For their trail horses, they adopted wild mustangs from the US Bureau of Land Management that were perfectly adapted to the rocky terrain and harsh conditions of desert and mountain travel.
A meticulously planned but sometimes unpredictable route brought them face to face with snowpack, downpours, and wildfire; unrelenting heat, raging rivers, and sheer cliffs; jumping cactus, rattlesnakes, and charging bull moose; sickness, injury, and death. But they also experienced a special camaraderie with each other and with the mustangs. Through it all, they had a constant traveling companion—a cameraman, shooting for the documentary film Unbranded.
The trip’s inspiration and architect, Ben Masters, is joined here by the three other riders, Ben Thamer, Thomas Glover, and Jonny Fitzsimons; two memorable teachers and horse trainers; and the film’s producers and intrepid cameramen in the telling of this improbable story of adventure and self-discovery.
For their trail horses, they adopted wild mustangs from the US Bureau of Land Management that were perfectly adapted to the rocky terrain and harsh conditions of desert and mountain travel.
A meticulously planned but sometimes unpredictable route brought them face to face with snowpack, downpours, and wildfire; unrelenting heat, raging rivers, and sheer cliffs; jumping cactus, rattlesnakes, and charging bull moose; sickness, injury, and death. But they also experienced a special camaraderie with each other and with the mustangs. Through it all, they had a constant traveling companion—a cameraman, shooting for the documentary film Unbranded.
The trip’s inspiration and architect, Ben Masters, is joined here by the three other riders, Ben Thamer, Thomas Glover, and Jonny Fitzsimons; two memorable teachers and horse trainers; and the film’s producers and intrepid cameramen in the telling of this improbable story of adventure and self-discovery.
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Overview
For their trail horses, they adopted wild mustangs from the US Bureau of Land Management that were perfectly adapted to the rocky terrain and harsh conditions of desert and mountain travel.
A meticulously planned but sometimes unpredictable route brought them face to face with snowpack, downpours, and wildfire; unrelenting heat, raging rivers, and sheer cliffs; jumping cactus, rattlesnakes, and charging bull moose; sickness, injury, and death. But they also experienced a special camaraderie with each other and with the mustangs. Through it all, they had a constant traveling companion—a cameraman, shooting for the documentary film Unbranded.
The trip’s inspiration and architect, Ben Masters, is joined here by the three other riders, Ben Thamer, Thomas Glover, and Jonny Fitzsimons; two memorable teachers and horse trainers; and the film’s producers and intrepid cameramen in the telling of this improbable story of adventure and self-discovery.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623492878 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas A&M University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 188 |
| File size: | 45 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Unbranded
Four Men and Sixteen Mustangs. Three Thousand Miles across the American West
By Ben Masters
Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2015 Ben MastersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-287-8
CHAPTER 1
PREPARATION
Inspiration
Unbranded started with cheap tequila and greasy enchiladas in one of the few places in the world where you can find people crazy enough to ride a horse for thousands of miles—Texas A&&&;M University. Raising his glass, Parker Flannery, horse trainer, polo player, cowboy, adrenaline junky, and firm nonbeliever in lethargy, toasted to my proposition. Of course we should take a semester off from school, save some money, gather a string of horses, and ride them through the state of Colorado. So we did. I recruited Mike Pinckney, whom I'd packed with in the mountains of Colorado the previous summer, and the three of us rode horses through the entire state. We went ahead and rode through parts of New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana while we were at it.
That trip was in 2010, and it really changed my life. We traveled more than 2,000 miles in four months through untamed country with few human inhabitants and great fishing. We were really broke and couldn't afford all the good horses we needed, so we adopted some cheap, unwanted mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to supplement our quarter horses. Those unwanted wild horses ended up being the best horses we had. But the lifestyle was tough; it iced on us for the last two weeks, and when I finished that ride on September 22 with an empty belly, cold fingers, soaking wet clothes, and sore legs, I swore to myself that I'd never do a horseback trip again.
A few weeks later, after my fingers thawed out, after I'd gained ten pounds and bought new clothes, I began to plan another one. But this time it would be different; I'd learned from my mistakes. We would need more horses, horses bred for that kind of trip, more time, and a different route that avoided Colorado's 12,000-foot snow-clad passes. I wanted to ride every single inch of the most backcountry route possible from Mexico to Canada, and I wanted to film it. The 2010 ride was so unusual and exciting that I felt confident people would want to watch a film of it. Making a movie couldn't be that hard.
