Velma and Stone Cabin “yesterday and today”
Fifty-five years after the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was signed into law, any honest birthday tribute to Velma “Wild Horse Annie” Johnston has to begin, and end, with her own words.
The best way to honor her legacy is not to flatten her into a symbol, but to listen to the voice that moved a nation and then warned us, repeatedly, how fragile our victory would be.
A note to BLM who has been publishing things about Velma the last few days: What you are doing is not honoring her, it is offensive. You are attempting to turn her into an endorsement of today’s fatally flawed and failing program and you are still not listening to her words. In fact, in places like Stone Cabin and Saulsbury you are actively fighting us in the courts to remain unaccountable to the promises you made.
“We must wait and watch”
On April 19, 1971, as Congress considered Public Law 92-195, Velma testified before the House public lands subcommittee, laying out in stark detail how the 1959 “Wild Horse Annie” law was being ignored and how local control had allowed the same political forces that were killing horses to control enforcement. She described illegal airborne roundups, maimed mustangs, and a law that existed on paper while sheriffs, brand inspectors, and prosecutors looked the other way.
Her testimony argued clearly that leaving protection to the states would be a disaster, and that only firm federal jurisdiction and real management planning could safeguard wild horses and burros on our public lands. As we look at the current landscape—where local politics still steer field offices and true preservation-minded planning remains rare—her warnings feel painfully current.
Included in her testimony were news clippings and personal observations
Velma in print, in real time
Contemporary reporting captured not just what Velma did, but how she was seen in her own time. In 1967, as she pushed for federal jurisdiction and the 1959 law faltered, the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s magazine The Nevadan profiled her as “Wild Horse Annie, The Madonna to The Mustangs,” at the very moment three Nevada men faced a test case on illegal mustang trapping. That article framed Velma as both deeply rooted in Nevada’s ranching culture and utterly unwilling to accept cruelty and lawlessness as the price of doing business on public land.
In 1972, Esquire’s nine‑page “How the West Was Lost” placed her in the middle of a West where mustangers, lawmakers, and a newly empowered public were colliding over the fate of wild horses. Even then, the article closed by conceding that, with “management” and “zoo keeping” on the horizon, Annie and her schoolchildren would have to contend with a system that could so easily slide from protection into control.
Take a trip to the Archive: HERE
“A Fight to Save a Memory”
In 1972, just five years before her death, Velma wrote her own memoir, A Fight to Save a Memory, reflecting on what had been won—and what had been left undone.
She opened by quoting the declaration of policy in the new law: that wild horses and burros are “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” fast disappearing, and to be protected as an integral part of the public lands where they were found.
Looking back to the day in 1950 when she followed a truckload of mutilated horses toward slaughter, she described airplanes driving terrified herds at breakneck speed, shotgun blasts used to keep them running, colts left to starve, and horses dragged onto trucks for the pet food trade. She was unsparing about the brutality and equally clear that it was profit, not necessity, that drove it. Her account ends with a section titled “Unfinished Business,” where she warns that the statute lacks civil enforcement tools, leaves the Secretary vulnerable to state and local pressure, fails to bar release of domestic horses onto the range, and—most seriously—omits explicit funding for implementation.
In that closing, Velma wrote that “we must wait and watch,” admitting that those in the forefront of the battle had not achieved all they sought and that the future of wild horses and burros could still come to nothing if the program was not fully carried out.
She concluded that if their future remained in doubt, “the fight will go on”—a charge that reads today less as prediction than as instruction.
Stone Cabin Grey
Stone Cabin: a herd she loved
One of the places Velma held closest to her heart was Stone Cabin in Nevada, home of the Stone Cabin Grey horses whose color shifts from dark foals to white elders over their first decade of life. These horses, descended in part from a grey Thoroughbred linked in local lore to gunfighter Jack Longstreet, carried for her the living history of the pioneer West far more than any restored cabin or commemorative plaque ever could.
It was at Stone Cabin, in 1975, that the first official BLM wild horse removal under the Act took place, using a water (bait) trap—not helicopters—to capture horses amid controversy and litigation. The court allowed that single roundup as an interim step but explicitly warned that BLM did not have a “blank check” to remove horses whenever a range was overgrazed, and that future roundups must follow environmental review and consider alternatives, including the role of livestock.
Velma was there, under threat serious enough that she had a bodyguard, watching the agency charged with enforcing “her” law test what that promise would mean on the ground.
Corral at Stone Cabin during the very first official “BLM removal”
Stone Cabin, Saulsbury, and the unfinished business
Last year, at Stone Cabin and neighboring Saulsbury, we helped carry forward the fight Velma said would go on when the future of these animals remained in doubt (just as it has all over the western landscape). In federal court, we won on a central point: BLM had illegally delayed creating a Herd Management Area Plan (HMAP) for the Saulsbury HMA, despite clear legal requirements to engage in real management planning.
But the district court stopped short of the full accountability Velma’s legacy demands. It declined to require BLM to honor the existing 1983 Stone Cabin HMAP—written shortly after Velma’s death—which calls for water improvements to distribute horses, a genuine evaluation of appropriate management levels instead of simply retyping numbers agreed with permittees, and even a careful distinction between BLM and Forest Service horses in a recognized migratory corridor. That plan has been effectively ignored for over forty years, even as the Stone Cabin Grey herd is reduced on paper to a line on a website instead of recognized as the living embodiment of the “historic and pioneer spirit” Congress vowed to protect.
We have appealed that part of the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to force long‑overdue accountability to the original Stone Cabin plan and to confront the longstanding neglect of this truly historic herd. Our goal is simple and entirely in keeping with Velma’s own words: meaningful, enforceable planning that considers wild horses as part of the land, not an afterthought to be managed away.
Mediation has stalled, with BLM apparently not even understanding their own promises made in writing in early planning documents. We are going to need to fight the costly battle in front of the Ninth Circuit panel of Judges.
Tour being given to Velma Johnston, Wild Horse Annie, of the first capture of wild horses by the BLM at Stone Cabin
To Truly Honor Wild Horse Annie
Today, BLM circulates pictures and video on social media claiming to honor Wild Horse Annie, even as our litigation record tells a different story. If the agency truly respected Velma’s work, we would not be in court 55 years after the Act passed, fighting to compel HMAPs like Saulsbury’s, to enforce the Stone Cabin HMAP drafted in the wake of her passing, and to secure public participation and welfare‑based standards that should be the foundation—not the exception—of management.
Velma told us, in her memoir and in her testimony, exactly where the law was weak and how local pressures could undermine its intent; she warned that without funding, enforcement tools, and strong, independent federal leadership, the program could “come to nothing.”
To truly honor her now is to refuse to look away from those gaps, to insist on real planning, transparency, and humane treatment, and to keep fighting in the courts, on the range, and in the halls of power so that the Stone Cabin Greys and all wild horses and burros remain what she demanded they be recognized as: living symbols of our shared history, free‑roaming on the lands that shaped them.
We hear you Velma.
Every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every court case we bring, every win, every action we take is only possible because of your support.
