That was nine years ago. Damara now is one of 15 horses living at Apache Creek Mustang Rescue in Meredith, a nonprofit organization that Jim and Maryann Ogden operate to save wild mustangs.

For these once-wild creatures who roamed the Western range, it’s a little piece of horse heaven in the New Hampshire Lakes Region.

“This is their herd,” said Maryann Ogden. “They love it here.”

Eva Lu, a well-fed 6-year-old border collie/golden retriever cross, welcomes visitors to the ranch with a wagging tail and cheerful attitude. Three horses poke their inquisitive noses over a paddock fence.

It’s difficult to believe that these friendly, sweet-tempered horses were once wild. That’s a tribute to the care the Ogdens have taken with the animals.

“Mustangs are great horses, but they’re different from a domestic horse,” Jim Ogden said. “You get a mustang and they’ve never been handled. It’s not like a domestic horse, that they’re handled from the day they were born.”

“Everything is new,” he said. “They’ve been in the wild. So you have to expose them to as much as you can so that they’re not afraid of it.”

“The biggest thing you need with mustangs is more patience than any other horse,” Maryann Ogden said. Something as small as a bucket out of place can spark fear in these wild animals, whose “fight or flight” instinct is much sharper than in domestic horses, she said.

But, she said, “Once you gain their trust, they’re just amazing.”

Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act in 1971, declaring the animals to be “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” The law gives the federal Bureau of Land Management responsibility to manage and protect herds on nearly 27 million acres of public land across 10 Western states.

That means managing their population. So the BLM annually rounds up hundreds of wild mustangs, holding auctions and other placement events to find homes for them.

Managing the herd is a necessity, Ogden said. “There’s no choice,” he said. “They’re all going to starve to death. There’s just too many.”

The Texas-based nonprofit Mustang Heritage Foundation also promotes adoption of wild horses and burros kept in BLM holding facilities. Its Extreme Mustang Makeover program pairs mustangs with approved trainers, who spend 100 days gentling and training the animals for competitions that demonstrate their skills, with the goal of making the horses more adoptable.

A passion ignited

The Ogdens moved to New Hampshire from their native Massachusetts in 1987. They got a couple of horses of their own, and in 2000, they bought 13 acres in Meredith and built a barn.

Years later, Maryann saw an ad for an Extreme Mustang Makeover competition in Topsfield, Mass. “You should do this,” she told her husband, who by then had become a skilled trainer.

Jim was paired with Damara in the 2015 competition. “She was wild,” he said. “She was very afraid, but she was brave in a way. She would let you do things, but you could see she’d be shaking.”

Ogden learned early on that stroking Damara’s forelock — the part of the mane that falls between her ears — would calm her.

When competition time came, he could tell the mare was nervous. “But she never showed it,” he said.

They placed seventh.

The Ogdens adopted Damara. Their passion for saving wild mustangs was ignited.

“It’s a feeling like no other,” Jim said. “Once you take a horse that is totally afraid of you and afraid of everything, and they learn to trust you and you feel them trust you, it’s just a great feeling.

“You make a bond that’s unbreakable,” he said. “That’s what I love about it.”

In the years since, they have taken in a dozen wild horses and trained other people to work with them and make them feel safe. They launched their nonprofit three years ago, named it after Jim’s first horse, Apache, and they are starting to fundraise.

Now 14, Damara is in prime condition, her once-gray coat and black mane turning white with age.

“She’s a great horse,” Jim Ogden said. “A very sweet horse. Loves everybody.”

The mustangs love the safety they find at the ranch, Maryann Ogden said.

”Every mustang wants to be in his own little space, safe from the night and predators,” she said. “They have their own hay, their own water, and they can lay down.”

A breed apart

Cary Scholtes, interim executive director of the Mustang Heritage Foundation, said the work the Ogdens are doing is critically important. “When someone like the Ogdens can help these horses, get them gentled and into good homes, it gives these horses a better chance at life,” she said.

Scholtes, who has had horses all her life, said mustangs are different.

“The mustangs can really bond with you. It’s unlike anything you can really get with a domestic horse,” she said. “It’s something you don’t really get until it happens to you.”

Approximately 61,000 wild mustangs are currently in BLM holding facilities, and an estimated 83,000 are “on the range,” Scholtes said. The captured horses go through health checks and get microchipped — not an easy task, Scholtes said. “Remember, these guys are wild.”

Kristen Peters, deputy state director of communications for Eastern states at the Bureau of Land Management, said mustangs are “beloved and iconic” animals.

“For many people, they’re that symbol of freedom and that independent spirit that a lot of Americans have,” she said.

The BLM doesn’t keep any horses on public lands in the East, Peters said. “Where we play a role in management of wild horses and burros is that we place them into private care,” she said.

That includes online auctions — “kind of like match.com,” Peters said — and in-person events, including one in Swanzey in April (blm.gov/programs/wild-horse-and-burro/adoption-and-sales/events).

Adoption of wild horses and burros “is helping keep wild herds and their habitat healthy on public lands,” Peters said.

“Adopters find giving a good, forever home to a wild horse or burro is a rewarding experience,” she said. “With kindness and patience, these adaptable animals may be trained for many uses.”

