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American Journalism
ISSN: 0882-1127 (Print) 2326-2486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uamj20
“Wild Horse Annie” Rides on Washington: Mythical
Characterization in Newspaper Coverage of Wild
Horse Advocacy
Aaron T. Phillips
To cite this article: Aaron T. Phillips (2016) “Wild Horse Annie” Rides on Washington: Mythical
Characterization in Newspaper Coverage of Wild Horse Advocacy, American Journalism, 33:1,
43-60, DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2015.1134974
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2015.1134974
Published online: 03 Mar 2016.
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2. American Journalism, 33:1, 43–60, 2016
Copyright C
! American Journalism Historians Association
ISSN: 0882-1127 print / 2326-2486 online
DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2015.1134974
“Wild Horse Annie” Rides on Washington:
Mythical Characterization in Newspaper
Coverage of Wild Horse Advocacy
By Aaron T. Phillips
Velma Bronn Johnston, also known as “Wild Horse Annie,” advocated
for the protection of wild horses from 1950 until her death in 1977. Her
grassroots efforts culminated in federal legislation, making her an important
early female figure in the history of environmental advocacy. This article
analyzes newspaper and magazine articles about Johnston’s advocacy to
consider how Johnston was framed in terms of myth and memory, cementing
her association with the highly symbolic animal she fought to protect and
with powerful mythological tropes of the American West.
O
n a bright, clear morning in the spring of 1950, Velma Bronn
Johnston, an administrative assistant for an insurance company,
was making her thirty-mile daily commute to her office in Reno,
Nevada, from her ranch in Wadsworth, Nevada. As she neared Reno, she
noticed blood streaming from the stock trailer in front of her. Concerned
by this unusual occurrence, she followed the truck to its ominous stopping
point, a rendering plant in nearby Sparks. When the driver opened the trailer,
Johnston was horrified by what she saw: it was packed to overflowing with
wild horses that had been rounded up days before by airplane, truck, and
lasso. The blood’s source was a mutilated colt that had been trampled by
the other horses on the drive to the rendering plant. Although Johnston was,
like most Nevadans, aware of a postwar increase in mechanized wild horse
roundups and slaughter to supply a burgeoning pet food industry, she had
not seen the bloody handiwork of “mustangers” firsthand.1
Johnston would
later recall this day as the day her “apathetic attitude was jarred into acute
awareness.”2
Aaron T. Phillips is an assistant professor in the Management Department at
the University of Utah, 201 South President’s Circle, Salt Lake City, UT 84112,
aaron.phillips@eccles.utah.edu
1
David Cruise and Alison Griffiths, Wild Horse Annie and the Last of the Mustangs (New
York: Scribner, 2010), 41–63. 60.
2
Alan J. Kania, Wild Horse Annie: Velma Johnston and Her Fight to Save the Mustang
(Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2012, 241), 7. Kania’s original source is Velma B. Johnston
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3. 44 Phillips
On that day at the rendering plant, Johnston took on a new role as an
advocate, eventually becoming a powerful force in the campaign to stop the
slaughter of wild horses and adopt more humane management strategies.
From the time of her conversion on the road to Reno in 1950 to her death
in 1977, Johnston advocated for wild horses, both in her home state of
Nevada and in the corridors of Washington, DC.3
Her influence began to
grow nearly a decade before Rachel Carson published her groundbreaking
environmental treatise Silent Spring, making Johnston an early yet important
female figure in the history of environmental policy and advocacy in the
twentieth century.4
Johnston was, as one biographer puts it, an interloper in
the “male dominated world of range conservation.”5
Disfigured at a young
age by the ravages of polio, she was extremely shy and reticent, but her
empathy and passion for wild horses nevertheless vaulted her into national
recognition over a hard-fought twenty-seven-year advocacy campaign that
saw the passage of two pieces of federal legislation: the 1959 Wild Horse
Annie Act, so-called because of Johnston’s nickname, and the 1971 Wild
and Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act.6
In 1952, Johnson was derisively dubbed “Wild Horse Annie” by Bureau
of Land Management (BLM) District Manager Dan Solari. Solari hurled this
would-be insult at Johnston shortly after Storey County, Nevada, approved
an ordinance outlawing aerial wild horse roundups, an early victory for
Johnston—and one that flew in the face of the grazing-focused logic of
rangeland management at the time. Johnston embraced the sobriquet, often
referring to herself in the third person as “Wild Horse Annie.” Her nickname,
a curious three-way hybrid of Western American icons Wild Bill Hickok,
Annie Oakley, and Buffalo Bill, resonated with the mythology of the wild,
frontier West. Like Johnston, the news media also seized on her colorful
nickname, and thus the name “Wild Horse Annie” and the story of wild
horses in the United States are inextricably linked.
This research builds on popular accounts of Johnston’s work such as
Alan Kania’s biography Wild Horse Annie: Velma Johnston and Her Fight to
Save The Mustang and J. Edward De Steiguer’s history of wild horses, Wild
Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s Mustangs. Although
Velma Johnston and wild horses are featured in the academic discourses
of law and natural resources, wild horses in general and “Wild Horse An-
nie” in particular have not been considered within the academic context of
and Michael J. Pontrelli, “Public Pressure and a New Dimension of Quality: Horses and Burros”
(paper presentation, Thirty-fourth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference,
Washington, DC, March 4, 1969).
3
Kania, Wild Horse Annie, 13.
4
Deanne Stillman, Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the West (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2008), 256.
5
Kania, Wild Horse Annie, 28.
6
Ibid., 12.
