In the early 1890s the Badlands hid more than fossils. Boone rides along with a Dakota cowboy named Bruce Siberts, who goes into the breaks after his stolen cattle and finds a good deal more trouble than he came for.
How do you steal a horse from the boss of the rustlers? Bruce Siberts could tell you, and by his own account he did it. Siberts was a Dakota cowboy of the early eighteen nineties, and when cattle thieves ran off his stock and holed up in the Badlands, he went in after them. He spent a week in those breaks, and you can guess how many of his own cattle he found, but he saw thousands of head of somebody's, and a good many wore no brand. Siberts took a lesson from that. He found himself a partner, came back and built horse traps, and they caught unbranded horses, put a brand on them and sold them for six hundred dollars, and if you're wondering how that differs from what was done to him, so am I. Next year he came back alone for more, and the outlaws got his horses, and there he stood, afoot, many miles from home, and what would you have done? He took the horse of Bill Newsom, the head of the rustlers, and he rode it to a railroad town in Nebraska and came home on the train like a gentleman, if you please. The horses outlasted the lot of them. Half a century on, several hundred so-called wild ones were running the Sage Creek basin, and the ranchers had a new rustler to complain of, because the wild stallions, they said, were enticing away their mares. The park's custodian wrote that it was about the only thing the Park Service and the ranchers could agree on, up to the last roundup in nineteen sixty-three. On at least one of those roundups they used airplanes. Hold that in your mind, a pilot low over a canyon, and a stallion running flat out in front of him, toward the loading chutes at Scenic.
Photo: Larry McAfee, NPS, public domain · Public domain