10/09/2026
🔥 IT IS HARD TO SAVE LIFE - WHY SHOULD YOU READ — OR SHARE — THIS POST?
IF you take your car in, you ask whether the mechanic has done this job before.
You ask whether the parts are real, or rebuilt parts sold at the new price.
IF someone in your family needs surgery, you do not look for the loudest voice in the clinic. You look for the surgeon who has already been in that operating room many times, with those instruments, when it counted.
Nobody calls that bragging. That is due diligence.
Wild horses do not get to choose.
Sadly, they get whoever shows up claiming to speak for them.
So, the question is the same one you would ask about a brake job or a heart transplant.
Do you want the people with the longest press list and the biggest ask — or the person whose qualification was paid for in years on the ground, in fire, in loss, and in a herd that is still alive because he did not leave?
A lot of wild-horse “advocacy” is rebuilt parts at the new price.
Money. Ego. A season. A gather. A slogan. Very little time inside the social field of a living band, where lions still hunt and winter still cuts the count.
William E. Simpson II’s life is the other kind of résumé.
It was not written in a bio paragraph. It was written in the price he paid to stay: twelve years, no season off, on a mountain that burns. A wife who would not abandon the horses. Smoke that took her and took his voice. Nineteen sanctuary horses and sixty-five more pulled off a slaughter truck and walked back into a family structure. A gene pool that was thinning. A herd that still hovers just under two hundred because someone treated genetic depression as a wound, not a talking point.
That is not a trophy wall.
That is the mechanic’s grease. That is the surgeon’s hours.
If you care about America's majestic Wild Horses — not the brand, these sentient beings — you owe them the same standard you would demand for a child on an operating table.
Read what William Simpson II actually did. And yes, we've seen all the documents that support this report.
Then decide who you trust with our treasured wild horses.
The long piece below is that record.
Please SHARE it if you want other people to see the difference before they write another check.
Read on....
William was a man with many lives and options still open to him, he chose the mountain and the Wild Ones.
The longest study of wild horses known to date is what he did with that choice.
👇 Read it. Then, please share it.
━━━━━TWELVE YEARS. NO SEASON OFF. ━━━━
For twelve years, without a season off, William E. Simpson II has lived among a free-roaming herd of cultural-heritage horses on the California–Oregon line.
Not weekends. Not a field season. Twenty-four hours, every day, in a balanced mountain wilderness where lions, bears, and wolves still hunt, and where the only livestock that matter are the horses themselves.
That is the longest study of wild horses known to date — continuous, documented, embedded, put on film, into photographs, and into print — published in New Zealand, Australia’s orbit through the wild-horse press, Germany, France’s Rewilding Europe network, Canada, and the United States.
It cost him almost everything. He stayed.
That staying is the measure. Not the titles. The titles only show what he could have kept doing instead.
━━━━━THE LIFE HE COULD HAVE KEPT ━━━━━━
He was not a tourist who found a hobby.
He was raised a hay-seed on the family ranch south of Grants Pass, FFA Star Green-hand, OSU science major and judo letterman under Sensei Kato — the man who told him, before dying in William’s arms in the dojo, that it is easy to take life and hard to save it.
He left the university, built companies on his own patents, took the America’s Free Enterprise Legend Award, then walked away from six-figure years to captain a Christian medical missionary ship on a stipend.
United States Merchant Marine Officer. Coast Guard–commissioned master of passenger and towing vessels. Commercial-instrument multi-engine airplane and helicopter pilot, turbines. Master SCUBA diver. Field gemologist in the mountains of Brazil. University instructor, University of Hawaii–Maui. More than 150,000 miles at sea. Four years sailing off-shore and two years living off-grid on uninhabited islands with Laura. A written Honolulu-sector Coast Guard commendation for driving his own boat into heavy seas to help the Coast Guard find and pull two men back from the water. Another high-seas rescue in the Sea of Cortez. National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers: highest score they had given, “Best Prepper,” then The Nautical Prepper from Ulysses Press.
That is not a trophy wall.
It is a map of other rooms he could still have walked into — sea, air, classroom, company, ship, island.
Mr. Kato’s sentence was the through-line. In 2014 he spent it on the wild horses.
A mind trained across those disciplines could have chosen almost any hard problem left on the table. He chose a thinning herd on a mountain that burns, and the daily risk that comes with living inside that problem instead of writing about it from town.
━━━━━ THE STUDY SITE ━━━━━
In July 2014 Simpson established Wild Horse Ranch on the edge of the Soda Mountain Wilderness, inside the orbit of the Cascade–Siskiyou National Monument.
The first five-year design was already stated in his 2019 preliminary report: continuous observation, all seasons, day and night, of a herd then about sixty-seven adults on land virtually empty of cattle and sheep.
The site was chosen so impact data would not be scrambled by livestock. Cervids and equids. Predators intact.
Those sixty-seven were already a wound.
