Saint Francis of the Mustangs

March 16, 2024
Grace lay bundled in her blanket, watching the dance of the pre-sunset clouds through the window.  Skye was already napping.  A cold breeze and higher than normal humidity left both of the girls chilled at the end of the day.  Grace's mind wandered to thoughts of the wild horses. They had seen Crazy's band.  They had seen the bachelor stallions with the blue-black mare and her foal.  But no Petrichor.  

The boss said she had something she wanted to share with the girls, and maybe they could get together tomorrow.  Grace was curious about it.  But she also wanted to keep looking for Petrichor.  Perhaps in the morning when the chores were done, they could ride for a while.  Then meet with the boss.  Hopefully with good stories to share.

March 17
No sooner had the girls saddled up, the wind began to blow.  The weather was unsettled.  Big clouds in the distance, blue skies overhead, and a restless wind that you could hear approaching through the trees.  It was forceful and erratic, shaking the trees in one draw and not the next; then suddenly coming upon them with little warning.  It was exhilarating, and from time to time quite unpleasant.

The girls pressed slowly into a rocky shelter where the wild horses often hid from the wind.

"Did you hear about Tanner's dog getting chased by coyotes?" Skye asked.

"I didn't.  Is his dog okay?"

"She is.  She outran them.  A pair of them.  Probably the same pair we've seen a couple of times.  I guess they chased her right up to the house, and then they saw Tanner and took off.  It was night time."

"The wild things really own this place by night"  Grace said. 

They waited for the wind to relent, but it didn't.  Eventually, they left the rock shelter and headed back to the ranch, empty-handed as horse sitings go.

The arena was adorned as if for a horse show, with the little table they used as a judging station propped in the southwest corner.

"What's all this?"  Skye asked.

"The boss asked me to bring a laptop and a table down here so she could share a story with us."

"Oh. Hey.  Like reading with dogs at the library...except we're reading with horses!"

The arrival of the boss was announced by the entrance of Contessa and Tosh.  The boss put a thumb drive in the laptop and settled her hindquarters on the table next to it.

"You will recall that I've been looking for the owner of the Great Danes since last June"  she began.  "And I never really gave up. That they are chipped and so I have their owner's name, and a phone number, and I've called, but I've never made contact with anyone.  Well.  I met a woman in Lancaster.  She had been a docent at the Antelope Valley Rural Museum, and she had a manuscript, an anthology that was never published, written by a dear friend who had passed away.  And she said the name sounded familiar."

The girls brought Angel into the arena, using him to try out the english saddle.  The girth and stirrup leathers had been replaced by Donna Allen.  Grace wasn't a thousand per cent sure she knew what she was doing, but she tried to divide her attention equally between the boss turned story teller and the horse more or less under saddle.

The boss continued.

"The woman found her friend's manuscript and shared it with me.  But she literally would not let it out of her hands, so I had to re-type the story as she read it to me.  The anthology is called 'Real Pioneer Women of the Modern West', and this story is dated July 12, 1980.  The title is 'Saint Francis of the Mustangs'."  

Outside, the clouds danced.  The air was unstable, the wind lulled, then gusted.  It was beautiful.  One of the most beautiful days ever, perhaps.

The boss cleared her throat, put on her narrator voice, and began. 
"Francis Loop Caldwell is the youngest woman in this collection of pioneering women, but she is every inch as worthy as any other.  And quick to point out that her story is really not so much her own.  She is her father's daughter.  She is the product of everything that he was, and in her own words, 'You cannot tell my story without telling his.  I was forged by my parents, my mother and father both, but especially by my father.  He was the real pioneer.  I am just his daughter, trying to live up to his legacy'."

"Her father's story was shaped by The Great Depression, and The Dustbowl.  The son of first generation Oklahoma farmers, William James Caldwell was eldest of four boys.  Life was hard, but come 1930 with the first year of the drought, it got a lot harder.  Few people had savings to live on if their crops failed.  They just prayed for rain and held on as best they could.  1931 and 1932 were no better, and the winds intensified.  Livestock perished, and farmers faced famine and foreclosure.  William had been given a pair of young Belgian horses in the spring of 1932, Jim and Jeb.  They were beautiful animals, but their owner couldn't feed them any more, and didn't need them.  Horses were quickly being replaced by machines for plowing the fields."