I also wanted to show people that mustangs aren't the worthless beasts that are currently wasting away in holding pens but are excellent, usable stock, especially in the backcountry. Some of them make great mountain horses, they're inexpensive, and they're living symbols of the American West. Mustang management is also in dire need of policy change, and currently the only method of population control is adoption. By using mustangs, I hoped to inspire adoptions and educate viewers on the necessity of population control.
I ruminated over the idea for a couple of years, looked at cameras, crunched numbers, and approached several production companies. The big ones wanted to bring large crews to the project and produce the reality junk typically shown on TV. I wanted the show to be raw and to tell the true story, documentary style, without a script.
Finally, in Bozeman, Montana, I found the right man for the job: Phillip Baribeau, one of the top adventure filmmakers in the industry. We put together a plan. All we needed was a crew of willing guys, a bunch of wild horses, some cameramen fit enough to do the job, and a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Everyone wants to go on a 3,000-mile, five-month-long pack trip until they really look at what it entails: hard work, no pay, no girls, dirty, expensive, slow, hot, dusty, sore—it's not an easy commitment. To find the right crew I had to go to Aggieland.
Jonny Fitzsimons, a new friend I'd met at a party, was the first to commit, and he was the perfect candidate. Jonny grew up on a cattle ranch near the Rio Grande in South Texas. A good horseman, Jonny had worked at a guest ranch one summer in Wyoming and knew a bit about mountain travel. Jonny committed to the trip within a few days of my bringing it up.
Thomas Glover was the next to commit. Tom and I were close friends in college, guided elk hunters in Wyoming one fall, and worked at the same dude ranch in Colorado. Tom grew up in the city of Houston but took to horses and the mountains like an old-school packer. He was exactly the type of guy you want in the backcountry when things go really wrong, really fast. He is also hilarious and pulls more than his weight, both important traits in someone you have to live with for five months.
Ben Thamer was a childhood friend of mine and a close pal of Jonny's at college. After Thamer graduated from Texas A&&&;M, he started working at a feedlot in the Texas Panhandle. Thamer also led horseback trips for an outfit in Colorado during a college summer and spent a lot of time in high school wrangling at a kid's camp. Thamer's quick wit and willingness to be the cook made him ideal candidate number four.
We had a good crew; now we just needed money, horses, and a production team to go out and make a movie. When you need cash in Texas you go to the oil fields. It's a hard, hot, and sweaty lifestyle, but the pay is great and they will work you ninety hours a week. So I went out to West Texas, lived on my brother's couch, and screwed pipes together on a caliche pad in the Texas sun for four months to save up to buy a nice camera and lenses. When I had enough money, I quit and headed north to Montana with the intention of shooting a promotional video to use for fund-raising.
I worked at Mountain Sky Guest Ranch for two weeks, where I shot footage of horses moving through the mountains. Then I spent two months filming pack trip elk hunts in Wyoming, and later two more weeks filming wild mustangs in the Pryor Mountains of Wyoming. I gave the footage to Phill Baribeau in Bozeman, where I learned that there was a lot more to making quality video than just having a nice camera. Although I got some fair shots, it just wasn't enough to make a video of high enough quality to attract production funding. We needed better footage, with the entire crew and more action. We decided to bring a cameraman along to film the adoption and training of 11 wild horses to be used on the trip. That would be the exciting footage we needed to raise production money.
Why Mustangs?
The image of horse and rider is a powerful symbol inextricably tied to the European conquest and settlement of the New World. During the course of 500 years, horses took conquistadors forth, moved settlers west, pulled the plow, carried the soldier, and transformed pedestrian native societies into some of the greatest equine cultures the world has ever seen.
Fossil records show that the ancestors of modern horses originated in North America but by the end of the last Ice Age were extinct on this continent. Fortunately, they had crossed the Bering Strait where the first cowboys, on the Asian steppes, broke them to pull, pack, and eventually ride.
Domesticated horses spread throughout Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Each locale required something different in their animals, thus breeds developed to better suit a horse to the task at hand. For example, in the Middle East smaller, more agile horses were bred to travel great distances bearing lightly armored warriors, while in northern Europe massive, heavy-boned draft horses carried fully armored knights into battle.
In AD 711, Moorish armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and entered Spain and Portugal. Although the Moors never had complete control of the people or their land, their presence for eight centuries left an indelible mark on the Iberian Peninsula, one that included horses. The Moors brought the Barb horse from North Africa, which was bred with the local Iberian horse to create the Jennet, a compact, gaited horse known for its courage, stamina, and durability. Thirty-four of these horses accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage and set hoof in the Caribbean islands in November 1493.
During the Age of Exploration, horses were commonly transported on ships suspended in belly slings with their front feet hobbled and barely touching the ground. Mortality was high crossing the Atlantic, estimated at around 30 percent, and the ocean voyages were the first of many selection gauntlets that left only the strongest to survive.
