In 1950, a Reno executive secretary followed a trail of blood dripping from a truck full of terrified, injured and dying mustangs.
When she caught up with the truck and saw the tortured animals, the woman’s life veered in a new direction—one that ultimately resulted in federal protections for wild horses. A 1971 law banned the then-common practice of rounding up mustangs by chasing them with aircraft and shipping them to slaughterhouses to become dog food.
Horse Girl: How Velma Bronn Johnston Became Wild Horse Annie and Outsmarted the Mustang Killers of the West, by award-winning Nevada author Terri Farley, is the result of six years of research and writing. It traces Johnson’s path from her birth in rural Nevada to her victory in the halls of Congress. In between, she battled polio, worked as an executive secretary, married a cowboy, started the Double Lazy Heart Ranch in Storey County, and fought a relentless 20-year crusade to save the free-roaming mustangs of the West.
Most of the story is taken from Velma’s notes that she kept for a possible autobiography. In Farley’s book, the reader gets the impression that Velma, who died in 1977, is sitting at the elbow of the author and relating her adventures as the tale unfolds.
Velma Bronn was born in 1912 in the mining town of Ione. When she was 2, her family moved to Reno, where her father started a horse-drawn freighting business. She learned to feed, curry, ride—and love—the horses. Three years later, she was stricken with polio, a disease that left her body painful, bent and twisted. She endured the primitive treatments of the time and eventually went back to school, often enduring the taunts of classmates who made fun of her twisted frame.
After she graduated from Reno High School, she worked as an executive secretary in a Reno bank and, later, at an insurance agency. Velma made her own clothes. Her outfits, designed to understate the zig-zag shape of her body, were based on the latest styles she saw in movies and fashion magazines.
She dreamed of owning a ranch. After she married Charlie Johnston, a cowboy and former lawman, the couple saved enough to buy what they named the Double Lazy Heart Ranch in Storey County. Now in middle age, Velma was content with her husband, her horses and her ranch.
Then came the encounter with the truckload of bleeding mustangs. She learned everything she could about the business of rounding up mustangs. Horse herds were chased out of canyons with aircraft, then vehicles would pursue them until a mustanger lassoed them with ropes tied to truck tires. The animals would drag the heavy tires behind them until they collapsed from exhaustion (as depicted in the 1961 movie The Misfits). When Velma went to the local Bureau of Land Management office, which granted permits for the roundups, she was told it was highly profitable business, and that she and her husband ought to do it themselves.
Instead, she and Charlie gathered support, went to government meetings and campaigned for laws to end the roundups. The couple also went out on the range to find the makeshift corrals where the mustangers kept the captured horses awaiting transport to the slaughterhouses. At night, they tore down gates and set the animals free.
Farley, who met Wild Horse Annie in Reno decades ago and had written about her before, said one of the things she learned when researching the book was “how physically brave Velma was” when carrying out her missions to free the mustangs.
“With Charlie, she found a good partner in crime,” Farley said. “What they kind of said to each other was, ‘We’re not really horse thieves, (because) the horses belong to the American people; they belong to us, not the people making money killing them.’ They released them so that wouldn’t happen.”
Mustangers, ranchers and federal officials opposed them. Velma persisted in the face of mockery, intimidation and threats. A BLM official called her “Wild Horse Annie,” and meant it as an insult. She embraced the nickname and signed it on the letters she mailed to politicians, teachers and others asking for support in protecting the mustangs.
When her (usually male) opponents saw the prim secretary in stylish clothes and high heels at public meetings, they underestimated her abilities, strength and determination, Farley said. Velma had spies among the mustangers and would eavesdrop on her opponents’ conversations while silently taking notes in shorthand. She was direct, stubborn and willing to meet her opponents head-on.
“To fight for what matters, you must have an unshakeable faith in the very rightness of what you are doing,” Velma wrote.
Over the years, Reader’s Digest and other publications took notice of her work. Schoolchildren across the country sent missives to their elected officials. Congress received more letters on the wild horse than any other issue, save the Vietnam War. Activists and politicians got involved. In 1971, after President Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, an interviewer asked Velma how she felt about winning her 20-year battle.
“Have you ever wondered how it feels to touch a star?” she replied. “I could pretty well tell you about it now. The feeling is a combination of many things. Exhilaration over successful accomplishment of a difficult job, gratitude to all who have helped bring it about, of an inability to believe that the long hard fight is actually over, of a great pride belonging to a country where it is possible to fight for that in which we believe… (There is) a peace that comes with knowing that one small part of this Earth is a little better for our having righted the wrong. How does it feel to touch a star? It feels real good.”