In the 1970s the same mountain held more horses. Ranchers had been high-grading the herd — pulling the best animals off the range for profit — a theft California livestock law does not allow. Stray or feral horses cannot be removed without prior written permission of the county agricultural commissioner. The removals happened anyway.
What remained was a smaller herd, made up of several family bands, related too closely. Even by definition in the Bureau of Land Management’s own 'Wild Horse & B***o Management Handbook', the herd was in serious genetic trouble.
Simpson’s science background read the signs: genetic depression had started. Inbreeding is quiet. It does not look like a crime scene. It looks like a herd that will not last.
William and Laura did not write a memo. They rescued nineteen horses of unique genetics from a failing sanctuary and walked them into the existing bands. Outside blood. A recovery, not a restock. The adult count rose toward one hundred.
Then, in 2023 and 2024, sixty-five more wild horses — animals from remote herds already in the slaughter pipeline — were pulled off that conveyor and rewilded into the herd's family structure. Four Warm Springs mares came in those years.
That is the diversity the Bureau of Land Management’s own Handbook for Wild Horse and B***o Management says a herd must have, the same standard Texas A&M geneticist Dr. Gus Cothran has spent a career putting into print.
The mountain did not receive a dump of surplus. It received genes that had been about to vanish into a truck.
By 2026 the same researcher is still there. The herd hovers just under two hundred. The number is not a target. It moves with winter, lion, drought, and foal — Nature’s ledger, the method that kept this continent in balance until European arrival, until cattle, sheep, and goats were poured onto a landscape that had evolved for different herbivores.
Michelle and William are now photographing the twelfth generation born on the same mountain, at Wild Horse Ranch.
Siskiyou County, in March 2022, recognized by letter the ownership and management of that cultural-heritage herd by Simpson, Michelle Gough, and Wild Horse Fire Brigade.
Simpson named his study method after Jane Goodall, in her honor: live inside the social field. Sight, sound, smell. Not a truck window. Not a two-week transect.
The published tallies from the project and its press run to more than 25,000 hours of close observation, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of stills, and hundreds of hours of video.
NPR walked the ground. The Guardian ran the photo essay. CAL STATE Sacramento sent students to live among the band under a multi-year field program — Fellowship of the Wild Horses — the only university course of its kind.
The lineage claim is part of the study, not a slogan. Simpson and Gough compile the Wright family photographs (1911–1957) from Hornbrook and the Collin dissertation on horses Drake recorded on this coast in 1579–1580. Whether every genome in the present band is Ice Age American is a lab question. That these horses have been on this mountain in living memory, and that one man has now studied them through twelve years of births, deaths, bachelor fights, and fire, is not.
━━━━ WHAT THE WORLD ACTUALLY PRINTED ━━━━
This is not a private diary.
Rewilding Europe’s wildfire-grazing journal GrazeLIFE asked for the preliminary study and ran it as an inaugural piece: “Wild Horse Fire Brigade: Lessons in Rebalancing North American Ecosystems by Rewilding Equids.”
That is the European scientific rewilding network, based in the Netherlands, circulating a Siskiyou field study into France and the rest of the EU conversation.
Germany’s Feine Hilfen published the mustang fight as “Der Kampf um Amerikas Mustangs — ein anderer Ansatz.”
New Zealand’s Horsetalk ran Simpson’s “How Wild Horses Deal with Death & Grief” — the dying mare Pixie saying goodbye in front of an Oregon forestry ranger — and the piece broke read-counters.
HorseTalk New Zealand later covered the volunteer music-video award. A New Zealand podcast, The Horse-Human Connection Matrix, devoted an episode to the ranch.
Canada’s Horse-Canada asked whether wild horses can help prevent Western wildfire.
In the United States the list is long and public: NPR, The Guardian (photo essay), Sierra Nevada Ally, Siskiyou News (dozens of bylined pieces), Capital Press, Epoch Times, Arizona Highways, Pagosa Daily Post, Healthy Forests / Healthy Communities, GovTech, and the award-winning micro-documentary Wild Horses. More than 150 articles by Simpson’s own count, two books, network television, Lars Larson, Jefferson Public Radio.
That is the validation the internet actually holds. Not a press release. A paper trail from Wellington to Utrecht to Yreka CA.
━━━━━ THE FIRE THAT TOOK THE REST ━━━━━━━
On July 5, 2018, the Klamathon Fire started off Klamathon and Copco Roads near Hornbrook.
It burned 38,008 acres, killed a civilian, injured three firefighters, and destroyed 82 structures. Official cost exceeded $34.5 million.
Simpson did not leave.
Laura Simpson, his wife of forty-seven years, refused evacuation because she would not abandon the horses she treated as friends.
William served nine days on the Camp Creek line as an unpaid local-knowledge advisor to CAL FIRE Fresno commanders. He photographed the horses grazing in front of the flame front — calm, not bolting — on ground they had already cropped into a roughly 5,000-acre reduced-fuel zone. He says that zone dropped crown fire to a height crews could fight, gave engines a safe pad, and helped keep the burn out of old-growth on the Monument.
