The first slain wild horse Bill Smith found in the Ozark forests was a stallion with a bullet hole through its muscular neck.
“It was in the fall, about three years ago. He was a black with a small blaze on his face and he was right at 5 years old because I looked at his teeth,” Smith recalled sadly.
“He had definitely been shot in the neck with a big rifle, and he hadn’t been dead very long,” said the burly, retired ironworker, who lives in the vast oak and hickory forest of the Ozark highlands, 150 miles south of St. Louis.
Since Smith found the dead stallion, he has discovered two other slain wild horses, and he has heard reports of about 10 others.
“It is sickening to think that anyone could do this,” he said. “It just seems like a senseless and cruel act. These horses are no threat to anybody, and they are not doing any harm.”
Someone is killing the wild horses of the Missouri Ozarks. There also have been reports of 11 wild horses being secretly rounded up by airplane and shipped off to slaughter, reducing to just 20 or so the herd that some date back more than 40 years to Missouri’s free-range years, when livestock roamed unfenced lands to feed and sometimes returned to the wilds.
Officials of the National Park Service who manage about 70,000 acres along the sparsely populated region’s two main rivers, the Current and the Jacks Fork, have suggested several suspects: coyote hunters who use the horse carcasses for bait, farmers whose crops the horses may damage, opportunists who sell the unprotected horses to slaughterhouses, or even horse owners whose own animals may be preyed upon by the wild bands.
But many who live in this region disagree with those theories and point angrily to a different suspect: the National Park Service itself. Smith and others contend that the park service is either directly or indirectly responsible for the secret slaughter of wild horses in these scenic woods.
“If I had to say one way or the other, it would be my opinion that the park service did it because they are the ones who want rid of them,” Smith said. “People around here don’t trust the park service at all.”
More than 60 natural springs flow beneath timber-topped Coot Mountain and Devil’s Backbone ridge in the Ozark forest. Springs that rank as the nation’s largest feed glassy, chilled water into a network of streams that in turn pour into the gravel-bottomed Current and Jacks Fork. The rivers run apart, then together through thousands of acres of private and public land that is, for the most part, unabused by man.
To outsiders, this rugged region, where brown bear, rattlesnakes and tarantulas also dwell, is known for canoeing and float trips, ample hunting and fishing, and the weeklong horseback trail rides (run by Smith’s cousin Jim) that draw thousands of riders from across the country.
To locals, the region is known for all that, and also for the vehemence of its feuds. Tales abound of long-running and sometimes violent battles, past and present. The Smiths’ own family history features a post-Civil War feud in which a relative spent years tracking and killing three bushwhackers who had murdered his two brothers.
There is no lack of modern-day feuds either. They pit natives against newcomers, farmers against hunters, canoeists against motor boaters, rivermen against horsemen. And, willing or not, the park service is a participant in more than a few of these hard conflicts.
Many locals have viewed the park service as an interloper since its agents came to the region in the late 1960s and began buying land, sometimes through condemnations, to create the Ozark National Scenic Riverways.
Park service officials contend that many property owners reaped financial windfalls in the buyout process, but locals claim that few were paid the true worth of their land. Embittered Shannon County residents recount the story of one elderly woman who ordered a son to burn down the family homestead rather than have it fall into park service hands.
“People here are of the opinion that the park service is trying to run the people and the horses out and take over the whole county,” said Bill Smith. Although the Riverways is a federal park designated for recreational use, locals claim that pistol-packing park rangers-not enough of whom are hired locally by some thinking-have placed more and more restrictions on what people can do and enjoy in their own native forests.
Local anger still simmers over a park service decision to limit the number of canoe and float concessions on the rivers. That ruling ignited a 10-year feud, pitting the rangers against local concession owners who had seized one of the scarce economic opportunities in this cash-poor region.
But even the battle over the rivers didn’t incite the overt animosity that arose after the park service’s 1990 pronouncement that the Ozark wild horse herd-actually four or five independent bands-should be removed as a “non-native feral stock” that “creates the potential for new trails, soil compaction, and bank erosion . . . and disturbance to native plant communities by random trampling and grazing.”
“The horse issue came to the forefront in 1990 due to complaints from local residents about maltreatment and mistreatment of horses,” said Park Supt. Art Sullivan, a Boston native vilified by locals who view the horses as a local treasure and want them left alone.
The Ozarks are full of resolutely independent men and women who admire these free-spirited animals. In Eminence and other small towns rooted in the hills and hollows, it is golden currency to sit down in a coffee shop with a report on the “rat-tailed wild Appaloosa mare” or a story about a wild stallion snorting a warning from deep in the timber.
