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Buzzzzzz…
The loud noise from the clock radio jolted me out of a deep sleep.
Reaching over to the nightstand, I turned the buzzer off and the light
on. It was just 4:00 a.m. and still dark as I jumped out of bed and slid
into my jeans. From the motel room next to me, I could hear my
cameraman, Dick Powers, also stirring. Within the half hour, we ate a
quick breakfast and picked up sack lunches from the only café in the
small cow town of
Burns, Oregon. Then we loaded our film gear into a government truck and headed south,
out of town. The two green BLM Suburbans that followed us down the
deserted road were packed with camera crews from the three major
television networks. We were all here for the same assignment: to film
the first government-sponsored wild horse roundup since the Civil War.
A
few weeks before, I’d received a phone call from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Washington,
D.C., outlining the assignment. Congress had recently passed a decree,
Public Law 92-195, The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act of 1971.
Among other things, this new law prohibited the use of motorized
vehicles for the hunting or relocation of wild horses or burros from
public lands. Our film was to be a visual report to Congress on the
practical implications of this new dictate. After resolving a few cost
factors and other details for our services, I asked the BLM executive
how he had chosen my company for this assignment.
In
a typical bureaucratic tone, he replied, “I looked in the Portland, Oregon, Yellow
Pages under ‘Film Production’ and saw your company’s
name. Media West sounded very western to me…and we’re talking about
wild horses…so it just seemed to fit.”
Smiling,
I thanked him and told him not to worry. Little did he know that my only
knowledge of wild horses came from watching cowboy shows on television.
Just
as the sun started peeking over the mountain tops of the eastern sky, we
turned off the paved highway and bounced down a long dirt road leading
to a box canyon. Here, local BLM staff had built a corral at one end of
the ravine and a high camouflaged camera blind for the press, just above
it. Gathering the crews around the blind, our BLM contact explained
their plans for the roundup.
It
sounded simple enough. Some months before, they had found a large herd
of wild mustangs in these mountainous public rangelands, some thirty
miles south of Burns. For the last few weeks, the BLM staff had been
driving the herd from one range to the next, always pushing them through
a small canyon that was open at one end but boxed at the other. On the
day of the roundup, they were moving the herd again, but this time the
canyon would be fenced off so the horses would have to turn into the
boxed end of the ravine with the corral.
“Will
you be using real cowboys for the roundup?” one reporter asked.
“No,
our staff can take care of this,” was the BLM reply.
“How
will we know when they’re coming?” another asked.
“We’ll
give you walkie-talkies so you can hear the staff working the herds.”
As
we set up our cameras in the hot August morning, we were told that other
BLM staff had arrived earlier and were already out on the high desert
plains, looking for the herd. Within a few short moments, we had a line
of cameras pointing in the general direction we were told that they
would come from. ABC, CBS, NBC and my two-person crew were all there,
waiting to document this historic event. The corral and the hill from
which they would approach were some distance from the blind, so we all
used our longest telephoto lenses to fill the frame. Time seemed to drag
on…until, finally, our radio came to life and we could hear that they
were coming.
Moments
later, on the top of a distant ridge to our left, they appeared. There
looked to be forty or fifty horses, being driven by a dozen or more BLM
staff. But just as the herd came into camera range, moving down the
ridge towards the corral, something spooked them and they broke apart
into small groups. Scattering in different directions, the BLM
‘cowboys’ took out after them, galloping out of view. Soon, on the
radio, we heard an update: during the chase, two of the staff had fallen
off their mounts, and one needed medical attention. An hour later, when
they had regrouped the herd, they tried again…but with the same
results.
By
the end of the day, we had only two animals in the corral—one old,
gray, swaybacked mare and a lame colt! All the others had been too fast
or too smart for the BLM. Using the corral as a backdrop, the network
crews did the best they could at telling this nothing story. The next
day, we returned to
Portland
and shipped off our exposed film to the BLM in Washington,
D.C.
A
month later, we were back in Burns to try again. This time, we came more
prepared, as we had rented a 240mm telephoto lens, about the longest
lens made for 16mm film cameras. The BLM was also more prepared, as they
had hired real cowboys from
Pendleton, Oregon. And, this time, we would be the only film crew.
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