These Cowboys Are Convicts

By James Willwerth/Canon City

Under a big sky on the Colorado plains, Rory Robinson, doing five years for burglary, is uneasily making the acquaintance of a gray mare that once ran wild and free. Robinson and the mustang have much in common: both have been corralled in the Colorado State Prison to be tamed.

Tense beneath her first saddle and confined to a narrow chute, the mustang lays back her ears indignantly. Robinson, 28, tall and powerfully built, eases atop the animal, and she erupts in furious leaps. Fellow convicts pull Robinson to safety. Released into the corral, the mare kicks like a ninja assassin as cowboys in green prison garb shout and wave their Stetsons to keep her from banging into the fence. Robinson climbs on again and seconds later is bucked into the dust. Yet even a wild horse eventually tires. Another man mounts up, the mare crow-hops a bit, stiff-legged and snorting. But her fight is gone.

When Prison Superintendent Harry B. Johnson first heard of the proposal that convicts tame wild mustangs under the Federal Bureau of Land Management's nationwide "adopt a horse" program, he feared the only results would be "injuries and lawsuits." Now Johnson tells of hardcase cons transformed into amiable cowpokes. "They are proud of the horses and proud of what they can do," says he of the 30 men in the program.

Wild-horse enthusiasts are equally delighted. In 1985 the BLM rounded up 17,000 of the estimated 50,000 mustangs that have overgrazed public rangeland, mainly in Nevada and Wyoming. The bureau offered the horses for "adoption" at $125 a head, but buyers found the animals unmanageable.

Last year BLM Range Conservationist Walter Jakubowski persuaded authorities at the Colorado State Prison complex in Canon City to let convicts break the horses. Most of the inmates are city bred, and none have had equine experience. In one year the convict-cowboy program has tamed more than 400 mustangs. Another 350 horses are corralled at the prison to be trained at the rate of about ten a day. Most are only halter broken, rather than readied for saddlework.

To become a cowboy, a prisoner must be near the end of his term: the horse corrals are outside the prison security system, and an inmate inclined to flee need only cross an alfalfa field and a low barbed-wire fence. No one has done so yet. Corral Boss Tony Bainbridge observes, "The meanest ones seem to make the best hands. You come out here and think you're a tough guy -- we'll find out." He says, "A 900-lb. horse can move you around more than you expect."

Some men say they hope to use their new skills to get jobs as veterinarians' assistants or as hot-walkers and groomers at racetracks when they get out of prison. Veterinarian Ron Zaidlicz, founder of the National Organization for Wild American Horses, teaches the inmates how to groom and care for the horses. In 1985 Zaidlicz and other NOWAH members rode mustangs from Colorado to Washington to lobby for better protection of the wild horses. "I was asked why I cared about horses when people were homeless and in so much trouble." Zaidlicz gestured toward a knot of inmates intently working with a mustang. "In a way, this answers that."