American Mustang

The word mustang comes from two Spanish words for stray, unclaimed livestock: mesteño and mostrenco.

Horses first evolved in North America and then disappeared from it at the end of the last Ice Age. They came back with the Spanish, beginning in the 1490s, and breeding herds were established by 1598. Escaped and traded horses spread across the West, and historians' best guesses for the peak, in the late 1700s or early 1800s, run from two to five million.

By the 1950s the estimate had fallen to about 25,000. A Nevada woman named Velma Bronn Johnston, known as Wild Horse Annie, campaigned against the roundups, and in 1959 Congress banned hunting wild horses on federal land from aircraft and motor vehicles. On December 15, 1971, Richard Nixon signed a broader law protecting wild horses and burros as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West." Today tens of thousands of wild horses run on public land across ten western states.

The picture is black and white and full of motion. A pale gray horse gallops from right to left across a sagebrush flat, mane and tail streaming, one forefoot reaching, dust rising behind. A flat-topped mesa runs along the horizon under a dark, heavy sky.