Farley noted that the fight to save the mustangs continues. Politicians try to chip away federal protections, and the Bureau of Land Management conducts regular helicopter roundups to gather herds they say are starving, or are too large for a given area. The helicopters chase the animals into traps, and some mustangs are maimed or killed in the stampedes. The survivors are given veterinary care and are then sent into adoption programs, for sales options, or (for the vast majority) to languish in long-term pastures, where about 37,675 mustangs now live out their lives, according to the agency.
“I’m hoping that kids who read this book will kind of key onto her physical bravery and the spy stuff that was going on, and then they’ll be pulled into her cause,” Farley said. “… If Wild Horse Annie could see what is happening now, she would be horrified.”
Terri Farley’s new book, Horse Girl: How Velma Bronn Johnston Became Wild Horse Annie and Outsmarted the Mustang Killers of the West, is available on the University of Nevada Press website. She will host a book launch event on Thursday, Sept. 17, from 4 to 7 p.m. at the old schoolhouse at Bartley Ranch Regional Park, at 6000 Bartley Ranch Road, and a signing on Saturday, Sept. 19, from noon to 2 p.m. at Thistle & Nightshade, at 5365 Mae Anne Ave., Suite A38.
An excerpt from Horse Girl
Chapter 8—Wild Night at the Courthouse
When the phone rang at Gordon Harris’ insurance brokerage on June 9, 1952, the call was not for Mr. Harris, and it wasn’t about insurance. The call was for Velma, and it was about wild horses.
For months, Velma had tried to gather facts for Lura so that her journalist friend could break the wild horse story in the newspaper.
Now, Lura had news for Velma.
A clandestine meeting between flyboys from Idaho and the County Commission was in the works, and Lura said they sought to “plane horses out of the range” just south of the Double Lazy Heart Ranch.
Lura said mustangers had a simple two-step process to gain approval for roundups. They applied to the BLM and then the County Commission for the targeted range. They kept their plans quiet, aware that ranchers, no matter their feelings about wild horses, didn’t like interlopers.
“Rarely did anyone appear at the County Commissioners meeting to speak against the granting of the permits, for people did not know of them,” Velma wrote later.
Velma jumped at the opportunity. She’d be at the meeting if Lura just told her when and where.
“Tonight,” Lura said, “at the Storey County Courthouse in Virginia City.”
Velma’s mind kept spinning as Lura explained she’d been tipped off to the meeting by an anonymous source linked to the flyboys.
With a little bit of research, Lura had learned that some local residents weren’t about to let the roundup proposal pass unopposed. They’d initiated a petition against it.
Velma nodded. She knew her neighbors had grown tired of pilots zooming over their ranches, spooking the chickens and scaring dairy cows out of giving milk.
Velma rushed through her day, hoping to finish work early. But her typewriter keys tapped slower and slower as she imagined what her father would say about what she was feeling.
“This is none of your business, so don’t upset the apple cart,” her father would say. And Velma agreed that her “apple cart” brimmed with dreams come true. She had a ranch, a job, horses, and, of course, Charlie.
But then Velma imagined what her feisty Grandma Mary would say. “Don’t sit and weep about your problem, girl. Fix it.”
Finally, Velma covered her typewriter, asked Mr. Harris for the rest of the day off, and started home to tell Charlie that his evening plans, whatever they were, had changed.
On her way, she stopped at the local office of the Bureau of Land Management. It wouldn’t hurt to learn more before the meeting about the bureau’s role in wild horse roundups.
Velma was directed to Dante—“call me Dan”—Solari. He managed the public lands surrounding the Double Lazy Heart Ranch.
Velma hoped he could end these roundups with a stroke of his pen so that she could go back to her peaceful life.
The BLM didn’t serve as the protecter of wild horses. They wanted them gone.
Velma started with a description of planes and wild horses. She was building up to the sorry sight she’d seen driving to work, but the instant she mentioned wild horses, Solari interrupted. He sympathized with “the miseries of trying to live with the stunted, inbred, diseased beasts.” Before Velma could tell Solari that he’d misunderstood the reason for her visit, he even apologized for stallions breaking down fences, luring away mares, and trampling water sources.
Velma had hoped for a wild horse rescuer; Solari wasn’t it. He’d jumped to the conclusion she wanted wild horses off her land when in fact they were welcomed on the rare occasions they were on her land. Solari and another man, an office mate who didn’t introduce himself, offered a solution to her nonproblem: The Bureau would gladly give Mister Johnston a permit to get rid of the cussed cayuses.
So that’s the way it was going to be. The BLM didn’t serve as the protecter of wild horses. They wanted them gone. Velma kept quiet and took notes in rapid shorthand.
“Not knowing my interest in the proposed roundup,” Velma told folks later, “the supervisor bent over backwards to tell me all about the ‘glorious’ record of the bureau and was quick to point out that they were able to save the taxpayers a great deal of money by allowing private capture of the horses.”
