Equine Companionship and the Multispecies Construction of Wilderness

This essay on equine companionship in the performance of wilderness is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

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As the summer heat descends into the Willamette Valley, I escape into the cooler reaches of the Cascade Mountains. I can be found riding up the trail into the Oregon wilderness, often with a pack horse trailing behind me. We climb together, working as a four-legged creature engaged in what Kirrilly Thompson calls “centaurability.” In relationship with one another, we work to become a centaur, feeling each other’s concerns and needs, moving as if with one body.  

In personal companionship with a horse, I participate in an enduring entanglement between human and equine beings. Horses and humans have shaped one another into companion species, transforming both in a set of relations not unlike human entanglements with dogs—Donna Haraway’s influential example of companion species. Humans have long influenced horse evolution through selective breeding practices and continue to shape the species today. And, as co-created species that co-evolved alongside one another, horses have shaped us in return.

Horses have repeatedly transformed human civilization, providing the literal “horsepower” of historical development projects. While most often view such projects as belonging to the past, horsepower persists today. As we venture together into Oregon Wilderness Areas, the pack horse carries both recreational supplies like food and camping equipment and, for many trips, vintage six and seven foot crosscut saws, salvaged from barns and estate sales and refurbished.  

Up in wilderness areas, Forest Service workers keep the trail looking like a trail. As old giants of the forest fall across the path, we stop, tie up the horses, pull out the crosscuts, and get to work. We saw the fallen logs using old techniques and move them from the trail. When thru-hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail pass us, they typically thank us. But we also field questions:  

“Why do you use those old saws? Wouldn’t a chainsaw be easier?” 

Of course it would be easier, but this is a wilderness area, and we are performing wilderness.  

The Wilderness Act

Most Forest Service employees and trail volunteers will not tell you that they are “performing” wilderness. Instead, if asked to explain their use of antique equipment, they might point to the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the guidelines that govern activities in wilderness areas. This act prohibits the use of both motor vehicles and motorized equipment, forbidding more convenient options for trail maintenance.  

At the time of its creation, the Wilderness Act was concerned with the possibility of human development spreading and modifying all areas of the country. In response, it sought to preserve lands “in their natural condition” for the future “enjoyment” of “the wilderness character.” 

Wilderness areas, as designated by this act, are commonly envisioned as the last vestiges of a “lost world.” In the popular imaginary, “the wilderness” is those places that remain untouched by humanity. They are protected for their purity and prized as places of escape. People retreat to wilderness areas. They camp and hike throughout these protected spaces to find a world untouched by humans or to reconnect with a natural world absent from urban spaces. 

This vision of wilderness as pure untouched land is, however, broadly inaccurate. As William Cronon argues, the concept of wilderness as an independent natural form is plagued by a series of contradictions. Rather, wilderness is inherently historical.

The idea of wilderness as an Edenic space unmarred by development and industry was constructed. It is a concept borne of specific historical circumstances—namely, the settler colonialist attempt to empty the North American continent of Indigenous peoples and instead occupy it with settlers. The vision of an “uninhabited wilderness” cannot exist without both the systematic removal of Indigenous peoples and the intentional naturalization of Indigenous “disappearance.”  

For Cronon, defining wilderness as the opposite of human-created civilization creates a logical paradox that collapses under its own weight. If the wilderness is a space of nature entirely untouched by humans, our very presence within wilderness areas fundamentally undermines them. Further still, the very mention of Indigenous histories creates a dissonance with the idea of wilderness—a dissonance that is often resolved either through erasure or by relegating Indigenous people to a less-than-human status as part of nature itself.  

Historical Re-enactment on Horseback

Our volunteer labor—mine as a sawyer and the horses’ as packers—is always situated within this history, and often draws upon historical practices within wilderness areas. Because wilderness areas prohibit mechanized equipment, we use non-mechanized tools and protocols. Horses, mules, and other pack animals are frequent co-laborers in this project. Rather than vehicles, we traverse on hoof; rather than chainsaws, we carry crosscuts.  

One frequent follow-up question that we receive after explaining that chainsaws are banned in wilderness areas is, “Oh, so it’s to prevent fires from chainsaws?” 

Counterintuitively, no. The prohibitions against motorized equipment were not originally created for the prevention of wildfires—although they would have aligned with the colonial regime of fire exclusion that erases Indigenous practices and that is currently under question. Rather, they are concerned with “the preservation of their wilderness character” for people experiencing the wilderness areas. The Wilderness Act seeks to maintain lands where “the imprint of man’s work [is] substantially unnoticeable,” including the intrusive noises of mechanized equipment.  

Mechanical vehicles are prohibited for this same reason; they interrupt the experience of “wilderness.” However, some particular signs of human presence are accepted and even celebrated. The presence of horses is one such sign.  

Horses, and their humans, do not disrupt the vision of wilderness areas because the experience of wilderness is not merely the fantasy of encountering a space untouched by human presence—this worldview would disallow the trails we maintain. Rather, the aim is to experience the land as aligned with a nostalgic historical impression of the encounter of the frontier.  

Horses cast a long shadow as a companion species, particularly in the American imagination. Horses made possible the expansion of empires, enabling transportation for both trade and violence. The historical presence of horses and humans are particularly salient in visions of the American West, where horses were a widely recognized part of the contested frontier.  

