Mustangs Revive Past, Renew Future Indians Breed Cultural, Economic Boon

Long before the black clouds blow down from the Rockies, the horses know a storm is near.

A stallion shakes his mane and kneads a hoof into the grass, then breaks into a gallop. Mares and foals join in, and soon a dozen mustangs streak across the prairie, legs blurring beneath them.

These are the original pride of the Western plains: Spanish mustangs, direct descendants of the Indian ponies that once ran rings around the U.S. cavalry.

Yet these hardy steeds are a rare sight today. As the West was won, the mustangs lost. Like the Indians who rode them, they were slaughtered in war and neglected in peace, their range fenced off, their bloodlines diluted.

Now, however, Spanish mustangs have returned to Indian country, brought home to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation by a father, his daughter, and their friend.

They wanted to resurrect a bit of history. Little did they realize what it would resurrect in them.

Spirits of the past beckon

Every year, 2 million tourists drive through Browning on their way to Glacier National Park. Most never even stop for gas.

To an outsider, Browning can seem depressing and dangerous, a sullen reservation town encrusted with poverty. There is little work and a lot of booze. Trailer homes and junked cars rust along the dusty streets.

But there is another Browning, a hidden place that whispers with the spirits of a prouder past.

Darrell Norman hears the spirits.

Born here 54 years ago, he left at age 12 when his father found work in Seattle. For decades he was teased by memories - the smell of sage in a summer rain, the wrinkled elders telling stories. In 1991, he sold his Seattle house and built a new one on a hill two miles west of Browning.

Tina Norman hears the spirits.

Age 30, she was born and raised in Seattle but never felt at ease there. It was so crowded, so polluted, so tense. In 1994, she visited her dad in Browning, planning to stay two weeks, and she hasn’t left yet.

Bob Blackbull hears the spirits.

Forty-five years old and the only Indian on the reservation with a Rhode Island accent, he arrived by bus in 1971, seeking his place in a confusing world. When he saw the mountains, rising white from the plains, he told himself, “This is it. You’re home.”

Artists honor the past

They are artists, Darrell and Tina and Bob. They live in Darrell’s house, which doubles as the Lodge Pole Gallery and is crammed with Indian arts and crafts. They make paintings, sculptures, beadwork, headdresses and spears. They try to wring from the past what is useful and beautiful for today.

It was art, naturally, that led them to the mustangs. Blackbull heard about them from an artist friend keen on historic authenticity.

Old paintings showed 19th-century Plains Indians on horses that were smaller and leaner than the big, muscled saddle horses popular today. Where did they come from?

The answer, it turned out, was Spain.

Though North America is where horses first evolved, they vanished from this continent 10,000 years ago and did not return until 1519, when Hernando Cortez landed in Mexico with 10 stallions, five mares and a foal.

More Spaniards followed with more Spanish horses, fabled in Europe for their endurance. By 1600, Spanish settlers had introduced horses to Indians in what now is New Mexico, and the horses gradually spread northward, some by escaping and forming wild herds, others through the trading and raiding of Indians.

By this time the horses were uniquely American - smart, sinewy and adapted to a hard life on the desert and plains. The Mexicans called them mestengos, or strays; in English, they were known as mustangs.

The Blackfeet were among the last to get horses, around 1750, but they soon became expert riders, using horses to hunt bison with greater success than they’d ever had afoot.

But the days of glory were numbered, for both the Indians and their horses.

During the Indian wars of the late 1800s, thousands of Indian ponies were slaughtered. As Indians moved onto reservations, they abandoned their mustangs for bigger horses suited to the work of farm life.

The wild herds met varied fates. Ranchers might shoot a band’s stallion and replace it with a domestic horse, just to see what foals would come of it. Thousands of mustangs were killed for pet food. Some herds, isolated by ranchers’ fences, became inbred with blindness and dwarfism.

