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There are seventy-three thousand wild horses roaming the American West. Their federally designated territory, which is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, extends across ten states, although most of it, nearly sixteen million acres, is concentrated in Nevada. No other state has such vast expanses of high, empty desert—the kind of landscape, sufficiently undeveloped and unpeopled, where wild horses can thrive. But, even there, they are threatened.

The earliest known ancestor to modern horses, Hyracotherium, emerged in North America some fifty million years ago. After the Conquistadors reintroduced the animals to the continent, in the sixteenth century, a cycle of booms and busts followed.

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, millions of the Spanish mustangs’ descendants ran free from the Great Plains to the Pacific. As homesteaders settled the land and ranches grew, wild horses became a nuisance, a pest, and, for some, dinner. Mustangers shot them for sport or sold them to buyers who shipped them East, where they were put to work.

As David Philipps, a national reporter for the Times, writes in his excellent recent book, “Wild Horse Country,” around the turn of the last century, one mustang named Hornet ended up as part of a theatre troupe, and another could be found “pulling a smoked-fish cart near Coney Island, in New York, where every summer afternoon he went swimming with his owner on the beach.”