"In 1933, the mass slaughter of livestock began.  Millions of animals were killed, some of them in an attempt to stabilize market prices, and some of them because they were already dying the slow death of starvation.  Jim and Jeb were thin, but William made sure they had water, shelter from the wind, and as much feed as he could find for them. In February, William's father told him it was time to let Jim and Jeb go."

"The next morning, well before dawn, William led his beloved horses out of their shelter.  He lay a make-shift set of saddle bags - two potato sacks tied together at the top with all of his belongings inside - on Jim, and he swung up on Jeb.  They headed west, to California."

" 'Okies, that's what folks called the people leaving their farms behind and heading to California' Francis explained.  'It was about 1,700 miles, and my dad figured it would take them about one hundred and thirteen days.  Belgians aren't known for their speed, and his horses were already a bit on the thin side.  So his goal was fifteen miles a day.  He would walk part of it, and ride part of it, and switch back and forth with his saddle bags.  A lot of people weren't very nice to him.  Okies weren't thought of in a good way.  They were treated pretty bad.  Even other Okies would talk down to him.  Tell him to get with the times.  The days of horses were over.  But then there were also kind folks.  They took pity on Jim and Jeb.  They'd let him stay overnight on their property and share what food they had with dad and the horses.  He said it seemed like every time he thought they just couldn't go on, something good would happen.  Some human angel would come to their aid, or they would find a bit of pasture grass and water'."

" 'At first my dad was going to head to the San Joaquin valley.  There was rich farmland there and the hope was that the Okies could make a new start there.  But then somehow he heard about Santa Anita, the race track.  Brand new, not even completed yet. It was all a gamble, you know?  No one knew what their future held.  There was no guarantee that the San Joaquin Valley would be the next bread basket of the nation.  So he gambled.  And he started heading toward Santa Anita.'"

" 'Jim and Jeb were tired, and really thin.  My dad was tired, and really thin.  But he started coming across horse people.  A very different kind of horse people.  Big money horse people.  But they saw the love my dad had for those poor horses...and they saw beyond the bones, those were good horses...they saw there was a story there, and they were intrigued.  A couple of folks stopped to talk to my dad, and pretty quick word got around that this man had walked out of Oklahoma with his horses to save them from being slaughtered.  And he was trying to make his way to Santa Anita.  And where he was.  And someone with a horse trailer went out looking for him, and they found him, and picked him up...dad and his horses, so skinny they both fit in a trailer designed for race horses.' "

" 'The rest of it is really a bit of a Cinderella story.  My dad got hired to do just about everything.  Jim and Jeb got fed and put up better than they'd ever known.  He'd seen my mother early on, and for him it was love at first sight, but he knew that along with his story came the stigma of being an Okie.  So he laid low.  He learned the lingo of the horse racing world and tried to lose his Okie accent.  He gained some weight and got some good clothes.  He was too big to be a jockey, but he could exercise horses and he wasn't afraid of the really excitable ones.  Eventually he would ride a horse for my mother's family, and they would be introduced.  They married about a year later, and I was born the following year, in 1936'."

"Francis would have a charmed childhood, until December 1941.  William James Caldwell joined the US Army Air Forces.  He trained to be a fighter pilot, and embarked on a tour of duty that lasted until 1945.  Upon his return home, his love for and skill with horses was rivaled by a new passion - aviation.  His aeronautic skills were sought after, particularly as a stunt pilot. And that, Francis explains, is how she got her name."