Although intact stallions were the gender of choice for warfare, mares were in demand for breeding purposes once in the New World. In the spring of 1519, Hernán Cortés left Cuba with about 500 men and fifteen or sixteen horses bound for Mexico. When they landed, for the first time in 10,000 years the family Equidae was back on the American continent.
Cortés noted that the horses were "worth their weight in gold," and their presence mystified and terrified the native people. Within two years, Cortés conquered Tenochtitlan, a city rivaling the largest city in Europe, and defeated the Aztec empire. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a chronicler of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, wrote, "The horsemen were also so dexterous and behaved so valiantly that, next to god, they guarded us most; they were a fortress."
For the next 300 years, Spanish conquistadors and their horses explored the land, searched for gold, and allowed missionaries to establish European roots in North and South America. Their horses strayed, were stolen by natives, and set loose to reproduce. Nearly doubling their populations every four years, horses bred and spread from Mexico to Canada, wherever there was ample grass to graze. In less than three centuries, these horses completely changed the lifestyle of powerful tribes of Native Americans. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the Comanche, Blackfoot, and Sioux without their horses carrying them alongside the buffalo migrations.
When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark went west in 1804 to explore the Louisiana Purchase, horses were so plentiful that most of the tribes they encountered—Hidatsa, Otoe, Mandan, Missouri, Sioux, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Osage, Pawnee, Assiniboine, Arikara, Cheyenne, and Gros Ventre—possessed ponies. Supply was ample, and a horse could be obtained for about one dollar's worth of beads and trinkets. Lewis and Clark even relied on traded Indian horses to cross the Rocky Mountains between the Missouri and Columbia River drainages.
The Lewis and Clark expedition opened the way for American settlers to head west, and inevitably horses accompanied them. Draft horses were taken along the Oregon Trail for farming in the Northwest. The US Cavalry relied on larger, thoroughbred-type bays to take them across the plains in pursuit of Native Americans. Texas cowboys brought their horses north during the cattle drives. Horses escaped and were stolen, and stallions with certain traits were let loose among free-ranging horses to improve bloodlines. For example, the US Cavalry released thousands of bay stallions (called "remounts") that stood between 15.1 and 16 hands and weighed between 950 and 1150 pounds, the size the US Cavalry most desired.
As populations of both Native Americans and buffalo dwindled under the European invasion, as railroads eventually stretched from coast to coast, and as barbed wire began to partition Texas and the Great Plains, the free-roaming horse competed for graze with livestock and measures were taken to lower their numbers. Mustangs were shot or rounded up and shipped to meat markets to make way for livestock, domesticated horses, and the farmer. By 1890, Spanish-style wild horses had disappeared from Texas, California, and the Great Plains and existed only in remote, geographically isolated regions in the Mountain West.
Then as now, ranching in the arid west was hard work, and turning a profit was difficult. Wild horses competed with livestock for food, and unlike cattle they couldn't be rotated or taken off the range during drought. Captured mustangs were sold for pet food, human food, and to militaries during times of war. But capturing wild horses was not easy or for the faint of heart. Horses were caught in water traps and bait traps and rounded up by cowboys and later by trucks, helicopters, and airplanes. Massive fences were set up to funnel the gathered horses to pens, where they were shipped or driven to market. Wild animals do not respond well to pursuit or confinement, and the inherent survival instincts of the horse to flee often led to injury during these gathers.
By 1940, wild horses were mostly gone from the West with the exception of the Great Basin, a vast, arid, and sparsely populated 200,000-square-mile region located in Nevada, eastern California, western Utah, and southern Oregon. The remaining wild horses lived there protected by the isolation, lack of development, and inhospitable terrain their surroundings afforded. Little rain, up to 110-degree heat in the summer, and down to minus-30-degree cold in the winter made the Great Basin a challenging place for both horse and human to live. Yet eventually the harsh landscape of the Great Basin attracted resilient individuals wanting to make the land their home. Wild horses were inevitably in the way.
In 1950, insurance secretary Velma Johnston was driving to work in Reno, Nevada, when she pulled up to a stock trailer that changed not only her life, but also wild horse management and the future of the mustang forever. Blood dripped from the trailer, and looking through the slats Johnston saw crammed horses with terror in their eyes. She followed the trailer to a meat packing plant and watched as the horses were unloaded, destined for slaughter. Johnston, later known as "Wild Horse Annie," would dedicate the rest of her life to the welfare of wild horses.
