That might have been an end to it, except that Bill Bury got involved. Not with the black specifically, but with what he referred to as the “mustang problem” in general. William C. “Big Bill” Bury was a cattleman and oilman whose empire stretched from Montana to Texas. Bury owned so much in so many states that he hired one accountant fellow whose only job was to keep track of the Bury holdings and to be able to inform Big Bill at any hour of the day or night whether or not he still owned those twelve oil wells in Midland, the slaughterhouse in Billings, or the bank in Riverton. Although they would never appear on the accountant’s books, Bill Bury also owned one of Wyoming’s two senators, a congressman or two, and enough of the state legislature that if he proposed a bill decreeing that the Bighorn Mountains should be leveled and turned into swampland, it would pass without a dissenting vote. In many ways it was Bill Bury who lit the fuse of what would become the legend of the black when he declared that, what with the drought and all, the wild horses of Wyoming had become a plague. Big Bill’s position was that, if the march of Christian civilization was to carry on its trampling of pretty much everything wild in the manner that God intended, the mustangs would have to be slaughtered or penned up with as little mercy as the white man had shown to the red man or the buffalo. What it boiled down to was that Bill Bury had at least a hundred thousand cattle out on the range somewhere in Wyoming and mustangs were eating some of the grass intended to fatten Big Bill’s livestock. The mustangs had to go, because they were getting in the way of his profit margin.

42.