blocks “over” the white) that Indians called “Medicine Hat” because of the darker head and ears. They considered parti-colored horses (and other things) to have distinctive or more connections to spirit powers—for lack of a better phrase.[VAULT.oversize.Ayer.Art.Sioux.Indian Newberry Library, Ayer Collection]
Usually, the army would confiscate their horses and then sell them in St. Paul, trailing them over there and selling them and using the money to purchase farm and ranching equipment for the Native people on the new reservations. But in this case, the local traders at Ft. Buford bought these confiscated Indian horses and eventually they ended up in the herd of an open-range rancher, a French nobleman named the Marquis de Mores, who had moved out west to raise cattle and eventually innovated a method for slaughtering beef locally and shipping them by refrigerated rail cars to the east.
The Marquis de Mores.
He was a military officer and a horseman, and he heard about these horses at Ft. Buford. I guess that fired his imagination, being a European. He thought these horses must have a lot of stamina; they must have a lot of valuable characteristics because they had survived all those traumatic years fighting [during the Plains Wars].
He bought all the mares from these confiscated herds and took them back to his ranch, where the Theodore Roosevelt Park is nowadays, and he raised those horses on the open range. His idea was to use them as a foundation herd to cross with European breeds so that he could retain the good qualities of these horses. He broke a number of these horses and he and his wife rode these Indian horses. When he left, he sold a large group of them to a nearby rancher. Before he left, he had many photographs taken of the horses, so we know what they looked like.
PR: And what did they look like?
CM: They looked just like the horses in the park and their offspring that Leo was raising: The main colors were black, grey, blue roans and red roans, a few paints, but very few or no chestnuts, bays, the common colors of quarter horses. Same conformation. In short, the horses in the historic photographs look exactly like these horses!
PR: So, by observing them in the wild and seeing their offspring, and comparing that with the archival evidence of the photographs, we are able to know something about the animals and the important role they play in our collective histories.
PR: It sounds to me like you have historical evidence that some of Sitting Bull’s horses are the ancestors of these horses your group is protecting. Is that right?
CM: Yes, that’s right.
PR: And, in a way, this is repatriation?