Johnston investigated the conditions of wild horse roundups and found them "barbaric beyond belief." She showed grisly evidence and gave eye-witness accounts to politicians, ranchers, schoolchildren, and anyone who would listen. She began making political ground with her childhood friend and ally Nevada congressman Walter Baring. Their first success was passing a law in 1952 that made mustang roundups by vehicle or aircraft illegal on private land. However, 80 percent of Nevada is public land, so Johnston and Baring went to Washington, DC, where they pushed for legislation prohibiting mechanical roundups in the state's entirety.
Johnston captivated Congress with her gruesome description of the methods mustangers used to capture her "wild ones," and her testimony was crucial to the passing of Public Law 86-234, better known as the Wild Horse Annie Act. The Wild Horse Annie Act prohibited vehicles and aircraft from hunting or capturing wild horses on public land; it also paved the way for more protective legislation to be passed. Twenty-one years after seeing a bloody trailer and devoting her life's work to wild horses, Wild Horse Annie, which she now used to refer to herself, watched the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 pass through Congress and be signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 15, 1971. The act's first sentence declared: "Congress finds and declares that wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene."
When the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed, horses and burros were present on 53.8 million acres. Today, the animals live and are managed on 179 different BLM Herd Management Areas that cover 31.6 million acres in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. Each Herd Management Area is different in size, geography, and wild horse bloodlines. Some of the herds have very little or no Spanish descent, while others, such as the Pryor Mountain herd, are thought to be very close to the original Spanish horse. Some of the herds are large draft animals, yet others are tiny and known for being difficult to train. Some herds are mainly paints, others bays, and some exhibit the primitive features of a dorsal stripe and stripes on the withers and legs. Each herd is unique, but all herds have survived a spectrum of serious selection criteria: voyaging to the Americas, riding into battle, taking settlers across the plains, and pulling plows across the prairies.
Hundreds of years of natural selection, of braving extreme heat and cold, and of battling for breeding rights have resulted in animals that survive on meager rations and are resilient, tough footed, surefooted, intelligent, and perfectly suited for a 3,000-mile pack trip through the same lands to which they are adapted.
The Kickstarter Campaign
Money is necessary to make a movie, but it's difficult to acquire—almost impossible with no filmmaking experience and only a crazy idea. I pitched Unbranded to quite a few production companies, but each of them wanted either total creative control or money up front. We didn't have any money and didn't want Unbranded to be junk TV, so we decided to raise funds to produce the film on our own through a fairly new website called kickstarter.com. Kickstarter.com is a crowd-funding website where the user posts a video, describes the project, sets a dollar goal, and establishes a fund-raising time frame. Donors have the satisfaction of bringing a project of their own choosing to life and may receive a premium depending on the size of their contribution (such as a DVD or book). If you don't reach your goal during the time frame, no one's credit card is processed, and you get nothing. We put all of our eggs in one basket, shot for the stars with a $150,000 goal, chose a forty-five-day time frame, and began the process.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unbranded by Ben Masters. Copyright © 2015 Ben Masters. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preparation,Inspiration,
Why Mustangs?,
The Kickstarter Campaign,
Choosing a Route,
Filming the Ride Cindy Meehl,
The Mustangs,
Picking Out the Herd,
The First 30 Days Lanny Leach,
Training the Horses Jonny Fitzsimons,
Val's Lessons,
Shoeing the Horses and a Resurrection Thomas Glover,
The Outfit,
Ben Thamer and His Horses,
Jonny Fitzsimons and His Horses,
Thomas Glover and His Horses,
Ben Masters and His Horses,
Donquita (a.k.a. Donkey),
The Hired Guns,
Arizona,
The Trail: 850 Miles,
Day 1 and Day 2,
Cameraman Down Phillip Baribeau,
Violet's Injury Val at the Vineyard,
Val Geissler,
The Cholla Incident,
Dysentery Ben Thamer,
The Grand Heatstroke,
Utah,
The Trail: 830 Miles,
Losing the Horses: Round One,
Leave Your Guns at Home, Jonny Jonny Fitzsimons,
Hell's Hole,
Trail Food Ben Masters and Korey Kaczmarek,
Impassable,
Losing the Horses: Round Two Thomas Glover,
Idaho and Wyoming,
The Trail: 520 Miles,
Two-Second Rodeo Career,
Western Hospitality,
Horse Care Trout Fishing into a Thunderstorm,
Montana,
The Trail: 800 Miles,
Seeing the Production,
Fly-Fishing Horseback,
Burned Out of the Bob,
Glacier,
The Last Mile Jonny Fitzsimons,
The Finish Line,
Reflections,
Auctioning Luke,
Mustang Dilemma,
Looking Back,
Thanks & Acknowledgments Dennis Aig and Ben Masters,