Horses of the Conquistadores

THE HORSES A WILD HERD OF SPANISH PONIES LIKE THOSE THAT CARRIED EARLY-DAY JESUIT EXPLORERS IS FOUND IN A REMOTE CANYON NEAR THE MEXICAN BORDER

I WAS A STIRRING DISCOVERY, ONE THAT EVEN the most starry-eyed of Western romantics would have difficulty imagining. A wild herd of Mexican-bred Spanish horses, a strain thought to have died out more than a century before, was found living on the Wilbur-Cruce Ranch near Arivaca. These are the same small, tough, and loyal mounts that carried Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino on his vast explorations of northern Mexico and what was to become southern Arizona.They carried Spanish conquistadores on their expeditions for gold, Apache warriors on their fearsome raids, and they helped Mexican and American cowboys tame some of the most unforgiving land on the continent. But here it was 1989, some 300 years after Father Kino first introduced his storied mustangs to the region, and the horses were found again, still running together, wild and pure, concealed from time by the remoteness of the Wilbur-Cruce Ranch.

O F H I S T O R Y

THE WILBUR FAMILY LET THE SPANISH BAR BS, AS THEY WERE CALLED, RUN FREE, ONLY PULLING HORSES FROM THE HERD AND BREAKING THEM TO THE SADDLE WHEN THEY WERE NEEDED FOR RANCH WORK.

How these beautiful horses got there, and how they survived for nearly a century in the brittle washes and cruel canyons of this isolated border country, is history itself, a true Arizona saga. The story of the Wilbur-Cruce herd began in the 1860s when Ruben Augustine Wilbur, a Harvard-educated doctor, came to this land and took a job as physician for the Cerro Colorado Mining Company. When the outfit failed, Wilbur decided to homestead on 140 acres near Arivaca Creek, establishing the first ranch in the area. (See Arizona Highways, February '87.)A decade later, a Mexican horse trader named Juan Zepulveda rode north from Mexico with 600 head of Spanish horses, selling them off as he drove toward the Kansas City stockyards. The Spanish horse had been established in Mexico centuries before, and the population gradually spread north with the march of the conquistadores and, later, Catholic missionaries.

Father Kino was the most dedicated of these. Over a 30-year period ending in 1711, he explored vast areas of northern Mexico and southern Arizona, establishing a chain of missions and ranches throughout the region.

Kino stocked these outposts with thousands of Spanish mustangs bred at his headquarters at Rancho Delores, about 100 miles south of the present-day Mexican borderthe same area from which Juan Zepulveda began his long journey. Indeed, the story that Zepulveda told Ruben Wilbur that day was handed down through generations of Wilburs, eventually becoming part of family lore: that the horses were genuine descendants of Father Kino's mustangs.

In large part because of Father Kino, the Spanish horse became dominant in America. But that was short-lived. Taller, stronger horses from the northeast and southeast swept across the continent with expanding Western settlement, and purely Spanish breeds mostly became a relic of the past. But something different was happening to the Wilbur-Cruce herd: it was carrying on, in an isolation that kept its Spanish blood pure, under circumstances almost too harsh to imagine. "It's amazing what those horses had to endure over the years, and yet they kept surviving everything that happened," said Eva Wilbur-Cruce, Ruben Wilbur's 91year-old granddaughter, who worked the ranch on the backs of Spanish horses for more than 60 years. (Her marriage to Marshall Cruce resulted in the ranch's name.) Threats to the herd's existence included the land itself. The Arivaca area was a brutal home: parched, mountainous, and unforgiving to the weak. The Wilbur family let the Spanish Barbs, as they were called, run free, only pulling horses from the herd and breaking them to the saddle when they were needed for ranch work. This sparing use allowed the process of natural selection to work on those that continued to run wild, so that only the toughest and most spirited survived. So rugged were these mounts that ranch hands nicknamed them "rock horses," for their ability to scale jagged mountain slopes. Eva recalled cowboys trying to shoe the wild horses and watching in amazement as the nails bent against the hardness of their rocklike hooves. But threats to the herd came from man as well. The most dramatic of these was in 1933, when a wealthy cow baron attempted to drive the Wilburs from their land. Augustine Wilbur, Eva's father, had just died in a fall from his horse, leaving Eva to run the ranch on her own. But the mortgage had come due, and the baron himself held the paper on it. He demanded payment within days, giving Eva, then 28, only one option: selling

THE HORSES OF HISTORY

Her beloved Spanish horses. “I didn’t want to do it because they had been our constant companions, year in and year out,” said Eva. “But what choice did I have?” She arranged a selling price and, accompanied by four Mexican cowboys, proceeded to drive the herd to Amado, 30 miles north. With the deal about to close, the baron suddenly declared that he was willing to pay only a fraction of the agreedupon amount.

Angry at the double cross, the strongwilled Eva turned to one of her cowboys and barked, “Turn the horses loose!” As soon as they were free, the Barbs galloped on their own back to the Wilbur ranch, the only home they’d ever known.

The herd was saved at least for the time being. Still, Eva knew she had to find another buyer or lose the ranch.

Miraculously, she was approached that same day by a cowboy named Shepherd with an offer of help. But Shepherd worked for the baron, and Eva at first doubted that anything good could come from whatever he had in mind.

