What will become of the horses of Coyote Canyon?

Sam Ribakoff

SANTA YSABEL, Calif. (CN) — Anza is a big, powerful animal, but when he trots over to the edge of his corral to investigate visitors, he does it with the grace of a ballerina.

Kathleen Hayden, 80, remembers the first time she brought him to her property. He came up to her to curiously watch her mend a fence.

“It’s hard to imagine he was a wild horse,” she said of the chestnut brown stallion with deep-set black eyes.

But the 28-year-old Anza is indeed wild — though he hasn’t been in the hills and canyons of eastern San Diego County where he was born for more than two decades.

In 2003, California State Park officials captured and removed Anza and 28 other wild horses. Known as the Coyote Canyon herd, they’re now being tended to by Hayden and her nonprofit Coyote Canyon Caballos d’Anza.

The nonprofit is a two-woman operation. Besides Hayden, there’s Chamise Pink, who works for the nonprofit as an animal caretaker and a consultant on Indigenous issues.

Like Hayden, Pink has also taken a liking to Anza. “I didn’t think my daughter would ever be around a stallion,” she said as she admired the horse one cool December afternoon. “She’s six years old — but I trust him. He’s very conscientious. He’s caring.”

Fast forward some 20 years since Anza was first picked up by wildlife officials, and Hayden and her group now hope to rewild the herd back in San Diego County. But how and if that’ll happen is a messy question that not only involves multiple government agencies but also implicates the ugly history of the colonization of America.

On the nonprofit’s 5-acre property, Hayden and Pink are first trying to repopulate the herd by matching remaining stallions with genetically similar mates from Utah.

They face steep challenges, including the horses’ ages. “We are really losing time to get them back in the wild,” Pink said. “With each passing day, the babies that are being born should be born in the wild.”

“He’s shooting blanks,” Hayden concurred, looking at Anza. “They don’t breed forever.”

After wildlife officials first removed the horses from Coyote Canyon, Hayden, working with a state lawmaker, formed Coyote Canyon Caballos d’Anza to manage the herd.

For a while, the horses roamed in a pasture in Ramona under Hayden’s care. She obtained 10 wild female horses from Utah, with the goal of repopulating the Coyote Canyon herd.

But the property was slated to become a conservation area, and wildlife officials ultimately decided the horses had to leave. Hayden says most of the horses were taken in the middle of the night, leading her to have a nervous breakdown.

(In an emailed statement to Courthouse News, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson said the horses were on the property “without the knowledge or permission of the landowner,” who later “arranged for the removal of the horses.”) That left her with just two Coyote Canyon horses, including Anza. Through breeding, she’s since gotten that number back up to five.

Why all the fuss for a handful of horses?

For starters, Anza and the Coyote Canyon herd are purported to be direct descendants of horses brought by Spanish colonizers to California.Those horses had a long legacy in the Golden State, including as work animals at ranches staffed by Indigenous laborers from nearby tribes like the Cupeño.

As with elsewhere in the United States, these horses became an important part of local Native American culture, almost akin to spiritual medicine, said Pink, who’s descended from a variety of local tribal groups, including the Pala and Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians.

The Coyote Canyon herd's history of dislocation, murder and forced assimilation parallels Native American history after European colonization, Pink said. As she sees it, the horses are a part of local Indigenous identity. Removing them represents another colonial effort to strip away culture.

“When you look at the horses, they have the same history we do,” Pink said. “They tried to manage us to extinction and look what happened. It didn’t work.”

In 1851, after local tribes refused to pay steep taxes and San Diego officials began confiscating animals and property, a Cupeño man named Antonio Garra led a coalition of Native nations spanning in a revolt against the U.S. government.

The revolt brought in tribes from as far away as the Colorado River before officials squelched it in 1853. Indigenous advocates still celebrate Garra’s legacy with an annual Antonio Garra Day, honored on March 16.

After the war, soldiers burned the Cupeño village of Cupa near San Diego. Although Garra was not a U.S. citizen, they also executed him for treason.

Before he died, Garra took some horses to remote Coyote Canyon. So the legend goes, at least. There, separated from other horses, they developed their own characteristics. In the view of some advocates like Hayden, they’re now unique enough to warrant protections as an endangered species under the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act.

Representatives from California State Parks dispute that story. The Coyote Canyon horses were never truly wild, said Danny McCamish, a senior environmental scientist for the Colorado Desert District of California State Parks, citing oral histories from locals near Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

Instead, the horses were likely released into the wild much later, McCamish said. In one telling, a local rancher released his horses into Coyote Canyon after failing to find someone to take care of them. In another, the release was a divorced rancher’s desperate attempt to keep assets out of alimony proceedings.

Mark Jorgensen, park superintendent at the time the Coyote Canyon herd was removed, was similarly dismissive of the claim that the horses were wild and descended from a Spanish herd.

“All B.S.,” he said.

As for stories about the horses' wild provenance, he says it’s just a matter of “people who are emotionally attached to them.”

“I have to think that they did it for the emotional mystique side of it,” he said. “Not for the good of the horses.”

According to Jorgensen, the Coyote Canyon herd once lived in relative peace and stability in the upper part of the canyon. Then a drought in the 1980s forced the horses to move down into the canyon, where they defecated and damaged its riparian ecosystem.

Nor was the situation particularly good for the horses, he said. After animal welfare experts visited the herd, “they basically said to us, look, this is a dire situation,” he added. “If this was a private ranch, we would probably have you guys arrested for animal cruelty.”

Stories about the Coyote Canyon’s Native American provenance are all made-up, Jorgensen concluded. Still, Hayden insists it’s Jorgensen’s story that’s bunk. She described what she called “a political movement” by state and federal wildlife officials to downplay the genetic and historic significance of herds like Coyote Canyon.“I don’t know why there is so much prejudice against wild horses.”

Whatever the true story, Hayden and Pink would like to see a happier outcome for both the horses and the people who love them. Pink hopes to rectify past injustices by giving Native children more opportunities to meet and interact with horses, whether wild or not.

She wants to introduce them to Shawnee, a small pony that lives on Hayden’s property. She’d also like to see local tribes work with San Diego County to steward the Coyote Canyon herd.

Meanwhile, Hayden has continued efforts to rewild them. She hopes to get them settled near the rural and unincorporated community of Santa Ysabel, where they’d have access to a water supply. Late last year, the county agreed to meet with Hayden and other stakeholders to discuss the request — though those efforts are still tentative. In an email to Courthouse News, Crystal Benham, a spokesperson for the county’s parks and recreations department, stressed that “the purpose of the meeting is exploratory and to make sure we fully understand the request.”

The opportunity is ripe for the horses to go onto county preservation land, Hayden said. She says the animals could find a new home under the county’s Multiple Species Conservation Program, which acquires land to preserve animals on the federal and state endangered species list.

So far, Stephens’ kangaroo rats, mountain lions, golden eagles and some endangered plant species have all land set aside for them. Coyote Canyon horses don’t, since they are not considered endangered by either state or federal officials.

Be that as it may, Hayden says horses like Anza represent a history and legacy in the region that’s worth celebrating and preserving. “They are the epitome of Native American, Spanish, Mexican and Western settlement,” she said. “They are the glue that, if not perpetuated, will be gone forever.”