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4. American Journalism 33:1 45
journalism history. This research seeks to add to histories of environmental
journalism by considering how print media of the time represented John-
ston. While this study focuses on media representations of Johnston and wild
horses, its implications extend into issues of Western rangeland and wildlife
management and, more broadly, the persistence of frontier mythology in the
American national identity. In addition, this study is linked to other schol-
arly efforts to map the role of media as purveyor of public memory, the
representation of women, and press coverage of the environment.7
In considering media characterizations of “Wild Horse Annie,” this essay
interfaces with three key lines of inquiry in journalism history. First, it nests
into broader conversations regarding the ways in which print media have
functioned as trustees of public memory; second, it is located in the context
of studies considering media representations of female public figures; third,
it offers insight into how the press covered the emerging “environment”
beat, particularly during the later part of the period studied. In constructing
public memories of the wild horse debate and Johnston’s advocacy in the
mid-twentieth century, media accounts reached into a storehouse of myth
and memory associated with the American West. As Jack Lule has argued,
hero and victim myths often appear in journalistic accounts of events, and
Johnston’s case is no exception. In particular, Johnston’s case involves depic-
tions of the wild, frontier West and its signature—if not native—inhabitants,
the horse and the cowboy. The American national identity, shot through with
notions of individuality and self-reliance, is populated at its core by heroes
and outlaws (who may be one and the same). The frontier ethos of toughness
and self-determination that animates the hero-outlaw continues to inform
American conceptions of national identity, as patterns in media coverage of
“Wild Horse Annie” can attest.8
Complementing and complicating these trends in coverage, media char-
acterizations of Johnston often cast her as a heroine, a category of iden-
tity that was evolving rapidly toward potential empowerment of women as
7
Key studies consulted include Carolyn Kitch, “Anniversary Journalism, Collective Mem-
ory, and the Cultural Authority to Tell the Story of the American Past,” Journal of Popular
Culture 36, no. 1 (2002): 44–67; Janice Hume, “Memory Matters: The Evolution of Scholar-
ship in Collective Memory and Mass Communication,” Review of Communication 10, no. 3
(2010): 181–196; Janice Hume, “Changing Characteristics of Heroic Women in Midcentury
Mainstream Media,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 1 (2000): 9–29; Mark Neuzil, The
Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2008); Craig Lamay and Everette E. Dennis, eds., Media and the Environment
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1991); Alison Anderson, Media, Culture and the Environment
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); and Robert Cox, Environmental Commu-
nication and the Public Sphere (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012).
8
Many studies examine the frontier and its relationship to American identity. See Richard
Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress: Theodore Roosevelt’s Myth of the Frontier,” American
Quarterly 33, no. 5 (1981): 605–637; and Richard A. Maynard, The American West on Film:
Myth and Reality (Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden Books, 1974).
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5. 46 Phillips
social influencers during the twenty-seven-year span of Johnston’s advocacy
campaign, as Janice Hume has shown.9
The study thus shows how media
coverage of Johnston constructed public memory, both of Johnston as a
mythically charged, influential woman and of notions of the frontier West,
including the evolving practices of environmental conservation and animal
protection. This study offers a contextualized, qualitative analysis in an at-
tempt to map coverage of Johnston and locate her mediated story within the
always-changing terrain of American myth and memory.
Two research questions orient this study: “How did media characterize
Johnston, her advocacy of wild horses, and wild horses?” and “How did that
coverage engage the mythology of the American frontier west?” The study’s
analytic emphasis is on newspaper and magazine articles about Johnston and
her advocacy of wild horses. Media accounts of Johnston’s advocacy efforts
may offer insight into the collective national memory regarding both her and
the highly symbolic animal she fought to protect. In particular, this analysis
considers how media characterizations of Johnston may resonate with the
mythology of the American West.10
Calling Johnston “Wild Horse Annie”
versus Velma Bronn Johnston, for example, frames the story in a particular
way; similarly, calling wild horses “mustangs” versus “feral horses” colors
the narrative about these animals and their presence on the land in very
different ways.
Source material for this analysis comes primarily from the Velma Bronn
Johnston archive in the Denver, Colorado, public library’s Conservation Col-
lection, which houses newspaper clippings covering the years 1949–1976.11
Particularly in feature-length articles and in articles with national readership,
Johnston was characterized as a strong, heroine-like figure in spite of her
diminutive stature. Many of the articles that covered Johnston’s advocacy
engaged the mythology of the frontier American West, often in complex
ways that speak to the durability of the frontier myth as it adapts to so-
cial change. Three themes emerged from the analysis, all of which engage
9
Hume, “Changing Characteristics of Heroic Women,” 9.
10
Jack Lule, Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism (New
York: Guilford, 2001).
11
Out of the many hundreds of clippings housed in the archive, the study focused on
articles referencing wild horses, wild horse protection, Velma Johnston, and/or “Wild Horse
Annie.” This winnowing process yielded 135 articles: one from the 1940s, two from the
1950s, sixteen from the 1960s, and 116 from the 1970s. Archival articles represented various
geographic regions: 45 percent were local Nevada sources; 38 percent were from other Western
states; 16 percent were national sources; and 1 percent were sources from the Eastern United
States and Canada. Since the vast majority of articles in the archival sample were from the
1970s, and since the archive does not include information as to how articles were selected by
Johnston, her executors, or archivists, this material was complemented by additional research
that provided a broader perspective of Johnston’s characterization by the media during the
entire course of her advocacy career, from 1950 until her death in 1977.
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6. American Journalism 33:1 47
frontier mythology: first, an emphasis on Johnston’s simultaneous frailty and
strength; second, a subtext of violence; third, an oddly oscillating romanti-
cization/vilification of the American “mustang.”
Simultaneous Frailty and Power
The signing of the federal “Wild Horse Annie Act” prohibiting aerial
and mechanized roundup of wild horses on federal land by President Dwight
D. Eisenhower on September 8, 1959, was covered by a broad range of local,
regional, and national newspapers. The stroke of Eisenhower’s pen forever
sealed the connection between Johnston and her “wild ones.”12
The name
“Wild Horse Annie,” frequently invoked in media coverage of Johnston’s ef-
forts, was sure to have stirred the imagination of those reading accounts of her
political wrangling. Johnston’s resonant—if originally derisive—nickname
efficiently embraced and represented these central characteristics of Ameri-
can national identity, harking back to the halcyon days of frontier indepen-
dence and open space and invoking powerful cultural myths. Though hurled
as a spur-of-the-moment insult, the name grew to proportions as legendary
and knotted into the fabric of American identity as the bands of wild horses
roaming the West.
