The Last Good Horse

Imagine a world without the great American mustang. Visualize our western parks and grasslands void of all wild horses. We are getting close, very close to that imagery today. Consider this: in 1914, there were roughly four-million wild mustangs in the United States; culling and slaughtering has reduced this number to less than one-hundred thousand. What is being done to our remaining untamed herds in this supposed enlightened age of ours is truly a travesty. Author, David Martin Anderson, journeyed to Montana's Pryor Mountain to study the last of the Spanish jennets still roaming free but soon to become extinct. The fruit of that labor is the novel, The Last Good Horse.The story, itself, transitions between the 1930s and modern-day Montana as the protagonist, Billy Bartell, languishes in a prison hospital eager to tell the truth about the dark days of his youth when he rounded up horses for the slaughterhouse. It was in 1939 that seventeen-year-old Billy leaves home to seek his fortune. For Billy the choice is simple: stay in Billings working the family funeral home or work the Pryor Mountain meadowland capturing wild mustangs and living out a lifelong dream among the last of the old-West cowboys. Ironically, Billy substitutes one death trade for another, for not only does he master rounding up horses, he learns how to slaughter and render the animals by the thousands and pack their carcasses in iced-down boxcars. Through it all Billy must come to terms with his newfound craft. You see, he has made a pact with the devil, one Captain Belial. Getting out of a pact with the devil is never easy especially when you are seventeen and possess a conscience. The Last Good Horse runs much deeper than the morality play it might appear on the surface. The story is not only a study in the horse extermination practices of the 1930's but also a revisionist look at American morals of that same bygone era. In 1939, America stood on the brink of a new awakening. America teetered between innocence and sinfulness brought on by a world stage in disarray. Billy Bartell represents that America, standing with one foot in heaven and one foot in hell. He has lost himself to the lure of money and debauchery and the need to flee a miserable home life at any cost. In the end, he has choices to make to salvage his soul, for at age seventeen he is neither child nor adult. He is Dante. He is everyman searching for heaven.