“Bureaucrats are certain they can get their own way if they just point out to a taxpayer how much money is being saved by whatever plan they have in mind at the moment,” she wrote. “This particular bureaucrat happened to be talking to someone (me) who was more interested in the heart than the pocket- book, but I … pretended that his methods of saving our money was commendable.”
Solari handed Velma a roundup application. The Johnstons could catch wild horses wherever and however they wanted, and deliver them to a “distribution center,” which was conveniently located just a few miles from their ranch. The broomtails would stay there until they were shipped to slaughter. After that, Mr. Johnston would get a check for the horses’ on-the-hoof weight—over six cents a pound! Plus, they’d be doing a public service. The range rats had to be culled. Wild horses were useless.
Velma left the office with an application she had no intention of filing out.
It was time to get home and ready herself for battle.
As she drove, her dark thoughts turned to wondering if some people would’ve wanted her “culled” after she was made “useless” by polio.
She shook off the resentment and concentrated on the facts Solari had given her.
Evidence. Exactly what Lura had said she needed. Dante Solari was a leaky bucket of information about government mistreatment of public lands and wild horses.
Velma drove toward home, hoping Charlie would take the lead tonight. She’d always hated public speaking. Her stomach roiled when she pictured herself standing to speak to a courthouse filled with staring eyes. Did she really want to make herself vulnerable to gawking and bullying all over again? No, but for the horses, she could do it.
At home, Velma made hurried calls to friends who supported wild horses while Charlie muttered against the flyboys who considered themselves airborne cowboys.
Just before 8 p.m. on June 9, 1952, Velma and Charlie arrived at the Storey County Courthouse, a 19th-century building known for its unblindfolded statue of Justice that gazed out over the surrounding mountains.
Inside the courthouse, members of the public had divided themselves into “for” and “against.” The evening felt decidedly Western. “The only thing lacking were six-guns hanging from pegs in the foyer,” Velma wrote. And though “this wasn’t a trial, I know, but it surely seemed like it.”
The county commissioners and district attorney were seated behind the rail facing the audience.
“The two flyers were present, looking much like something that would come out from under a wet rock,” Velma mused, and she noticed the flyboys’ wide-eyed whispered asides to each other as seats in the courthouse filled.
“It is absolutely certain that those applying for the permit, and those in league with them, were astounded at the turnout to oppose them,” she wrote.
But the men didn’t look worried. Dante Solari and Edward Greenslet, the other man Velma had seen at the BLM office, sat beside the applicants, ready to support the roundup.
First, the application for an aerial roundup was read. The applicants themselves were sheep ranchers claiming that their ancestral family ranches were overrun with mustangs. Their sheep were being starved out by horses! They needed permission to capture and confiscate all unbranded horses that stepped hooves on the land between Lousetown and Ramsey.
Velma, Charlie, and other ranchers from the area included in the petition looked at one another. They never saw wild horses on their own property. They did on public lands, but that vast rolling range belonged to every citizen sitting inside the courthouse or out of it.
“Ancestral lands,” come to that, belonged to Native Americans, not those sheep ranchers. But Velma understood their strategy. The men thought they’d have better luck representing themselves as hardscrabble ranchers than speculators in the canning of horseflesh. When their pilot partners cheered them on, no one was fooled.
As Solari and Greenslet began to speak, Velma hoped they’d correct the sheepmen’s geography. They didn’t. With the pride of experts, they agreed that the horses invaded ranches. And the broomtails were so voracious, they must be starving. So, roundups were the kindest thing.
Solari and Greenslet didn’t hear the contradictions in their arguments. The unsettled rustling of half the audience said that they did. At last, postmaster Edward “Tex” Gladding and his friend Jack Murray presented a petition against the roundup. Velma hoped the men would dismantle the sheepmen’s weak reasoning. Gladding and Murray said they’d been watching the abuse of wild horses for some time, and they’d had enough of it.
“Fliers were driving some horses down a canyon, running them out on the flats and then shooting them from the air for sport …” Gladding said. “The mustang deserves better than that. It stands for the Old West, just like the Indian and the buffalo. There used to be a thousand broomtails here in Storey County; I doubt if there are 60 now. We must preserve them.”
Dante Solari said he could ease Gladding’s mind. There was no danger of wild horse extinction, because if there were 100 horses this year, there’d be 200 next year and 400 the year after that.
Charlie Johnston was an expert in the cowboy tradition of joshing. He could take uppity folk like Solari down to earth.
Rising to his full six feet, Charlie spoke up with apparent humility. He was mighty impressed by the Bureau’s statistics, he said. So, mustangs doubled in population every year! That was a wonder of nature.
“I sure as hell would like to have stock multiply on the basis that the BLM witness says the horses would!”