The BLM is “doing the best they can with what they’ve got,” the Mustang Heritage Foundation’s Scholtes said, but there are always more mustangs than there are homes for them.

“It’s going to take a whole lot of people coming up with several different ways to help with the mustang overpopulation out west,” she said.

“And what Jim’s doing is helping,” she said. “One horse at a time.”

Many hands on the reins

It’s been a tough couple of years for the Ogdens.

Jim suffered a stroke in 2021 and spent a month in rehab before coming home, where he had to learn how to walk and talk again. He was just about recovered when when he broke his femur in late 2022 in a fall, he said.

He’s feeling better, he said. “I’m going to ride in the spring.”

Now in their early 70s, the Ogdens depend on a posse of loyal volunteers, who share their passion for saving these wild horses and giving them a chance to succeed.

It seems it’s not only the horses who have found their herd.

Apache Creek is like a family, said volunteer Kateri Bean.

Bean, 28, grew up in New Hampton and started riding horses when she was 5. She dreamed of having a mustang but knew that these horses needed a special kind of handling and care.

Someone in the local horse community gave her advice: “You need to go to Jim. He can help you.”

She met with the Ogdens, and they offered to help her train a mustang if she found the right one.

Bean recently learned that the New Hampshire SPCA in Stratham had a mustang that had been surrendered, and she drove to the Seacoast to see him. “When I met Chief for the first time, I just fell in love with him,” she said.

The horse, who has a white heart on his forehead, responded to her at once.

Captured in Nevada, Chief had been in BLM holding facilities for eight years, then bounced from one owner to another, Bean said. “He’s small, so people wanted him to be a good children’s horse, but he’s actually really wild,” she said.

In the six short weeks since she adopted Chief and moved him to Apache Creek, the horse has made great progress, learning to walk and trot on a lunge line (a long single rein) with Bean’s encouragement. “He’s really bonded with me,” she said. “I’m really happy about it.”

Amazing transformations

Mustangs all have different personalities, and it can take time and patience to gentle them, Jim Ogden said. “I’ve had some of them that were really dangerous and then after working with them, they turned into the sweetest horses,” he said.

When Soleil, a striking palomino, arrived in New Hampshire from Wyoming, “she was untouchable,” volunteer Kateri Bean said. Now Soleil is friendly and sweet-tempered, tossing her blond mane as she greets visitors over the paddock fence.

“She’s very, very pretty, and she knows it,” Bean said with a laugh.

Michelle Myrdek boards her two horses — Sparks, a Belgian cross, and Reed, a striking “leopard Appaloosa” — at the Ogdens’ barn. An experienced horsewoman, she helps train some of the other volunteers to work with the mustangs.

One of Myrdek’s favorites is Lucinda, a skittish mare who is learning to trust.

Maryann Ogden adopted Lucinda in an online auction, sort of by accident.

“She was 12 and had been pulled in by the BLM,” Maryann Ogden said. “Do you know how scary that must be, to be out for 12 years and then to be thrown into a fenced-in area?”

No one had bid on the horse, she said. “It broke my heart.”

So she bid $45 — $10 over the suggested opening bid — “just to try to get some interest from other people, and then forgot about it,” she said.

A month later, Jim got a call: “You won the bid.”

“What bid?” he asked his wife.

“So we took her, “ Maryann said, laughing.

The horse was shipped east from an Illinois holding facility. When the horse trailer arrived in Meredith at night, the driver offered these parting words: “Good luck with this one.”

The first year they had Lucinda, they couldn’t even lead the horse in and out of the barn. “She was so scared,” Maryann said.

They built a chute for the horse to get to a pen outside. Gradually she responded to their gentle care.

Worth the patience

It was dapple-gray Steel who stole the heart of Susan Ford, a volunteer from Center Harbor. “Steel is like my childhood dream,” she said. “A wild horse.”

Ford spent a lot of time with horses when she was younger but had been away from them for a while. After a mutual friend introduced her to Maryann Ogden, she started coming to the barn.

“They are just such welcoming and nice people,” Ford said. “Of course the minute I walked in there, I fell in love with Steel.”

Jim Ogden was paired with Steel in a 2018 Mustang Makeover competition in Texas.

But the horse, he said, “had other things in mind.”

“We never made it. Second day I had him, he kicked me and put me in the hospital for eight days.”

Steel still has a wild side and is quick to bolt if given a chance. But Ford said he’s making progress. She loves “the rebel side of him,” she said.

Jim Ogden said he’s choosy about who can adopt one of his rescued horses. “I just don’t want them to be passed around,” he said. “It takes a certain person to be able to deal with mustangs.

“You have to be careful when you train them that you’re not too hard on them. They’ll just shut down.”

Wild mustangs are worth saving, the Ogdens said.

“They were here before we were,” Maryann said. “And they deserve to enjoy their life, too.”

“They’re America’s horses,” her husband said. “The original American horses out of the wild.

“We can’t let them die out.”

swickham@unionleader.com

To help

For more information about Apache Creek, or to sponsor a mustang, visit: apachecreekmustangs.com.

For more about wild mustangs and efforts to save them, visit blm.gov/whb and mustangheritagefoundation.org.