As Johnston ramped up her campaign to save wild horses from slaughter
in the years following the 1955 Nevada state law outlawing aerial wild horse
roundups on state land, she was increasingly covered by regional newspa-
pers in addition to those in her home state. These articles likely increased
public awareness of Johnston and the wild horse advocacy campaign on a
regional scale, but the first article to bring national exposure to Johnston was
a Reader’s Digest abridged version of a Denver Post story.13
Published in
eighteen languages and with an American readership of at least seventeen
million, Reader’s Digest in 1957 was undoubtedly an influential publication.
Magazines, Carolyn Kitch has argued, are often “important sites of meaning-
making, community-building, and reminiscence,” and Reader’s Digest was
particularly prominent at the time.14
The Reader’s Digest article character-
ized Johnston as “the most tireless, outspoken friend the mustang ever had.”15
In what would become a predictable pattern in coverage of her efforts, the
writer, Robert O’Brien, noted, “she stands five foot six in her high-heeled
riding boots and weighs a spunky 108 pounds.”16
Remarking on the contrast
12
J. Edward De Steiguer, Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s
Mustangs (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 3.
13
Robert O’Brien, “The Mustangs’ Last Stand,” Reader’s Digest, December 1957, 188–
192.
14
Kitch, “Anniversary Journalism,” 45.
15
Robert O’Brien, “The Mustangs’ Last Stand,” Reader’s Digest, December 1957, 188–
192.
16
Ibid.
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7. 48 Phillips
between Johnston’s waifishness and her tireless advocacy, O’Brien wrote,
“her diminutive size has not kept her from waging a bitter battle for the
country’s mustangs—so bitter, in fact, that her friends and opponents now
refer to her as “Wild Horse Annie.”17
O’Brien’s emphasis on Johnston’s
high-heeled femininity and diminutive size and its ostensible contrast with
her tirelessness and fierce advocacy became a common refrain in later ac-
counts. From that point on, most journalists tended to consider her size and
stature and contrast it with her influence, character, and reputation. Her char-
acter and reputation were intimately associated with her nickname, which
carried echoes of an imagined frontier past.
By the summer of 1959, Johnston’s national campaign for legislation
banning aerial and truck-assisted roundups of wild horses was in full swing.
She testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee on July 23, 1959, de-
tailing for a rapt audience of sixteen the inhumane treatment of wild horses
during roundups. As Time magazine described her testimony, she told of how
“mustangs are flushed from their hilly retreats by low-flying airplanes, whose
pilots pursue the animals across the prairies until they are near exhaustion.
Then trucks take up the chase. Finally, the horses are lassoed with ropes
weighted with truck tires or other heavy objects. The horses drag the weights
around until they drop. Then they are hobbled and hauled into the truck.”18
The Time magazine article, which appeared in the July 27, 1959 issue,
characterized Johnston as the “frail, unlikely-looking champion” of the “wild
horses and burros of the romantic old West.”19
The article did not, however,
stress the contrast between Johnston’s perceived frailty and femininity and
her tirelessness. This difference in characterization of Johnston may have
been due, in part, to the nature of each article. The Reader’s Digest article
devoted five paragraphs to discussing Johnston; the Time article is four para-
graphs long, and though its headline was “Wild Horse Annie,” it sought to
cover her congressional testimony, which focused on the inhumane treatment
of wild horses, in a “straight news” way. Yet even in an article devoted to
dispensing facts, such as the grim reality that from the end of World War
II to the article’s publication, one hundred thousand wild horses had been
“captured and cut up into dog food,” the evocation of a frontier Western past
is prominent: the roundups were taking place in “the romantic old West.”20
Just as the mythical construct of the frontier and the rugged independence
associated with it had appeal extending far beyond the Western rangelands
where wild horses and burros roamed, so, too, did the Wild Horse Annie Act.
In addition to romanticizing the old West and general tropes of the frontier,
articles in the summer of 1959 commonly evoked the quintessential frontier
17
Ibid.
18
“Wild Horse Annie,” Time, July 27, 1959, 5.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
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8. American Journalism 33:1 49
individual: the cowboy. A Milwaukee Journal article headlined “Wild Horse
Annie Lassos Mustang Support in House” detailed Johnston’s early success
with the bill in the summer preceding its passage.21
The fact that Annie was
able to “lasso” congressmen from distant districts emphasized her defiant
power and places her in the wrangling role of the traditional cowboy.
News of the bill’s passage in September of 1959 was announced na-
tionwide and in several Canadian provinces. Articles announcing the bill’s
passage ran in the Toledo, Kansas Blade; the Calgary, Alberta Herald; the
Regina, Saskatchewan Leader-Post; the Nashua, New Hampshire Telegraph,
and many other newspapers. Editors exercised a healthy level of frontier free-
dom in crafting headlines for the story, nearly all of which drew heavily from
Western American mythology. The Toledo Blade, for example, published
the headline, “Law Heads off Last Roundup; Wild Horses Get Reprieve.”
Headlines such as this emphasized both the Western traditions involved in
the case and the role of Washington lawmakers as intercessors for the wild
horse. This contrast was embodied by the bill’s sponsor and one of Wild
Horse Annie’s staunchest supporters, Nevada congressman Walter Baring,
who commented on the bill’s passing into law, “I’m very happy. It shows the
people’s hearts are still with the good old American traditions.”22
Interestingly, Johnston’s early disfigurement from polio was not gener-
ally brought up in newspaper accounts, but, clearly, her diminutive size and
stature were often part of the mythmaking evident in the press. While her
disfigurement was reportedly the subject of derisive behind-the-back com-
ments in the political arena, newspaper accounts tended to stress her prim and
proper demeanor and how it contrasted with her outsize influence in Wash-
ington, DC, particularly as her campaign gained ground nationally between
the passage of the 1959 law and the 1971 Wild and Free-roaming Horses and
Burros Act.23
After the passage of the 1959 law, Johnston’s advocacy continued but
faded from the national spotlight until the political leadup to the 1971 Wild
and Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act. Whereas the 1959 law had featured
Wild Horse Annie in its very title, the 1971 act foregrounded the animals it
was meant to protect from slaughter. Nevertheless, press accounts of John-
ston still liberally deployed metaphors and mythos of a bygone Wild West.
