Red Badger, a traditional red roan herd stallion, on Nokota Horse Conservancy land. (Photo: Seth Zeigler)

The campaign to save an endangered Western horse began with a horse race, a park ranger, a couple of cowboys, and the living legacy of a famous Indian warrior.

In the late 1970s, brothers Frank and Leo Kuntz of Linton, North Dakota, were producing the Great American Horse Race, “fashioned after races done by the Native Americans, cowboys, and cavalry—it’s ‘I’ll race you from here to that hill and over the crick and back over here,’” Frank Kuntz explains.

Leo had bought a few wild horses native to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and one night in 1978, when he stopped at a sale barn in Dickinson, North Dakota, he spotted more of the distinctive looking horses in the kill pen—destined for slaughter. He bought them and brought them home.

What he had rescued were descendants of the hardy, handy horse of the Plains Indians and cowboys, the breed portrayed in the paintings and sculpture of Frederic Remington, the swift, bold horse that carried warriors into the Battle of Little Big Horn and sped hunters after the great buffalo herds.

When Lakota Chief Sitting Bull surrendered at Fort Buford, North Dakota, in 1881, about 350 of those horses were confiscated by the U.S. government from his band. Some 250 head went to the Marquis DeMores, a French nobleman who established the town of Medora, North Dakota, now headquarters of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. In 1884, the HT Huidekoper Ranch, the earliest large-scale ranch in North Dakota, purchased 60 mares from the marquis and crossed them with the Thoroughbred stallion Lexington, as well as other Thoroughbred and Percheron stallions. After the marquis died in 1896, some of his herd was dispersed. What Leo and Frank Kuntz had found were their descendants, inadvertently enclosed when the national park was fenced in 1950.

Read the complete story in the pages of Cowboys & Indians magazine at your local newsstand or call (800) 982-5370.