There are few sights so breathtaking as that of wild horses running free across the open land, like birds in flight and fish swimming in fluid schools. In Idaho, as in a few other Western states, there are herds of wild horses—mustangs—that roam the open land, much of it owned by the federal government and managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Nearly five years ago, Elissa Kline began photographing a herd of mustangs near Challis at the urging of a friend, Bonnie Garman. The photographs were eventually printed onto seven-foot panels of cotton voile fabric. Her first exhibition, "Herd but Not Seen" was at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Meanwhile Californian-based journalist Deanne Stillman wrote her first non-fiction book, "Twenty-nine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave." While researching that book, she read a newspaper story about the carcasses of mustangs being found in the hills.
"I was completely stunned," she said. "By the end of that year, 34 mustang carcasses had been found. They finally arrested two marines, one of whom was stationed at Twentynine Palms."
Ten years later, she and Kline will give a talk and slide show called "Last Stand for America's Wild Horse" at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 15, at the Community Library in Ketchum.
The talk will feature the book that grew out of that story in Nevada, Stillman's "Mustangs: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West," as well as Kline's photos.
"When I first started this I had no idea how long it would go on," Kline said. "My promise to the horses was 'I'm going to tell everyone about you.'"
Her work has been featured in nine gallery shows around the West, newspapers, magazines and on television.
When writer Judith Freeman—a part-time resident of Camas County—told Stillman that her friend Elissa Kline was taking photos of wild horses, a match was made. Stillman eventually used one of Kline's photos as the frontispiece in the new book. Their stories, like the mustangs, are deeply American.
"My mom had horses," said Stillman, who grew up in Ohio. "She taught us how to ride. When my parents got divorced, we moved with her to the wrong side of the tracks. To make some money she became a racetrack 'exercise boy'—she was one of the first women in the country to work on a racetrack.
"I always felt that I wanted to repay the favor somehow. Horses literally saved our lives. I had this sense I owed them so much for their service, beauty and nobility."
For Kline, who had moved from Los Angeles for a job on a ranch near Challis, the herd of wild horses became a near compulsion. Garman had witnessed a BLM "gather" done with helicopters and was appalled. Though Kline didn't begin the project to become political, she has since become something of an activist on the subject.
"I probably photographed 100 horses over the course of a couple years," she said. "They were thriving. Their hooves were strong. They were beautiful beyond words."
But when a herd numbers around 250, the BLM does a gather. After the horses are rounded up, they are penned up awaiting adoption. After years of this practice, there are now more horses in captivity than in the wild.
"It costs taxpayers almost $40 million a year to capture, hold and feed them in captivity," Kline said. "The BLM doesn't know what do with them so they're proposing killing them. Of course, I can only speak to this one herd in Idaho. It's survival of the fittest. They're self regulated."
Currently "public lands are under siege and the most voracious wild horse roundups in modern times have been waged, at the same time that BLM scientists have revealed that recent grazing studies were altered to favor stockmen," Stillman writes.
It was not always thus. In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, banning inhumane round-ups of mustangs and donkeys on public lands and preventing their sale for slaughter.
But in 2004 former Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., slipped an amendment into a larger bill that removed all protection for wild horses over the age of 10 or those offered more than three times but not taken in the government's Adopt-a-Horse program.
"They really have disregard for the wild horses," Stillman said. "They are our great, silent witnesses. They were on the front lines from day one. Whenever I write about it, I get an outpouring of mail, across the board. I get letters from soldiers in Iraq saying 'I'm over here fighting for freedom, so what are we doing to our great icon of freedom?' That's the heart of it."
In September, Kline and Stillman collaborated on this topic at the Millard Sheets Museum at the Los Angeles County Fair. Some 250,000 people went through the show, "Hoofprints: The Horse in Art, Legend and Action."
"Hundreds of thousands of people know about the horses now," Kline said.
A wild horse summit was held last weekend in Las Vegas to try, in Stillman's words, to "figure out how to end this war against the animal that blazed our trails and carried us through our greatest battles."
Author and photographer will offer presentation on plight of American mustangs.