As she grew in symbolic stature, later newspaper accounts continued to fore-
ground her appearance and character, often elevating her wildness to the
level of caricature. Newspaper articles vividly portrayed Johnston as a wild
cowgirl who “head[ed the] stampede” to save wild horses and “spur[red]” the
21
“Wild Horse Annie Lassos Mustang Support in House,” Milwaukee Journal, July 15,
1959.
22
“US Law May Save Wild Horses in the West,” Calgary Herald, September 9, 1959.
23
De Steiguer, Wild Horse Annie, 151.
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9. 50 Phillips
passage of legislation by “rid[ing] the range” of policy and politics, ultimately
“stamped[ing] a law through Congress.”24
The emphasis on the dramatic tension between Johnston’s body, occu-
pation, and demeanor, on the one hand, and her passionate character, on the
other, was taken to a literally cartoonish level by one profile. Jack Waugh
profiled Johnston a year after the passage of the 1971 Act for the Chris-
tian Science Monitor. A “slip of a thing who became a scourge of sorts”
to her enemies, Johnston was, in Waugh’s view, “Clark Kent disappearing
into a phone booth, a Kate needing taming, Madame La Farge knitting at the
guillotine, Belle Starr shooting up the town.”25
Waugh’s litany of compar-
isons placed Annie in a category of dangerous women unwilling to succumb
to limited positions in society. Waugh wrote of Annie’s detractors, “they
prefer Salome dancing.”26
For Waugh, Johnston’s apparent aversion to the
acceptable feminine role—particularly in a male-dominated Congress of the
1960s and 1970s—of seductress or tamed shrew, rendered her comparable
to the ultimate male superhero, Superman. The image of Clark Kent entering
(and Superman exiting) a phone booth was likely ingrained in the mind of
most readers of Waugh’s profile of Johnston. His comparison of Johnston
to the pinnacle of mythical iconography was telling of the impression she
made on the journalist. His characterization was likely to have added to her
mythological status as an unlikely champion.
Waugh wrote rhapsodically about his first meeting with Johnston; the
journalist seemed entranced by the contrast between her reputation for tough-
ness and her bodily form. As he “saw her standing in the doorway, her hand
outstretched, her lips upswept in smiled greeting, [he] mumbled to [him-
self], is it really her?”27
He wrote that she was “thin enough to be a rail.
A high wind would topple her and roll her like a tumbleweed. She should
be playing Mary Poppins in a Walt Disney movie.”28
Remarking on John-
ston’s appearance with a hyperbolic frenzy of cultural references, Waugh
continued:
Wild Horse Annie should have the shoulder spread of a Japanese
Sumo wrestler. She should be chewing nails, hammering out her
outrage on some tabletop. She ought to be clad in boots and spurs
and sweaty Levis instead of this pressed shirt and velvet trousers.
24
“‘Wild Horse Annie’ Heads Stampede to Rescue Wild Western Horses,” Sarasota
Herald-Tribune, March 15, 1972; Wild Horse Triumph,” Milwaukee Journal, December 7,
1971; Charles Hillinger, “Wild Horse Annie Rides Range Again,” Tuscaloosa News, June
25, 1971, 12; “‘Wild Horse Annie’ Wins Battle against Ranchers,” News-Dispatch (Dripping
Springs, TX), October 20, 1976.
25
Jack Waugh, “Alias Wild Horse Annie,” Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 1972.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
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10. American Journalism 33:1 51
She ought to be girdled with a brace of strapped-on six shooters.
She should comb her hair with barbed wire and instead she probably
flits off to the beauty parlor.29
The quintessential cowboy, chewing nails while clad in boots and spurs and
strapped with six-shooters, took a curious form for Waugh.
“Sustained Fighting Qualities” and Frontier Vigilante Violence
Journalists often noted the “sustained fighting qualities” displayed by
Johnston in the face of strong resistance to her efforts.30
Johnston’s resolve
and resoluteness were almost always noted in accounts of her wild horse
advocacy, and these characteristics were often associated with near-religious
fervor. As early as 1959, her cause was likened to a crusade. The term “cru-
sade” is often used to indicate a righteous campaign for social justice, which
is presumably how many journalists meant to portray Johnston’s advocacy.
Yet the term’s legacy is decidedly one of violence.31
A similar violent subtext
operates in notions of the frontier or the cowboy. These cultural concepts call
to mind freedom, self-determination, and grit, but they imply the violence
of expansion and conquest.32
Violence was a consistent theme in the print
media coverage of Johnston’s campaign. Martial metaphors were pervasive
throughout the articles, and these metaphors may have reflected the under-
current of real violence that characterized the wild horse debate. Aside from
the clearly violent way in which wild horses were rounded up, corralled, and
slaughtered, wild horse advocacy itself was a dangerous business. Indeed,
as Johnston sought to produce photographic evidence of horse roundups,
she was accompanied by her husband, Charley, and his .38 revolver. As
Johnston’s advocacy continued to prove successful into the 1970s, she was
threatened with death by a group of Idaho vigilantes. Curiously concurrent
with the increase in the possibility of violence against Johnston on the part of
enraged stockmen was a realignment of the relative value of wild horses on
the part of conservation and environmental groups. And just as the wild horse
debate carried an undercurrent of violence, so, too, did 1970s environmental
discourse (and with it, environmental journalism) occasionally turn bellicose
in its view of wild horses and, by extension, of Johnston.
29
Ibid.
30
Russell Nielson, “Who Is ‘Wild Horse Annie?”’ Eugene Register-Guard, April 25,
1971, 19.
31
Malcolm Billings, The Cross and the Crescent (London: BBC Books, 1987).