Since 1971, the West’s 40,000 or so remaining wild mustangs have been protected by the federal government. Most of those animals, however, bear scant resemblance to the Spanish mustangs that roamed the West 100 years ago.

Keeping the legend alive

Fortunately, the mustang’s decline was noticed early on by a Wyoming horse-packer named Robert Brislawn. Starting in 1916, he traded Indians for their best mustangs. His son, Emmett, continued the work by seeking out isolated wild herds, and today Brislawn is a big name in the small world of Spanish-mustang breeding. Fewer than 2,000 registered Spanish mustangs exist today.

When Bob Blackbull learned all this, he saw symbolic potential in the idea of Indians raising Spanish mustangs, an enterprise that had become strictly a white man’s hobby.

He also saw dollar signs. Not only could mustangs draw attention to the gallery, Blackbull enthused, they could create a new economic base for the entire reservation.

“We have a major drug and alcohol problem here,” Blackbull says. “If we can get kids hooked on horses instead of on drugs, then we can save lives.”

His dreams proved contagious with Darrell and Tina Norman, and soon it was decided. They would start their own herd of Spanish mustangs.

One problem: They barely knew the first thing about horses.

Descended from battle-hardened horsemen, these children of the plains were decidedly soft around the middle. Darrell, son of a shoe salesman, had peddled antiques and insurance before becoming an artist. Tina’s training was in cosmetology. Blackbull was not mechanically minded unless it involved leather or beads.

But they were Blackfeet, weren’t they? With confidence buoyed by ignorance, they leapt into horse-breeding.

Blackbull paid $3,800 for six mares from the Brislawn ranch, raising the cash by selling artwork. His friend - the artist interested in authenticity - chipped in $1,400 for two stallions. Darrell, whose house sits on 200 fenced acres of good pasture, supplied the land. Tina volunteered to run the gallery and help care for the horses.

The mustangs arrived Sept. 13, 1994.

They were graceful and spirited, their coloring and character as varied as the prairie flowers: Blue Boy, a proud, steel-blue roan. Desert Wind, refined but sturdy. Wyoming Belle, an affectionate “love bug.”

All were instant celebrities.

“After the horses returned,” Blackbull says, “it just seems that everything started happening.”

Schoolchildren came by the bus load, and many parents followed. The Lodge Pole Gallery became a cultural center of sorts.

Strangers started showing up, and so the artists became innkeepers, Blackfeet style, renting out mattress space in a circle of tepees.

The mustangs, meanwhile, were multiplying. The first year, Blackbull bought six more Spanish mustangs from a New Mexico rancher. Five foals were born this year. Blackbull bought 19 more adults this summer, and by year’s end, he says, there will be 60 mustangs in seven herds around the reservation.

The venture pleases Blackfeet tribal chairman and chief, Earl Old Person. “There was a time when kids of the Blackfeet nation always learned how to ride horses,” Old Person says. “That’s kind of lost now.”

Horses renew ancient spirit

It is evening, and the storm has come. Lightning stabs the hills, and rain falls in sheets. The mustangs graze peacefully, even as thunder booms and hail bounces off their backs.

Blackfeet legend says Thunderbird brings such storms. It belches thunder and carries lightning in its claws. Darrell Norman dances to it every spring, honoring it for bringing the rain and restoring life to the land.

Now Norman and Blackbull stand in the garage, watching the rain and the horses. Two years ago, they figured the mustangs would be good for Blackfeet culture. What they didn’t know was how their own lives would grow.

They have learned patience from hours spent among the horses, grooming or feeding or just talking. They worried like parents when it was 35 below zero and the mares were foaling. They summoned courage when an ill-tempered stallion challenged the pickup truck and nearly bit off a side-view mirror.

“This is not a museum. This is not ceremony,” Darrell Norman says. “These horses are part of our lives.”

Why bring them back? To close a circle - no less. The Blackfeet have their mustangs again. This time, they vow, they won’t let them go.