ENTERTAINMENT

During the 1998 Christmas holidays, 34 wild horses in the mountains near Reno, Nev., including a pregnant mare and a newborn foal, were shot and killed by three men armed with high-powered rifles.

Deanne Stillman, a Los Angeles investigative writer and desert roamer, read the story and wondered about these subhumans and their pitiless act: "Why would someone go out and kill animals that had blazed our trails, fought our wars, served as our most loyal partners?"

This small inquiry led to bigger questions about the decline of the mustang population in the U.S. Two million mustangs inhabited 17 states, California to Missouri, Texas to Montana, at the end of the 19th century. Today a relative handful remain, most of them scattered in the Nevada outlands. How and why did this happen?

In Mustang, the author's impassioned investigation results in an epic history of the horse. She covers not only the 6,000 years or so that humans have made use of horses, but takes us from the terrier-size eohippus ("dawn horse") of 65 million years ago to the familiar and beloved animal of today.

Ms. Stillman writes absorbing chapters on the Spanish conquests in the New World, the horse culture of the Plains Indians of the American West, the horse of the cowboy and the cattle trails, and the horse in the entertainment world, from Buffalo Bill's Wild West to the horses Hollywood's Western stars rode. We also learn about the horse in literature, from lines in Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and Melville's Moby-Dick to the greatest cow horse novel of them all, Smoky by Will James.

There is, however, something awry in this captivating history and lore: Too much of it seems redundant and distant from the real subject of the book, specifically the wild horse. What, for example, does a long description of the Little Big Horn battle of 1876 have to do with mustangs? Or all those Hollywood horses? The thread connecting Roy Rogers' Trigger to those original mustangs the Spanish explorer Francisco Coronado left in the Western wilderness in 1540 seems very thin.

Ms. Stillman is at her best in telling such modern mustang sagas as that of Velma "Wild Horse Annie" Johnson of Reno, who in 1950 saw blood spilling from a truck carrying live animals to a rendering plant. She devoted most of the rest of her life to protecting the wild horse of the West from hunters, torturers and horse-meat industrialists. Her work led in 1971 to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon, who quoted from Thoreau: "We need the tonic of wildness." The act made it a federal crime to "capture, brand, harass, or kill wild horses on public lands."

The author's recounting of Wild Horse Annie Johnson's gutty two-decade-long campaign is told with passion and needs to be told book-length, preferably by Deanne Stillman.

Dale L. Walker of El Paso is author of many historical books and biographies.

The Saga of the Wild Horse

in the American West

Deanne Stillman

(Houghton Mifflin, $25)