32
For a discussion of Manifest Destiny and frontier violence, see Stephanie LeManager,
Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-century United States
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
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11. 52 Phillips
The June 1959 issue of Desert Magazine was termed “the wild horse
issue.”33
If the wild horse debate was entering the national consciousness
on a broad scale at the time, it had always been an important issue in the
magazine’s area of geographic focus. The so-called wild horse issue of the
magazine featured a profile of Johnston, headlined “Crusade: Wild Horse
Annie Fights to Save the Mustang.” The martial theme common to most press
coverage of “Annie” was evident in this article. Describing the scene in which
Johnston and her husband photographed a wild horse roundup, the article
noted the “strange, tortured cries” of the horses” occasioned by their brutal
treatment by “wranglers.” Upon realizing they were being photographed,
according to the article, the wranglers “rushed for their truck and came
roaring toward the Johnstons. Charles leveled his .38 at the truck driver as
Velma scrambled for safety. At the last second, the truck veered and took
to the open road.” This account of the Johnstons’ early adventures in horse
advocacy emphasized the very real danger associated with igniting what
the article termed a “range war.” Emphasizing—if perhaps dramatizing—the
danger and threat of violence associated with wild horse advocacy seems an
extension of the prominent tendency of print media to cast Johnston’s efforts
in terms of martial and frontier metaphors. Rather than focusing exclusively
on Johnston’s pluck, determination, and perseverance in all their frontier
charm, this article dwelled at some length on the possibility of violence
against the “slim, vital, determined” champion of wild horses.34
Moreover,
the article portrayed a masculine frontier culture of violence, with male
wranglers descending on an armed Charley Johnston, as Velma, no longer
identified as “Wild Horse Annie,” fled.
Upon the passage of the 1971 Wild and Free-roaming Horses and Burros
Act, the theme of violence in the wild horse debates began to loom ever larger.
A 1975 article in Sports Illustrated, headlined “Wild West Showdown,”
spared no detail in its discussion of the violent means by which wild horses
were captured.35
Reporting on an illegal 1973 wild horse roundup near Howe,
Idaho, Herman Weiskopf constructed a chilling account of the incident. He
wrote,
Some horses died or were killed on the way to the corral. Trapped
on a narrow ledge, some of them plummeted over the cliff to their
death. Rustlers slit the throats of others and used a chain saw to cut
off the legs of those whose feet had become wedged between rocks.
Other horses had wires driven through their nostrils to restrict their
breathing so they could not escape.
33
Beverly Walter, “Crusade: Wild Horse Annie Fights to Save the Mustang,” Desert
Magazine of the Outdoor Southwest, June 1959, 4–8.
34
Ibid., 4.
35
Herman Weiskopf, “Wild West Showdown,” Sports Illustrated, May 5, 1979.
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12. American Journalism 33:1 53
This kind of brutality was part and parcel of what Weiskopf called “a saga
complete with shotgun blasts, screaming planes, heavy politics, spies and
the blood of men and horses.” Johnston, the “heroine of what may well be
the final epic Wild West drama,” was depicted as “commander in chief of a
crusade to save the last of America’s wild mustangs.” As with any commander
in chief, the threat of violence hung over Johnston. Yet her response to it,
according to Weiskopf, had an “endearing Auntie Mame quality,” with all
the pep and good humor of Rosalind Russell’s titular character in the 1958
film, Auntie Mame. This Auntie Mame, however, answered her door “with a
.38 in hand.”36
If the violence visited on wild horses during the Howe roundup did not
shock readers, Weiskopf’s mention of a vigilante threat against the aging
Johnston may have done so. He wrote, “Not long ago, Wild Horse Annie
received an envelope containing a large yellow poster of a coiled snake,
beneath which was this warning: DON’T TREAD ON ME THE VIGILANT
COMMITTEE OF 10,000.” Weiskopf quoted a member of this committee as
saying, “I wouldn’t want to be on the outs with these boys. . . they’re tough
people. . . I want to tell you, they get it together.” The interviewee did not
rule out the possibility of “an Old West shootout” that might result in “some
dead bodies.” At sixty-two years of age, having fought for humane wild horse
management for twenty-five years, a resigned Johnston admitted, “I guess the
best thing that could happen would be if one of those men killed me.”37
Press
accounts indicated more than just the Idaho-based vigilante group would
be happy to oblige. One Los Angeles Times article suggested that ranchers
“cheerfully admit they’d like to see her hanged.”38
With its casual reference
to lynching (neatly encapsulated in a parenthetical aside), the article not only
emphasized violence but also conveyed a sense of frontier justice, meted out
in many cases by angry mobs uncontrollable by the forces of law and order.
Driving this point home, in a 1971 letter to the editor in the Nevada State
Journal, a detractor ominously quipped, “I predict Wild Horse Annie will be
called Dead Horse Annie in a very few short years.”39
The emergence of this narrative of vengeful, masculine frontier violence
in print media had implications in terms of authenticity. Johnston’s frontier
pluck was emphasized in many articles surrounding the 1959 law, unaccom-
panied by a focus on her being threatened by actual violence. As the narrative
in the press about her lobbying efforts evolved through the 1970s, the threat
of violence was introduced into more stories. Whereas early accounts lent
Johnston an air of authenticity based on the inherent ethos and cachet of her
36
Weiskopf, “Wild West,” 83.
37
Ibid., 84.
38
Goodman, Mike, “Law Backfires—Now Wild Horse Population Exploding,” Los An-
geles Times, March 3, 1974, B1.
39
Letter to the editor, Nevada State Journal, April 1, 1971.
