“Just what the hell do you think you know about that horse?” he’d ask. Then he would proceed to iron out the wrinkles in the truth with his own version. The yarn as he told it would be absolutely at odds with the narrative spun by another cow chaser, who was willing to swear he was there when it happened, riding right alongside that Choctaw cowhand Two Spuds, hell-bent for election over country that was rougher than a Saturday night in Gillette. Firearms were frowned upon, but arguments waged by flinty, whiskey-fueled seekers after truth were settled with fists, teeth, kneecaps, head butts, boot toes, broken bottles, skinning knives.

Making allowance for the ravages wrought by time, corn liquor, and repeated blows to the head, there is a consistent line that runs from one version to another, straight as the path of an old horse on his way back to the barn. There was a legendary black mustang stallion that roamed Wyoming in the darkest years of the Great Depression, and he became the focus of an escapade that is still talked about around campfires from Yellowstone to Cheyenne. Everyone who actually got within hollering distance of the animal agrees that the black was a wild horse so unlike any other that he might have been thawed from some Ice Age bog, a large, ferocious, predatory carnivore of the sort that once filled the nightmares of heavy-browed men shivering in caves and squabbling over hunks of burnt mastodon. He eluded capture for so long that some of the horse hunters who worked the high country thought he must have been a spirit horse, although he was flesh and blood enough to bring considerable discomfort to the incautious.

No one knew where the horse came from. He just turned up in the Bighorns, fully grown and cantankerous. Buster Estabrooks, a cowhand from New Mexico who had worked a couple of roundups on the 8T8, claimed the black was the same stallion he had seen in the summer of 1935 down on Stinking Water Creek south of Ogallala, Nebraska. It was a long way from the Powder River to Ogallala, but at one time there were thousands of mustangs on the Stinking Water. They bred with all manner of horses, descendants of the animals that were lost by Cortés and de Soto, draft horses and quarterhorses and thoroughbreds, Morgans and Appaloosas, Percherons and Tennessee walkers, and horses that had been stolen by desperadoes and abandoned when the law got too close.