Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde

We used to ride 70, 80 miles a day,

and I think I'm a cowboy first,

a conservationist second,

and then a writer third.

Nothing better in the world than the feel of a good horse,

and a good saddle.

As a child, I wanted to be a cowboy,

I wanted to ride tough horses.

My dream was to get good enough that I could go to a rodeo

and come out of the shoots on Five Minutes Till Midnight,

or some of those legendary old outlaws.

I never have turned down an adventure,

and there are a lot of stories in my life yet untold.

The worse thing anybody ever called was

an environmentalist.

I never look back when I have an idea in my head,

I go ahead and do it.

Hanging the circumstances.

I've always felt that man didn't have dominion

over wildlife, as some religions claim.

I think man rather has a responsibility

to take care of all their other fellow travelers

on this earth.

1988, I went down to Northern Nevada to buy some cattle,

to stock my ranch in Oregon,

when I passed a government wild horse holding facility,

in Lovelock.

The corrals were packed with unhappy Mustangs,

standing in boredom, gaunt ribs, heads hanging

in sleepy stupor, lips drooping, eyes half closed

against swarms of flies.

They were just miserable.

I was angry that they'd come to that.

I'd been going up with wild horses, and owed them

for a lot of joy in my life, and I just had the feeling

that I was the guy who had to do something about it.

So I phoned my kids and told them to take over the ranch,

I was going to go and find a place that I could set up

as a wild horse sanctuary.

People thought I was crazy

to do that when I was 62.

It's hard to believe that he had the energy

to do that at that age,

but Dayton's a man that has to have a quest.

Once he got these horses as a quest,

why, it's taken over everything else in his life.

He's done so much just to get them here.

He fought the government, he fought the neighbors,

he's fought everybody.

Now we're here just southwest, I guess,

of Hot Springs, South Dakota, the southern edge

of the Black Hills.

What do you envision for this particular site?

The potential for this land in the Black Hills here

is just tremendous.

Our idea is to put together some big

fenced ranges for them where those horses

can then be controlled.

But can live a great lifestyle.

In 1971, congress had passed a wild horse and burro

protection act, so I had to get congressional approval

to do a sanctuary.

How long have you been working on this?

It's taken me a year and a half,

and I think I probably spent four months of that

in Washington, D.C.

Talks to every congressman and senator I could buttonhole.

How often do you have someone come to you,

that looks like he just climbed off a horse?

That says, "I've got a solution to a problem

"that you've had in Nevada for ten years."

Horse lovers see them as national treasures,

to be protected at any and all costs.

Many ranchers, however, see them as dangerous

competition for their cattle, and would like to see

far fewer of them.

There are about 37,000 free wild horses in the American

West, more than half of them,

right here in Nevada.

But the Federal Government says that is simply too many.

A wild horse is an animal which doesn't

have any predators, so you do get a situation

where their breeding excessively,

and exceeding their range.

They increase at the rate of about 15% a year,

the problem is too many horses.

These horses had to be run in out of vast areas,

and most wild horses are captured by a helicopter

and men on horseback.

So even 40 years down the pike,

wild horses still go crazy when they see a helicopter.

It's cruel to take a horse off it's home,

and put it in a corral someplace.

And it is a great problem for the government,

so what I was trying to do is come up

with an easy solution.

Everything we tried,

prior to the man walking into my office,

didn't work, didn't even work a little bit.

With Dayton Hyde, we at least have hope.

I just was stubborn.

People were telling me it couldn't be done,

and that's the wrong thing to say to a cowboy.

I stuck to it, and when I came here,

I spent the first summer building eight miles

of new fence up over the rocks.

Didn't want them getting away, out into the neighbor's

fields, and these wild horses had no sense of barbed wire.

So we had to build a training field, we had ribbons tied up,

and we kept them in there for three weeks to teach them

what barbed wire was.

Since then, we've done an awful lot of fencing,

probably 15 more miles of good fence.

And all these years, we've never had problems.

Today, we've got about 500 wild horses,

and 12,000 acres or so.

I'm probably more concerned with animals,

and birds and nature than I am with the human species.

The horses are my friends, so I have lots of company

here in the Black Hills.

I'm just another happy horse, I guess.

I was born up in Marquette, Michigan,

1925, long time ago.

When I come here, of course,

there are the ghosts of my family.

My dad came down with multiple sclerosis in 1929,

the year of the Depression,

lost his job, he was in his 30's,

and he walked with a cane for awhile,

and then he got progressively worse.

We had a ramp built so he could roll

down the ramp, onto the dock, and he'd sit there

and watch the sun come up over the lake.

But occasionally he would get going too fast down

the hill, and go right off the end of the dock,

and we had a pole with a hook on it, and we would

fish his wheelchair up out of the depths,

and he'd be ready to go again.

I think he worried that I enjoyed being alone too much.

I hadn't seen another kid my age all summer,

and there were a bunch of high school boys

standing on the corner, talking about transmissions,

and brake drums, and things like that

that I didn't know a thing about,

but I was desperately lonely, and I walked up

and said, "Hey, you guys, I found a Blackburnian

"Warbler nest this summer, and it had four eggs in it."

And they turned and glared at me,

and I turned and ran back to our cabin.

My mother went off picking blueberries,

I was supposed to babysit my father,

or sit with him, and make sure he didn't

need anything,

and my father said,

"I've got a surprise for you, there's a Cedar Waxwing nest

"right outside my porch."

And he was all excited.

I said, "Old birds, their not worth anything."

And I just took off, running.

Oh, man.

I remember picking a yellow violet,

and spinning it in my hand, and turning it

into a blur of gold.

Finally I remembered my father, and

as I approached the cabin, I could see the screen door

was smashed down, and there was blood on the pine needles,

and it scared the life out of me,

and there was my father, lying under the cedar tree,

flat on his back.

He said, "A big snake crawled up and tried to get

"the nest, but I got him."

What he did was, wheel his wheelchair to the screen door,

and threw his body at it, and there was a big, flat

snake underneath him.

He'd fallen on the snake.

But ever after that, I thought if a man like that could

enjoy birds, well, it wasn't too bad if I enjoyed them, too.

Just adding diesel to our tank for the pump,

put water in the tank for the horses.

This one on red, or.

Junior's my oldest son,

and lives in Oregon,

and works in construction.

Hey, Dad.

He comes back two or three times a year

just to check on me, and helps whenever he can.

We're kind of kindred souls in many ways.

A five gallon bucket would fill faster,

and make me feel like they're getting something.

I'm pleased with what he's done here.

Certainly left his mark over the years.

But I don't think I've got the same

background as my dad does on horses.

At home we'll ride the trails

just for the heck of riding.

But nobody rides when they come here.

500 horses, and not a single one of them broke.

And, I've seen a stud kill a saddle horse, so,

it's not going to happen here.

Anytime you get this many women together,