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13. 54 Phillips
nickname in the context of Western myth, later accounts began to rearrange
that authenticity, locating it with the stockmen and big-game hunters who
were Johnston’s primary foes. A rancher operating out of Bishop, California,
was quoted as saying, “We live with nature,” emphasizing the stockman’s
intimate attachment to his landscape in contrast to the citified detachment
of the “ecology kook who’s never seen one [wild horse] outside a coloring
book.”40
In addition to disparaging a burgeoning ecological movement, Johnston’s
opponents also drew on gender roles to diminish the authenticity of “Wild
Horse Annie.” John A. Chugg, a Utah cattleman, declared in 1972, “the
law that was pushed through Congress by busybody women’s clubs and
elementary schoolchildren is ridiculous, unrealistic and dangerous to our
environment and economy.”41
This dismissal of Johnston, in stark contrast to
her characterization as a cowboy/superhero by other print media accounts,
was perhaps ironically present in the kind of ecologically focused discourse
Johnson’s opponents on the grazing side of the debate might call “kooky.” In
a New York Times story, Gladwin Hill wrote, “as far back as 1950, a Reno,
Nev., hay grower, Charley Johnston, and his wife were been [sic] outraged at
the cruelties of the meat-hunting mustangers, and started a crusade to protect
the horses.”42
Mustangs on the Road, on the Radio, and in the American Imagination
In 1964, the Ford Motor Company debuted the Mustang, a racy coupe
that captured the American imagination as much as its namesake had over
the course of Johnston’s campaign to raise awareness about wild horses.
Selling seventeen million units in its first year, the car was wildly popular.43
Mack Rice’s 1965 R&B song, “Mustang Sally,” went to number fifteen on
the charts.44
The song has since been covered by a who’s who of blues and
rock music; the car has been piloted by a laundry list of celebrities over the
years. Velma Johnston owned a Ford Mustang, decorated with a personalized
license plate, “WHOA,” signifying the official name of her group, Wild Horse
Organized Assistance.45
Two years after the first Ford Mustang rolled off the assembly line
and one year after “Mustang Sally” hit the airwaves, Marguerite Henry’s
40
Ibid.
41
Billings Gazette, December 13, 1972.
42
Ibid.
43
Robert A. Fria, Mustang Genesis: The Creation of the Pony Car (London: McFarland,
2010).
44
Jay Warner, American Singing Groups: A History from 1940s to Today (New York: Hal
Leonard, 2006).
45
Kania, Wild Horse Annie, i.
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14. American Journalism 33:1 55
biography of Johnston, Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West was published.
Geared toward children and told in the first person with Johnston as the
narrator, the book described Johnston’s early love of horses and her later
advocacy efforts. Henry was also the author of the popular 1947 children’s
book Misty of Chincoteague, which dramatized the life of a particularly
remarkable wild horse on an island off the coast of Virginia. It is likely
that many of those in decision-making roles regarding wild horse policy,
particularly around the time of the 1971 law, had read this influential book
as children. In the case of the 1971 law, the Rolling Stones song, “Wild
Horses,” may also have exercised an influence, mnemonic if nothing more,
on the discussion of wild horses in the nation’s capitol over the summer.
Released on April 23, 1971, the single would have been difficult to escape
during that summer’s congressional deliberations on wild horses.46
The widespread popularity of these cultural products testified to the
durable presence of the wild horse, or mustang, in the American imagination.
Just as the cowboy continued to be a powerful identity marker for those
who may never ride the range, eat beans from a can, or track down cattle
rustlers in a vigilante posse, the mustang continued to evoke a spirit of
independence, freedom, and wildness. Media accounts often employed the
term “mustang” extensively, implicitly highlighting the freedom and wildness
of free-roaming horse herds. A 1957 Nevada State Journal article doubly
emphasized wildness when it reported, “national recognition has come to
Mrs. Velma B. Johnston of the Double Lazy Heart Ranch at Wadsworth,
Nev., for her untiring efforts to save the last of the wild mustangs in the
Nevada hills and the Nevada deserts.”47
The “national recognition” referred
to the 1957 Reader’s Digest article, throughout which O’Brien liberally
used the term “mustang.” Its headline was “The Mustangs’ Last Stand,” a
somewhat unlikely mixture of Western tropes that seemed to lump together
the unbridled freedom associated with mustangs with the legendary hubris of
George Armstrong Custer.48
The opening paragraphs were a veritable ode to
mustang wildness, building a narrative of “a milk-white mustang stallion with
burning black eyes” who was “so swift and elusive that mustangers called him
‘The Ghost of the Staked Plain.”’49
In the battle of wits between mustang and
mustanger, the wild horse prevailed in O’Brien’s account. Another legendary
horse, “a steel-blue stallion with flint-colored eyes and a mane and tail
of sheer silver,” escaped his fate after being corralled by mustangers: “he
attacked four mustangers as they tried to rope him, then sailed over a high
corral fence, crashed out of a log enclosure and escaped.”50
Mustangs did not
46
Alan Lysaght, The Rolling Stones: An Oral History (Toronto: McArthur, 2003).
47
“National Recognition for Nevada Woman,” Nevada State Journal, December 29, 1957.
48
O’Brien, “Last Stand, 188.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
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15. 56 Phillips
belong in enclosures like this, early articles suggest; rather, they were native
to the “clean wide spaces of the wind.”51
Johnston herself extended this evocation of wild freedom—and with it a
claim that the mustang is integral to the American identity—in her congres-
sional testimony on July 15, 1959, when she said, “[T]he mustang doesn’t
just belong to Nevada. He is a symbol of freedom for all. He is our American
Heritage, as meaningful to us as the battlefield at Yorktown or the white
church at Lexington. Even more so, because he is a living symbol.”52
Just
as Johnston harnessed the horse’s mythic power, the animal’s mythological
character continued to be emphasized in the press. In the months before and
after the passage of the 1959 “Wild Horse Annie Act,” for example, news-
papers nationwide covered the issue, using the term “mustang” extensively,
yet also emphasizing wild horses’ vulnerability. A Milwaukee Journal arti-
cle was headlined, “Wild Horse Annie Lassos Mustang Support in House.”
