In frontier days ranchers respected mustangs for their speed and their stamina. They captured the finest stallions and mares to breed with their domestic stock. But by the 1920s, tractors began replacing horses on American farms. No longer a resource, the wild horse became a pest and a nuisance of use to no one. In the 1930s the U.S. Government authorized the removal of wild horses from the public range. Wild horses were killed in large numbers.

Once two million mustangs roamed the American west. Soon there would be fewer than 17,000. Dawn Lappin laments the results,

"So they'd be gathered up and sent to slaughter and, of course, it made a lot of money. At the time the hanging weight of horses was somewhere around 10 cents a pound but if you gathered 2 or 300 horses at a time and took them to slaughter you could make yourself a tidy bit of change."

Few people knew or cared about the slaughter. But that was about to change with the crusade of a rancher's wife named Velma Johnston, whose father had taught her to love horses. In her later life the sight of reinforced corrals where horses were brutally treated saddened her eyes and aroused her anger. Her enemies derisively gave her a name she now proudly bears, "Wild Horse Annie."