Terri Farley, author of the Phantom Stallion adventure series and Wild at Heart: Mustangs and the Young People Fighting to Save Them, has written a new biography of Johnston, Horse Girl, How Velma Bronn Johnston Became Wild Horse Annie and Outsmarted the Mustang Killers of the West.
Among the projects of the book is to separate fact from mythology in the recounting of Wild Horse Annie's life. 'One of the myths,' according to Farley, 'was that she grew up on a ranch. She didn't. She grew up in walking distance to UNR. And another one was that her husband Charlie, Charlie Johnston, married her for a family ranch. Well, there was no family ranch. They worked together for years to get the money to buy a ranch.'
The polio that Johnston contracted when she was five affected her throughout her life. 'This was pre-vaccinations,' says Farley, 'and also before a lot of effective treatments … Her body was kind of twisted at the waist and she tended to lean forward as she walked. But she could still walk. She could still run. She could still ride. And even though she was a straight-A student, she would cut school on the day that there was public speaking. That makes it even more admirable that she took up the challenge of speaking at meetings and eventually speaking twice to Congress.'
A formative incident in Velma Johnston's life, one that set her on her course of activism, took place almost accidentally as she was driving to her job in Reno one day. As Farley describes it, 'She got trapped behind this trailer, and then she noticed it was leaving a trail of blood.' When she got close enough to it, she saw that it was 'crammed with horses. She was horrified that anybody would treat horses that way. And she followed the trailer into Reno to a slaughterhouse.'
Velma Johnston, soon dubbed Wild Horse Annie by an official of the Bureau of Land Management, became a central figure in the fight to stop the rounding up and killing of wild mustangs. Her information gathering, public speaking, and lobbying led to the passage of the 1959 Wild Horse Annie Act, and then the more comprehensive Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971.
However, the rounding up of wild horses hasn't ceased, which is among the reasons Farley wrote her book. 'One of my mottoes is, people can't care if they don't know. And that is why I've written a gazillion books about wild horses. I'm not Velma. I'm not in all of the classrooms and going to Congress. But what I can do is go out on the range or go to the roundups and bear witness.'
Horse Girl, How Velma Bronn Johnston Became Wild Horse Annie and Outsmarted the Mustang Killers of the West by Terri Farley is published by the University of Nevada Press. A release event for the book takes place on Thursday, September 17. unpress.nevada.edu for more.
Click here for an extended version of this interview with Terri Farley.
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