“I’ll be at your ranch tomorrow morning before the sun comes up,” Shepherd told Eva.

Even though she was deeply suspicious, Eva agreed. At the next dawn, Shepherd made good on his word and galloped up tothe ranch. “The thing you should do is go to town right away and pay off that mortgage,” insisted the cowboy.

Eva laughed bitterly. “How am I supposed to do that with no money?” she asked, wondering what trick he had up his sleeve. Shepherd then handed her a rolled cigarette paper and said: “I told you I was going to help you, and I did.” Still suspicious, Eva dropped the strange gift on the table and promptly received a stern warning from Shepherd that this seemingly worthless scrap of cigarette paper must not be treated casually.

After he left, Eva unraveled the mysterious paper and, to her astonishment, found a $1,000 bill rolled up inside. “I was flabbergasted,” she recalled. “I kept thinking, something is wrong. Maybe the bill is a fake. This must be a trick.” It wasn’t. Shepherd, strictly from the goodness of his heart, gave his own money to pay the mortgage on Eva’s ranch, thus saving the horses for the second time in 24 hours.

But the herd still wasn’t secure. That same year a vicious range war erupted, another attempt by the baron to frighten Eva from her land. And once again the target was the Spanish herd.

In one ugly incident, 30 of the horses were driven into a canyon and machinegunned. So stunning was the slaughter that it made news as far away as California. A banner headline in the Los Angeles Examiner declared: “Machine Gun Bands Bring Reign of Terror in Arizona.” The paper reported that the Wilbur ranch had been the target of numerous night raids, during which countless horses had either been driven off and butchered or they simply disappeared.

A vigilante committee was formed, with its leader publicly declaring that he intended ed to hang the thieves and horse killers if need be. “No jury in Arizona would convict a vigilante of murder if he used some contemptible desperado to stretch hemp,” he told reporters.

Fortunately the war didn’t last long, and law enforcement was able to regain control before the Wilbur-Cruce herd was decimated.

Providence intervened on behalf of the Horses once more in 1990. This time, in addition to still more thieves, the herd had acquired new foes: preying lions and a fierce drought.

By then Wilbur-Cruce had sold the ranch to The Nature Conservancy for eventual addition to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (which occurred in 1989). But officials of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, which ran the

THE HORSES OF HISTORY

refuge, ordered the removal of the horses to protect the area's sensitive habitats.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Steve Dobrott and wife, Janie, spent weeks hoofing through the rugged San Luis Mountains doing an inventory of the herd. What they found was a battered group of animals fighting to survive on scarce food and water.

The herd numbered 100 in the winter of 1989, but by the time the horses were taken off the land some months later, their number had dwindled to 77.

Steve Dobrott believed that some of the 23 missing animals were taken by thieves, most likely drug runners using the animals to haul their product up from Mexico. But many more were being killed by lions. Because of the drought, the horses had gathered at the only watering hole remaining on Arivaca Creek, making them easy targets for the hungry cats.

"The lions were especially tough on the foals," said Dobrott. "We have photographs of horses that we took during the inventory that were never removed from the ranch. They just disappeared between the inventory and the rescue."

Ironically, the same factors that killed so many horses also contributed to their survival. By keeping the population down,enough food and water remained for the strongest to carry on.

"It's natural selection again," said Dobrott. "It's no exaggeration to say that the thieves and the lions helped save the herd."

Here the long saga of these horses took a final fantastic twist.

When the Dobrotts began inventorying the herd in preparation for their removal, they knew nothing of the origin of the horses. The herd's oral history had gained little currency beyond the Wilbur-Cruce family.

As far as Steve and Janie Dobrott knew, this was an ordinary herd of wild horses. That changed three months into the inventory when Steve happened to read A Beautiful, Cruel Country, Eva's 1987 book about life on the ranch.

In it she discussed the Spanish Barbs that her family used and their area of origin near Rancho Delores in Sonora. Could these be descendants of the same horses, the Dobrotts wondered?

Experts from the Spanish Mustang Registry and the American Minor Breeds Conservancy (AMBC) were summoned to examine the horses, and blood was drawn to determine if it contained the genetic traits of the Spanish breed. The results were positive, scientific confirmation of the tale Juan Zepulveda told Ruben Wilbur more than a hundred years earlier.

But it was only through the chance reading of a book that the historical and genetic significance of the horses was rediscovered. Said Steve Dobrott: "They probably would have been sold off to anyone who was interested, and the strain would've gradually died out. That would've been the end."

The removal of the Wilbur-Cruce herd from land they'd roamed for five generations took place in June of 1990. For this seemingly star-crossed herd, probably the last purely Spanish horses remaining in the U.S., it was the final rescue.

Because of their historical importance, Eva agreed to donate the horses to AMBC for placement with breeders pledged to keeping the strain alive. The herd has since been dispersed to breeders in California, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona with a group of 13 living at the Pioneer Arizona Living History Museum north of Phoenix.

For those involved in the rescue project, it was a labor of love in preservation of a glorious past.

"Every time I look at these horses I see history," said Janie Dobrott. "They're the very same horses that were used here 300 years ago. Imagine what they must've seen in that time. Just imagine."