Whereas the article’s headline evoked freedom and wildness, the article itself
stressed the victimization of wild horses, who were chased “to exhaustion
[. . . ] using airplanes and trucks,” only to be transformed into “cat and dog
food.”53
Journalists emphasized repeatedly that these “storied beasts” were
being ground into pet food.54
An Associated Press story emphasized their
“shaggy, scrubby appearance,” noting in an emotional tone that they tended
to “hide out in the vastness, wary as deer.”55
Also around the time of the
1959 law’s congressional deliberations, wild horses were compared to buf-
falo, which may have struck a chord with readers wistful for a frontier past
before the extirpation of bison from the American Plains. The horses were
said to be “vanishing from the American scene as the buffalo did 75 years
ago.”56
The 1971 act codified Johnston’s sentiment that wild horses are part of
the American cultural iconography. It enshrined the mythology of the West
into its language by describing horses as “living symbols of the historic
and pioneer spirit of the West.”57
Pre-1971 articles often emphasized the
51
Walter, “Crusade,” 5.
52
Treatment of Wild Horses and Burros on Land Belonging to the US: Hearings on H.R.
343, H.R. 2725, H.R. 4289, and H.R. 7531, before the Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee
No. 2, 86th Cong. 1 (1959).
53
Wild Horse Annie Lassos Mustang Support in House,” Milwaukee Journal, July 15,
1959.
54
Ibid.
55
“Law Heads off Last Roundup; Wild Horses Get Reprieve,” Toledo Blade, September
9, 1959, 2.
56
For more on the slaughter of the American bison, particularly as it relates to the case of
wild horses, see Deanne Stillman, Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 61–62, 129, 132–133, 139, 147–148.
57
Wild Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, Pub. L. No. 92-195, 85 Stat. 649
(1971).
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16. American Journalism 33:1 57
imperilment of these living symbols, as in a 1970 Miami News story alarm-
ingly headlined, “Only 16,000 Wild Horses Left on Plains.”58
Symbol or not,
Johnston explained in 1971 that “being a domestic animal gone wild, they
can’t qualify as an endangered species. They’re not considered wildlife in
the sense that deer, elk and antelope are.”59
Though Johnston enjoyed “fame
among conservationists,”60
wild horses indeed were not considered wildlife,
and wildlife managers were often of the same mind as ranchers and big game
hunters, who tended to view wild horses not as wild, free, powerful, and
symbolic mustangs, but instead as “ornery, inbred, roman-nosed maverick
cayuses.”61
Described in 1971 as an outgrowth of the “current concern about
ecology,” Johnston’s wild horse ‘crusade’ would, in the years following the
1971 law, prove unendingly controversial.
As range and wildlife management came to be driven by principles of
ecology during the 1970s through passage of legislation such as the 1973
Endangered Species Act, wild horses’ iconic status changed: since they were
not a native species, officials increasingly marked them as “feral” or even
“invasive.”62
Even if “horses were different from kudzu, starlings and other
introduced invasive species,” in their symbolic appeal, the doubling of their
population in the years 1971–1976 may have caused a shift in attitudes
toward wild horses.63
This shift was soon made law in the 1976 Federal Land
Policy and Management Act, which amended the Wild and Free-roaming
Horse and Burro act to allow the use of helicopters in roundups. By the late
1970s, “conservation organizations such as the Sierra club [were] supporting
extirpation of the burros and animal-protection groups [were] resisting.”64
The terms used to describe wild horse advocates had completed a shift, from
“conservationists” to “animal protection groups.” Ecology and conservation
were now, perhaps paradoxically, on the side of the ranchers: both the Sierra
Club and many Western ranchers and big game hunters would prefer a range
devoid of wild horses. Many journalistic accounts reflected this desire to
militate against the invasive presence of wild horses, citing the “untenable”
nature of their protection.65
58
“Only 16,000 Wild Horses Left on Plains,” Miami News, November 28, 1970.
59
“Wild Horse Annie Rides Range Again,” Tuscaloosa News, June 25, 1971.
60
“Wild Horse Triumph,” Milwaukee Journal, December 7, 1971.
61
Russell Nielsen, “Who Is ‘Wild Horse Annie?”’ Eugene Register-Guard, April 25,
1971, 19. A cayuse is, in the language of the Chinook Native American tribe of Oregon, a
pony.
62
United States Bureau of Land Management, “History of the Wild Horse and Burro
Program,” last modified July 18, 2007, accessed February 2, 2013, http://web.archive.org/web/
20080221040511/http://www.blm.gov/es/st/en/prog/wild horse and burro/history.html.
63
Dave Phillips, “Is There a Way through the West’s Bitter Wild Horse Wars?,” High
Country News, November 12, 2012.
64
Gladwin Hill, “Facing the Feral Stampede: The Wild West Could Be Overwhelmed
with Formerly Tame Animals,” New York Times, July 1, 1979, E9.
65
Ibid.
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17. 58 Phillips
No longer a “symbol of unbridled freedom and part of the romance of the
Old West,”66
wild horses became “so-called mustangs—usually ranch horses
turned wild over the years.”67
Rather than “valiant mustangs,”68
they became
“nuisances”69
and “pests” that were “at large,” breeding out of control and
overrunning Western rangelands.70
Far from being “handsome steeds,” wild
horses were now “stunted and deformed by generations of inbreeding.”71
This
shift in characterization also influenced reporting on Johnston. For example,
according a story in the Ellensburg, Washington, Daily Record, Johnston
had squandered the donations of schoolchildren “in an attempt to prove the
horses were wild.”72
In fact, the wildness of wild horses had always been in
question by ranchers and big game hunters, who “begrudge[d] every blade
of grass nibbled by the mustangs.”73
This general media shift in orientation toward the sustainability of the
wild horse’s presence and the species’ impacts on native flora and fauna be-
came a significant trend in media coverage over Johnston’s advocacy career.
Although the media began to cover the wild horse issue as a problem of the
abundance of a non-native species versus a problem of the scarcity of a wild
and free muse of American culture, journalists did not always report the issue
in ecological terms. Nevertheless, the shift toward media characterizations
of the horse as a feral presence rather than a native one was important for
its historical position in the context of developing ecological discourse, most
notably the emergence of the “environmental beat” in American journal-
ism.74
The 1970s saw, along with the passage of the 1971 law that protected
wild horses, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which codified policies for
ensuring the survival of endangered endemic species.75
Saving non-native
wild horses, while simultaneously working toward the integrity of native
ecosystems, may have created a dynamic tension between competing visions
of the often ill-defined notion of “conservation.”76
66
“Who Is ‘Wild Horse Annie?”’ Eugene Register Guard, April 25, 1971.