'Loop was my dad's nickname after the war, because he was known for doing aerial loops.  The nickname was made popular by one of the main characters in a Shirley Temple movie, Bright Eyes I think it was, and it stuck with him for the rest of his life.  So my middle name - Loop - that's in his honor. It is now my legal middle name.' "

" 'While my father was away, my mom began breeding and showing Great Danes.  They aren't particularly fierce dogs, but I think she took comfort in their size and presence, what with my dad being away.  And it just happened that in the 1940s and 1950s, the Great Dane was extremely popular, so she was quite successful with her dogs, and of course, she had the best of the best bloodlines.' "

"Today we know Francis by a different nickname - Saint Francis of the Mustangs.  Francis has worked tirelessly to address the plight of the west's wild horses - in America and Canada - not only by appealing to legislators for better herd management practices, but by creating her own wild horse sanctuary in the southern Antelope Valley.  It seems a far cry from the horse world of the race track, and of course it is.  But for Francis, it is the continuation of a journey that began with her father."

" 'When I was fifteen years old, we took a family vacation to Canada, near Alberta.  And we saw wild horses.  Wildies, the locals called them.  They were small, and tough, and built like miniature draft horses, but with small nostrils and ears and less dramatic profiles.  They were clearly draft influence mustangs.  The offspring of discarded heavy horses, turned loose to fend for themselves with the wild herds when their owners no longer needed them. And they were under fire, literally.  Ranchers saw them as competition for grazing, and the governing bodies didn't want to deal with them.  I will never forget what it felt like to see them.  The rush of excitement I felt.  The longing...to do something to help save them.  It was a pivotal moment in my life.  I had to do something to insure that wild horses could remain on the western landscape.' "

" 'Creating a sanctuary was a dream...I think every young girl dreams of having her own private herd of wild horses, don't they?  But over time I realized there were horses that were going to be euthanized or sold for slaughter if no one stepped in to save them.  Good horses.  Not that any animal deserves the fate we humans often assign them...but there are really nice horses out there that aren't going to enjoy a long or good life if someone doesn't adopt them and then treat them well.' "

" 'So we began buying land.  Mountainous, rugged parcels.  Big parcels, preferably with surface water, which is fairly rare in southern California mountains.  And of course the parcels needed to be connected. We are currently looking to purchase one more parcel, a large parcel, that includes a water source and a good sized grass meadow.  When that purchase is complete, we will have a substantial sanctuary.  We won't be able to save all of the horses that need saving, but we will be able to save some, and that is significant. ' "

"Don't go looking for a big sign swinging over the driveway to Saint Francis of the Mustangs Sanctuary.  Francis prefers to keep her herd of 'wildies'...well...wild...and out of the public view.  Not that she doesn't wish to share them with the world and with every horse crazy young girl. Nothing would please her more than to instill in others the love for horses that she has in her own heart.  But first, the horses themselves need to be safe.  It will be a while before the sanctuary opens its arms to the public."

" ' We are witnessing the continued demise of the horse in the lives of the people, all over the world, really.  And it's a big loss.  It's a loss to humanity, to our spirits, to who we are as humans.  My father witnessed it first hand and first-generation as the mechanized plow replaced horsepower.  Today we witness it across the American west, as horses become a nuisance species, having no value to the powers that now manage the land.' "

"And for that vision, that courage, and that commitment, though Francis may be young, she is truly a real pioneer woman of the Modern West."

The boss closed the laptop, smiled, and pretended not to be emotional.

Later in the evening, Grace and Skye drove in silence to Manzanita Campground to watch the sunset. 

"Dang, we need sunglasses" Skye said, too short to benefit from the visor.

Grace parked the truck, drew a deep breath, and exhaled.

There was another long silence.

"This is going to sound crazy" Skye finally said.  "But I feel...like...connected somehow to Francis. It's so weird. I can't explain it."

"I get it"  Grace said.  "I feel it.  Like literally in my chest. I feel it.  We are connected to her.  Directly.  Through the dogs.  Through the horses.  Our wild horses are almost certainly her wild horses.  Through..."

"Through Petrichor"  Skye blurted out.  "Maybe Petrichor was one of her favorite horses.  Maybe that's why he's sort of not really that wild."

Grace looked at Skye, parted her lips several times as if she was going to answer, finally shook her head.

"I don't know."
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