Last wild mustang in Mineral County?

MINERAL COUNTY – For years, Mineral County residents driving along the road that winds below Bald Hill just a few miles west of Superior could occasionally look up at the aptly named, virtually treeless mountain and see a lone horse.

Details about the animal are few. Locals say they would sometimes see the wild horse running with a pack of elk. No one seems to know where it came from or how it came to live on Bald Hill.

One area resident familiar with the animal said he had a theory on how the horse came to run wild in the area.

Clint McGuffy owns a home near the foot of Bald Hill and he said he and his family were used to seeing the animal grace the hillsides outside their home.

“We moved here in 2003 and we were told when we moved in, there was a wild horse that lived up on Bald Hill,” McGuffy said. “Very soon after we moved in, we saw her. Some people think she got away from her owners and just ran wild after that.”

McGuffy said his favorite story about the wild horse of Bald Hill was how the animal got along with its elk neighbors.

He said the relationship between the elk herd and the horse wasn’t always completely amicable.

“There was one time where we saw her grazing up there with the elk,” McGuffy said. “There was a bull up there and he saw her grazing and he would try to chase her off and she would just run circles around the group and then go back to grazing. Then he would do it again. It was almost like he knew she was different but maybe not that different.”

The wild horse of Bald Hill apparently had other visitors over the years. McGuffy said some residents have attempted multiple times to change the animal to a not-so-wild horse and all have failed.

“There’s been several people who have gone up there and tried to get close to her,” McGuffy said. “People have tried to catch up to her and some have even tried to rope her and no one has come close. We think she jumped the fence, ran up the hill and no one has been able to touch her since,”

Sadly, according to one local source who has seen the horse several times over the years running on Bald Hill, she hasn’t seen the animal for the last two years.

Lorie Cotter, Forest Service fuels manager said the last time she saw the animal, its back was swayed indicating it was of advancing years.

“You would just be driving by and there (s)he was,” Cotter said. “You’d see him running with a herd of elk. Sometimes (s)he was alone. It was kind of cool when you saw him.

The last time we saw him, (s)he looked like (s)he was getting pretty old.”According to the U.S. Department of the Interior Land Management Bureau, Montana is home to only one herd of wild horses.

For more than a century, the Pryor Mountains near Billings has been the site of free-roaming herds of wild horses.

While the origin of the wild horse in Mineral County remains a mystery, Cotter said one theory was the animal was originally domesticated and may have escaped his previous owner.          

While details about Mineral County’s wild horse and what happened to it may never be known, what is known is he hasn’t been seen for at least two years.

Today, free-roaming wild horses are protected under U.S. law and are managed by the BLM.

They are considered an endangered species and are absent from any states they used to roam. In 2010, there were approximately 33,700 horses, most of them in Nevada.

While the fate of the wild horse of Bald Hill will likely never be known, McGuffy said the animal was a fixture in the area for over a decade.

He said, when she was alone, the horse would often times perch atop the hill and just gaze out across the countryside.

“She’d come out on a windy butte and just stand and look south like she was enjoying the cool breeze,” McGuffy said. “It’s kind of cool living in a place where you can look up the hill and see a wild horse. I don’t think she was a remnant of a by-gone day. I think she was a horse that somebody tried to tame and she got away. And they just couldn’t re-catch her.”