In encountering wilderness areas, myself and other visitors are not passively experiencing a natural world “out there.” Instead, through our actions and practices in wilderness area, we co-create these landscapes as wilderness. Rather than a place, wilderness is a set of embodied relations with which multiple species engage: horses, humans, trees, shrubs, grasses, and the multitude of others that are impacted by management choices made on stolen land.  

As an embodied practice, trail maintenance in wilderness areas reenacts historical methods through multiple avenues and motivations. In areas without roads, horses and mules are both a vision of those historical methods and a practical way to transport equipment. In my work with the Forest Service, we have transported far more than crosscut saws across wilderness areas. We have also hauled gallons of live fish, destined for small mountain ponds; broken rafts, abandoned in a river accumulating trash; and scientific equipment, utilized by ecologists in remote areas, all on the back of a horse.  

Similarly, the use of vintage crosscut saws emerges at the nexus of historical idealization and practicality. With chainsaws disallowed, long crosscut saws are the most effective way to cut through the large logs—often in excess of fifteen inches in diameter—that fall across the trail. Old crosscut saws, scavenged from estate sales and old barns, are therefore the preferred tool for trail volunteers.  

Vintage crosscut saws were made differently, and many trail workers assert that modern saws cannot compare. Modern saws are cut from a single piece of metal, resulting in a stiff saw that is the same width at the top edge and at the cutting edge. In contrast, vintage saws were crafted such that the top edge is narrower than the cutting edge, vital for preventing the saw from becoming stuck as a you cut a large log – a problem known as “bind.” A vintage saw is thus easier to use than a modern saw.  

Additionally, modern crosscut saws are fundamentally anti-horse. Their stiff metal prevents them from bending to be carried on horseback, snapping rather than shaping to the curve of a horse’s back. Engaging in trail maintenance as a project of companion species requires the usage of old tools and old practices.  

Yet embodying the wilderness in this way is in often a fight against time. My friends in Back Country Horsemen of Oregon worry about their aging saw-sharpener, a man practicing a nearly lost art. They send anyone with interest to his workshops to learn the craft, hoping to conserve the knowledge that enables this maintenance work. 

Wilderness as Multispecies Performance

When I first moved to Oregon for my graduate program, I was amazed at the amount of public land and my broad access to it. Having grown up in a state with a very low percentage of public land and even less land open to public use, I was enticed by the Cascade Mountains and the forests that lingered persistently outside my door. It was not long before I found myself more deeply entangled in public lands and their management, my own hands working to shape the landscape.  

I began this work, as many do, uncritically. I celebrated the experience of laboring to maintain trails and wilderness areas, as well as the opportunity to share the work with my equine friends. Yet the more I have learned and worked with horses in wilderness trail maintenance, the more I have come to recognize the performativity of our actions. There is nothing natural about the “wilderness” I help to maintain.  

Judith Butler describes a theory of performativity in which gender is established by repeatedly enacting cultural practices of gender. In this context, gender is not a stable noun but rather a set of expressions that perform, and therefore construct, gender.  

Similarly, I came to know wilderness not as a noun but as a set of embodied practices. When I ride out onto the trail on horseback, ponying behind me a pack horse with a vintage crosscut saw slung over his back, I (and the horses with me) enact an understanding of wilderness with our bodies. We engage in a performance that creates the very thing that we are experiencing—a colonial land regime of wilderness.  

Angenette Spalink similarly considers how virtual presentations of National Parks constitute a performance of ideas about wilderness. Yet performance is not limited to that which is recorded and disseminated; the same concepts of wilderness are performed on the land itself, impacting all the species that live on it.  

The body of wilderness is far reaching, covering large swathes of land, all the beings that live on that land, and the interactions that happen within it. For this reason, wilderness is not performed by humans alone, but instead within companion species relationships. In particular, horses are an integral part of performing wilderness.  

With their bodies, horses help humans enact a series of relationships to the land many understand as wilderness. Their hooves compact the ground of the trail into a solid path that leads us through the wilderness. They graze upon the plants alongside this trail, keeping the trail visible. And, when off-trail, their movements are far less visible than the motor vehicles that elsewhere replace them.  

Horses in the “wilderness” help illustrate that companion species are about far more than companionship, and about more than a distinct relationship between two species. Through the unique entanglement of horses and humans, broad networks of relationships among many species are impacted and transformed.  

While we may typically understand wilderness as a category of protection and conservation, the embodied relationships between horses and humans in wilderness areas reveal how contingent wilderness really is. “Wilderness” does not exist beyond humans. With horses by our sides, we engage in an embodied performance, bringing wilderness into existence. This perspective—assessing a fallen log from between a horse’s ears and determining how best to re-establish a traversable path—helps us see how the seemingly-static wilderness can and must be transformed.  

Currently, the Northwest Forest Plan is under revision, and the Just Futures Collaborative is working to increase Tribal sovereignty and decision-making power in the updated plan. As potential change comes to wilderness areas, those of us connected to them must remember that wilderness is dynamic. Nothing is inevitable about wilderness—and new relations of equine companionship will be performed and created in these changing forests.  

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Featured image: Two people ride on horseback on the Bradley Fork Trail in Great Smokey Mountains National Park. Photo by the NPS, 2022.

Kathleen Gekiere is an interdisciplinary PhD student in Environmental Studies and English at the University of Oregon. Their interests include relationships with other-than-human beings, speculative futurity, multispecies becoming, and feminist science and technology studies. They currently study wild horses in the American West, and their dissertation is tentatively titled “Chasing Wild Horses: A Discursive Analysis of Management and Care.” Contact.