The rural audience laughed in agreement, but Velma was worried that the petition and Charlie’s joke wouldn’t be enough to turn the county commission away from approving the roundup. Velma knew she had to do something.
“At the height of the arguments, seemingly without my own volition, I found myself propelled to my feet.”
She was scared, but she was also a savvy bank secretary who’d learned to turn folks’ staring eyes away with her intelligence. She dealt with finances every day, and she saw the flaws in the BLM’s claims that their “glorious” wild horse extermination program was saving the taxpayers money.
Velma knew the audience would expect her to be “more interested in the heart than the pocketbook,” so she whipped out the notebook she’d filled with shorthand after her meeting with Solari at the BLM office.
Reading from the notes she’d taken in the BLM office, Velma pointed out that Mr. Greenslet had told her that she and Charlie could earn thousands of dollars through “private capture” of wild horses. Using Greenslet’s numbers, Velma quickly calculated a more specific amount for the audience. An applicant’s check from the slaughterhouse could be over $3,000, about $35,000 today.
Stung by Velma’s words, Greenslet protested that she was exposing information from a private conversation. Velma barely paused a beat before asking if he recalled Mr. Solari as part of the conversation and weren’t other BLM employees sitting right there in the office? He admitted he did recall that others were there, but—
Velma pressed on. Weren’t the wild horses they were all talking about living on public lands? And didn’t that make them public property?
Greenslet bawled in protest. Velma was distorting everything he’d said! He turned to Bill Marks, the county commission chairman, and complained that this interrogation was unfair.
As he waited for Marks to agree, Velma worked past her shyness. She wouldn’t allow Greenslet’s accusations or Solari’s glares to intimidate her. She tilted her notebook toward the commissioners and said she was “just a simple secretary” and she was only reading Mr. Greenslet’s words back to him.
“I’m sure there’s nothing simple about you, Ma’am,” the chairman said, “and from what I’ve seen here tonight, anyone who thought that would be making a serious mistake.”
The chairman appreciated her strategy. That was good for the horses, wasn’t it? Velma thought there was a little bit of praise for her, too, so she thanked him and added that the BLM was certainly being generous with the wild horse hunters in allowing them to swoop over Northern Nevada. She wondered aloud if that was because the applicants were family or friends? She stifled Greenslet’s outrage by saying she surely didn’t see how the BLM’s “glorious program” was saving the public money.
As Velma sank back into her seat and leaned against Charlie, rustling and chatter came from both sides of the courthouse aisle. Math and shorthand notes had made it clear this application was all about profiting from the death of wild horses, not saving ranch land or feeding sheep.
Velma held her breath. Would the county commission defy the powerful BLM and the flyboys?
Yes! The application was rejected to great applause by the wild horse supporters.
The Reno Evening Gazette covered the courtroom conflict and followed up with a news flash. It wasn’t the flyboys or the sheep ranchers who had submitted the roundup application. In fact, the applicant was a local slaughterhouse. The owners noticed the BLM’s eagerness to issue permits and grabbed the shortcut to fast cash! Eager to turn wild horses into pet food, they applied and, much to their surprise, lost.
Excited by their victory, Velma, Charlie, and Tex Gladding took a giant leap and, just a couple days later, filed a petition to make all airborne roundups of wild horses illegal.
This could be the end, Velma thought. If wild horse round-ups ceased, she could return to the country life she’d dreamed of as a girl.
Sadly, it wasn’t the end. Although their application passed, the County Commission wasn’t feeling bold. Airborne roundups would be illegal—but only in Storey County. Storey County was a sparsely populated patch of wild horse country. Velma knew some horses would be saved, but she and Charlie were certain the lure of big money would spur men to get creative.
Still, it was a win, and the Reno Evening Gazette let people know about it. The headline on June 17, 1952, read STOREY ISSUES ORDER BANNING HORSE CHASES. After reading the details of mustang hunts and how brutally the wild animals met their end, many residents joined the Comstock Humane Society and opened their eyes to what was happening to their wild horses.
Some didn’t care. Charlie met up with men who asked why he was breaking his back building, hammering, and raising stock in summer heat and winter snow when he could make easy money culling wild horses. Their advice ended as they jeered a warning not to let his wife make a dang fool out of him.
Velma’s fight for the wild horses was complicated by the fact that the courtroom battle had exposed her skills. Solari would keep his eyes on her. So would Greenslet.
“When I used his information against him, he was aghast,” Velma wrote. “From then on, it was all-out WAR, and whenever I needed something witnessed, or some info, I had to send someone else.”
The BLM wouldn’t be blindsided again.
Excerpted from Horse Girl: How Velma Bronn Johnston Became Wild Horse Annie and Outsmarted the Mustang Killers of the West by Terri Farley, © 2026, published with permission from the University of Nevada Press.