67
Mike Goodman, “Law Backfires—Now Wild Horse Population Exploding,” Los Ange-
les Times, March 3, 1974, B1.
68
Beverly Hall, “Wild Horse Controversy Stampedes Congress,” Christian Science Mon-
itor, March 5, 1976.
69
Gladwin Hill, “Facing the Feral Stampede: The Wild West Could Be Overwhelmed
with Formerly Tame Animals,” New York Times, July 1, 1979, E9.
70
Charles Hillinger, “Wild Horse Annie Rides Range Again,” Tuscaloosa News, June 25,
1971.
71
Mike Goodman, “Law Backfires—Now Wild Horse Population Exploding,” Los Ange-
les Times, March 3, 1974, B1.
72
“Wild Horse Annie,” Ellensburg (WA) Daily Record, September 4, 1974.
73
Weiskopf, “Wild West Showdown,” 87.
74
Neuzil, The Environment and the Press.
75
Endangered Species Act of 1973, 16 U.S.C. §1531-1544 (1973).
76
For an account of the early evolution of notions of “conservation” versus “preservation,”
see Christine Oravec, “Conservationism vs. Preservationism: The ‘Public Interest’ in the Hetch
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18. American Journalism 33:1 59
This tension was reflected in news media accounts such as Gladwyn
Hill’s 1979 New York Times discussion of a “feral stampede” or Roger
Latham’s bemoaning of horse overpopulation in a 1976 installment of his
“Great Outdoors” column in the Pittsburgh Press.77
These developments in
thinking and corresponding management practices were not lost on Johnston,
though, who kept pace with such developments and appeared to understand
the ecology of range management as well as her counterparts in the Bureau
of Land Management did. Indeed, in an interview with the Battle Mountain,
Nevada, Bugle in 1976, she noted, “When the wild horse population increases
beyond the ability of the land to provide food for the horses, the surplus horses
are humanely rounded up and placed for adoption.”78
Although this program
of adoption has proven to be a challenge, Johnston’s advocacy of it showed
a sensitivity to and an understanding of the ecological concerns increasingly
raised by a press beginning to work the environmental beat.79
Conclusions
Even though journalistic representations of her lobbying efforts became,
at times, less enthusiastic as the value of wild horses was increasingly ques-
tioned, Johnston’s real-life pluck never waned. Indeed, when the Los Ange-
les Times published an article in 1974 that relied extensively on a Bureau
of Land Management official’s opinion regarding wild horses’ deleterious
effect on the landscape, Johnston characterized the article as a “propaganda
campaign,” contacted the bureau’s wild horse and burro specialist who had
made the claims featured in the article, and persuaded him to admit his er-
ror.80
Many printed accounts of Johnston’s lobbying efforts engaged Western
iconography and myth extensively, but that myth-making was a natural fit
given Johnston’s real-life grit. There was undoubtedly something uncom-
mon about Johnston’s passion and drive. These qualities propelled her into
national prominence as an advocate for humane management of horses and
helped her campaign enjoy a great deal of success.
Hetchy Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 4 (1984): 444–458. Johnston and
those like her who advocated for horses were often termed “conservationists,” but alternative
visions of conservation decried what New York Times reporter Gladwyn Hill termed a “feral
stampede” of wild horses. The result was a “split in the environmental community, with
conservation organizations such as the Sierra Club supporting extirpation [of wild horses and
burros] and animal-protection groups protesting.”
77
Roger Latham, “Overprotection Can Be a Real Killer,” Pittsburgh Press, January 22,
1976.
78
Andrea Daley, “Give and Take Necessary, Says Wild Horse Annie,” Battle Mountain
(NV) Bugle, June 10, 1976.
79
Dave Phillipps, “As Wild Horses Overrun the West, Ranchers Fear Land Will Be
Gobbled Up,” New York Times, September 30, 2014.
80
Ibid.
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19. 60 Phillips
After her death from lung cancer in 1977, many newspapers, including
the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the national wire services AP
and UPI ran obituaries of Johnston.81
The New York Times wrote, “She led the
drive in 1959 when Congress passed a bill to prohibit planes and trucks from
rounding up [wild horses]. In 1971, she helped spur passage of the Wild Free
Roaming Horse Act, which gives further protection to the herds.”82
The use
of the words “drive” and “spur,” with their invocation of the bovine–equine
dyad of the old West and their protector and rider, the cowboy, was telling.
Even in the traditionally staid genre of the obituary, the reporter was unable
to resist adding the color and flavor of a bygone frontier era to this account of
Johnston’s life and work. Several months after Johnston’s death, Los Angeles
Times staff writer Lynn Simross wrote an article about Johnston’s role as
the founder and engineer of the group Wild Horse Organized Assistance.
Simross concluded the article with words from Johnston’s testimony before
Congress in 1971, in which she described wild horses as a “species that
so uniquely represents the American spirit—freedom, pride, independence,
endurance and the ability to survive against unbelievable odds. Should the
future of these animals remain in doubt, the fight will go on.”83
Johnston could just as well have been talking about herself. She was
at the time of her death a legendary symbol of Western gumption. Indeed,
Johnston’s symbolic stature was commented on at length in the Reno Evening
Gazette, which offered a page-long editorial upon her death. It argued John-
ston was “as symbolic of the American spirit as the horses she worked so
hard to protect” and concluded that “Annie was a legendary character when
she lived.”84
81
Kania, Wild Horse Annie, 191.
82
“Wild Horses’ Friend: Her Crusades Led to Passage by Congress of Protective Laws,”
New York Times, June 28, 1977, 4.
83
Lynn Simross, “Wild Horse Annie,” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1977, B2.
84
Editorial, Reno Evening Gazette, July 11, 1977.
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