Area farmers leave salt blocks for the horses in the summer and bales of hay in the winter. Canoeists glow from surprise encounters with the horses at river’s edge. Trail riders spend hours searching for the elusive bands as the horses graze on acorns, wild grains and grasses in this horse nirvana.
Who started it?
The plan to remove the horses was first suggested by the state humane society in 1989, but the park service took over after the proposal “got too hot” for the humane society, Sullivan said.
But the park superintendent’s account is disputed by many locals, as well as by the state humane society’s former chief investigator, David Garcia, who said that when he first came to check reports of wild-horse abuses, he learned that the park service already had a plan to have them slaughtered.
“They were trying to do it very quietly so as not to arouse public opinion, but when I found out what was going on, I got a television crew,” said Garcia, now head of the humane society in Franklin County, Mo. “I said that if people allowed the park service to remove the horses, they would load them in a truck and take them to a (slaughterhouse). That got people in an uproar.”
Sullivan denied that he ever planned to slaughter the wild animals, but wary horse lovers in the region organized the Missouri Wild Horse League, which has fought the park service in the courts and in the woods with equal fervor.
The park service issued a permit to two area men to capture the horses in 1991; the league last year won a permanent injunction to halt the removal.
But last summer the park service won a reversal in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, reopening the door for removal. The league, which points out that the horses roam as much on private property as public land, is now preparing to appeal the reversal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In response to widespread opposition, the park service in October announced an “indefinite postponement” of the horse roundup. But the mistrustful members of the league have not reined in their challenge.
The issue heats up
League members said they have considerable evidence-including people who saw the horses after they were captured-to show that the two area men who were given a permit and then told to halt went ahead with their roundup anyway and sold 11 wild horses for slaughter at 89 cents a pound.
League members said that one of the men involved indicated to them that the park service was aware that the roundup was taking place but did nothing to stop it.
Sullivan acknowledged that two reported roundups were investigated. “I cannot say for certain that no horses were taken as reported, but we found no concrete evidence that they had been,” he wrote in a letter to a local newspaper. “I can assure you that, if true, (the roundup) was not at the direction or the knowledge of the National Park Service.”
And so, the horses and the feud run on.
In October, during the annual weeklong fall trail ride that draws more than 2,500 people to Jim Smith’s Cross Country Trail Rides in Eminence, the Smiths and other league activists led a demonstration that will long be remembered in these parts-particularly by Sullivan.
On Oct. 8, an 8-mile-long convoy of trucks and cars pulling horse trailers cut through the Ozark Mountains from Eminence to Van Buren 30 miles to the south and pulled into the parking lot of the park service headquarters.
Estimated at nearly 3,000 by league leaders and local media (Sullivan put the number at closer to 700), the protesters on horseback and muleback, in carriages and even on a rocking horse paraded through the town of 900 residents. Many carried signs aimed directly at the embattled park superintendent:
“Art’s a fart,” read one of the milder reproaches. “Memo to Art Sullivan from U.S. taxpayers, message, you’re fired!” said another. “My mule isn’t the only ass around here.” “Remove the parkservice, not the wild horses.” “We say no to wild horse Alpo.”
The protesters also chanted the slogan of the Wild Horse League that adorns caps, T-shirts, sweatshirts and banners found across the Ozarks: “Wild and free, let ’em be.”
At the protest, Poplar Bluffs lawyer Doug Kennedy, who represents the league, presented a subdued Sullivan with a petition demanding that the park service “make the wild horses permanent residents” in the Riverways park. “For 25 years, the park service has been riding roughshod over local people, and this wild horse issue has become a rallying point,” Kennedy said later.
It’s something personal
Members of the league have been suspicious of a park service proposal to create a wild horse refuge on private land; the league has offered to serve as caretaker and protector of the herd if it is left alone.
Bill Smith is among those who regularly ride deep into the forests to check on the wild herd and protect it from human predators. Brawny and not inclined to lengthy discourse, Smith, like many others who oppose removing the horses, has deeply personal reasons for wanting the animals and their freedom preserved.
“I don’t talk about it much,” he said, “but I had a little girl, and she got killed when she was 14. She and I spent a lot of time together riding to see the wild horses. It thrilled her to see them. It was the main thing that she liked to do.
“That is what makes me so hard on this matter personally. And I know a lot of people around here who for their own reasons feel the same.”
