Mustangers on the Banks   

by Carolyn Mason (June 2007)

I talked to Weldon Willis at Harkers Island, NC, today, to probe his memory about a boat trip to Shackleford Banks that he made 25-years-ago this month. “They found me,” he said, “when they came here looking for people who owned horses on Shackleford.  Emmett Brislawn, and the other men, some of whom who had been soldiers at Fort Bragg, got out and walked the Banks.  I stayed on the boat with an older fellow, he may have been Emmett’s uncle… I’m not sure, now.  There was an Indian woman with them. I remember she wore a big black hat, and had a baby strapped to her back.  She walked the beach with them, too.  They were looking for bones, as well as horses, so I told them where I had last seen some.  One of the men had a long beard, and he could plait that beard with one hand, then he tied a bag-tie around it to keep it in place.  They were a real interesting group.  There was a boat-load of them” (~ Weldon “Peter” Willis, 7 June 2007).

In 1982, there were horses, sheep, cattle and goats on the island.  The Atlantic Ocean on the south, the inlets, and the sounds on the back side of the Banks, made a natural “fence” to keep the animals in place.  Most animals had been branded by locals, and any unbranded  animals found at roundups were eventually claimed and branded by the local “salt-water-cowboys.”  When fishing was bad, the sale of a horse or cow paid for shoes for the family, or helped pay bills. 

Area history, consisting predominantly of oral histories passed down generation to generation, told that the horses had “always been there” on the barrier islands. My grandmother told me as a child that the horses on the Banks “were here when our people came.” Our people, were originally Welshmen, Scotsmen and Englishmen.  Most of the families in this old, “Down East” area of Carteret County are descendents of those same early settlers who came here in the late sixteen and early seventeen hundreds. Many years ago, my father, when I asked if the horses could swim, replied, “ ’Course they can; that’s how they got here. They came ashore off ships.”  

More recent accounts, written mostly by people who never lived here, state that the people who lived on the banks (and who left there after the great hurricane San Cirraco washed the bones of their dead up out of the graveyard in the late 1890s) left their horses on the banks.  The local oral histories, however, further elaborate that the horse were already on the Banks, when those people first settled there.  Known historically as the Sand Banks, the islands have become well known in recent years as the Outer Banks. 

According to a 1982 article in the Fayetteville newspaper, they arrived in tooled-leather boots and cowboy hats; a startling sight at Harkers Island, North Carolina, a village of Atlantic coast fishing families.  Emmett Brislawn, Bob Price, Cody Holbrook, Fayetteville Observer reporter Tom Lawton, and others, boarded Weldon Willis’ shrimp boat for their trip across Back Sound.  Captain Willis, wearing his white rubber fishing boots, was about to ferry these Wyoming members of the Spanish Mustang Registry to Shackleford Banks for a look at the wild horses whose ancestors had inhabited the barrier island for several hundred years.  More accustomed to the back of a horse than the throb of engines and the slow roll of a boat, the westerners were very curious and asked lots of questions about the trawler and its rigging.  Many of them had never seen an ocean before.  They had recently come to the Banks for a Spanish Mustang Registry annual meeting, and to look for wild horses.
 
 (Quotes from: “Stalking The Wild Horses Of Shackleford Banks,” Fayetteville Observer-Times, Sunday Morning, June 27, 1982) 

 The Mustangers had come from Wyoming, Colorado, Maine and 15 other States to see the wild horses on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.  Last Friday, some 60 of the registry’s 200 members gathered for their annual meeting at Currituck, and on Sunday, drove down Hatteras Island and took the ferry to Ocracoke.  From there, the plans were to catch the last Sunday ferry to Ceder Point [should be Cedar Island] spend the night at Harkers Island and roundup all the horses on Shackleford for a close inspection.

But the schedule was hard to keep.  By the time the moveable meeting rolled onto Harkers Island Monday morning, nearly half of the members had peeled out of the caravan and were on the way home.  With neither the time nor the crowd for a roundup, the remaining mustangers were headed for a walking tour of Shackleford Banks.

 The Mister Big III with Welder [should be Weldon] at the helm and a motor dory in tow, took them two and a half miles across Back sound and dropped anchor about 500 yards from the island.  The dory shuttled them another 250 yards and they waded ashore, the water lapping at their thighs and filling their boots.

 The mustangers spent about four hours trudging through the cordgrass and salt marshes of Shackleford.  They climbed dunes to study living horses and dug around for skeletal remains of the less fortunate, hoping to find conclusive evidence to register some of the horses as Spanish Mustangs… “That way they’d have a better chance of staying on the island, said Robert, “Pete” Peterson a mustanger from Fayetteville [NC].  “We just want to save the best there is.”  “And develop a little bit of interest in North Carolina history and national history as well,” added mustanger Bob Price, also from Fayetteville.   

Since 1957, when the SMR was founded, just under a thousand Spanish Mustangs have been registered.  The requirements for registry are strict: three certified inspectors must count ribs and lumbar vertebrae and examine musculature, just for starters.  The numbers are growing slowly and some of those early [horses] are dead.  

 “People don’t know how rare this little horse is and how hard it is to come by,” said Peterson. “They don’t know what a prize they’re getting.”   Peterson and Price became interested in the Shackleford horses last year [1981], bought a few of them and registered some of them.  Realizing that the isolated Outer Banks were an ideal place to find horses pure enough to qualify, they convinced the SMR to meet there. Standing on a dune and looking out over Shackleford Banks, Emmett Brislawn admitted it was a little hard at first to picture such a Western horse in such an Eastern Setting.  

 “But then that’s why we’re here,” said Cody Holbrook also of Oshoto, Wyo.  And after Painstakingly stalking the horses through Shackleford’s salt marshes and cordgrass, and examining skulls and lumber vertebrae, they believed what they say.  No new horses were registered, but the ground work was done. Back aboard the Mister Big III, they shucked boots from their magnolia-white feet and poured out the seawater.  
 “I didn’t know cowboys had feet,” said a mustanger from Bryn Mawr, Pa. 
Update.   Due to the work of the Foundation for Shackleford Horses, Inc. and NC Third District Congressman Walter Jones, with the support of State legislators, citizens and equine scientists, The Shackleford horses are now protected by Federal law: 

The Shackleford Banks Wild Horses Protection Act.