Laura took the last photograph of William on that line. She died June of 2019.
The Oregon Medical Examiner, Simpson and later Gough have stated the cause as an autoimmune reaction to novel toxins in the wildfire smoke — not carbon monoxide — after more than a million dollars of care at St. Vincent’s and OHSU.
William kept permanent lung damage from his time serving as a volunteer on the line, from the same deadly plume of wildfire smoke.
He lost the person who started the ranch with him, a heroine in her own right. He lost clean air in his own chest. He did not lose the study.
Michelle Gough came into that wreckage and kept the work standing. The herd is still on the mountain. The twelfth generation is still being born.
━━━━ THE SONGS HE CANNOT SING ━━━━━
The smoke took the voice that would have carried the rest of it.
William still writes. He cannot sing the songs himself.
The same toxic wildfire smoke that killed Laura scarred his lungs and his vocal fold. What you hear on the recordings is his lyric and his arrangement, sounded by a machine because the mountain already took the human instrument.
That is not a gimmick. It is the cost, audible.
Out of the wilderness, the herd, the fire, and the hole Laura left, he built a body of country-western work:
Wild Stallion, Spirit Horse, Copco Road, Torn Apart, Where Wild Horses Say Goodbye, Wild Horse Grift, Tears of a Cowboy, The Last Mustang, Stallion on the Ridge, and Rising Star.
Pixie dying on the range became a ballad.
Copco Road is the road the fire used.
Torn Apart is the essay “Nature and Mankind Torn Apart” set to a melody.
Wild Stallion speaks in the horse’s mouth: two million years on this ground, no cattle bones in the old dirt, still called invasive.
Rising Star is the one where he does not look away.
After Laura passed, he has said, he lost all hope. The personal cost was absolute.
Michelle Gough — Cherokee-Choctaw, science and medicine behind her, six years now on the same mountain — became the light he could still see, a guiding star in his otherwise dark night.
He wrote Rising Star for that turn: the depression after the funeral, and the woman who would not let the study, or the man, go dark.
The song is on the Tears of a Cowboy EP. It is not a press statement. It is a seasoned captain telling the truth in the only register he has left.
He has said the songs are for anyone who has stood in that same weather — widow, widower, burned-out caregiver, anyone who thinks the night will not move.
The horses kept grazing. Michelle stayed. He wrote.
If a stranger in another town hears Rising Star and gets up the next morning, that is part of the study too.
Grief was never off the protocol. It was the weather the twelfth generation was born into.
━━━ WHY CONTINUITY IS THE FINDING ━━━
Most wild-horse “studies” are a gather, a collar, a season, a paper.
Simpson’s design is the opposite: one observer, one herd, one wilderness, no off-switch.
From that design come things a two-week crew cannot publish:
• Bachelor-band fights and the stallions who win breeding rights • Foal deaths to lion and coyote, and a herd that does not explode the way BLM HMAs do
• Grief at a dying mare
• Grazing that is not “overgrazing” when predators and winter still cut the numbers
• Horses that do not panic in a 38,000-acre fire
• A gene pool pulled back from high-grading and slaughter, then left to Nature’s count instead of a helicopter’s
The Klamathon Fire week is the only published, on-the-line documentation of a free-roaming American wild-horse herd under catastrophic fire.
That fact alone would justify the decade. The decade around it is what makes the fire week science instead of a story.
━━━ THE COST WAS THE METHOD ━━━
You cannot embed if you commute. You cannot watch night stalks if you evacuate. You cannot count twelve generations if you sell the ranch after the funeral. You cannot reverse genetic depression from a desk in town.
Simpson paid for the land and the station himself. The 2019 report says so.
The fire took Laura. The smoke took part of his lungs.
Nineteen sanctuary horses, sixty-five slaughter-pipeline horses, and four Warm Springs mares are still on the grass because two people decided a thinning, in**ed remnant was not a finished sentence.
The work continued.
That is the study.
It is in GrazeLIFE, Feine Hilfen, Horsetalk, Horse-Canada, NPR, and The Guardian. It is on the county letterhead in Yreka. It is in the faces of horses who have known one man since 2014. It is in a song a damaged voice cannot perform, written so someone else in the dark might still find a star.
The longest study of wild horses known to date did not happen in a university enclosure. It happened on a mountain that burns, after the person who helped start it was gone, because a merchant captain who had already risked his own life to help save strangers lost heavy seas — and who still had other lives available to him — refused to leave the herd.
🔗 wildhorsefirebrigade.org
SHARE this. The horses are still on the mountain.
━━━ REFERENCES ━━━
Wild Horse Fire Brigade. “Our Herd.” https://www.wildhorsefirebrigade.org/our-herd
Wild Horse Fire Brigade. Facebook biography/resume post, August 24, 2026. https://www.facebook.com/OfficialWHFB/posts/pfbid02xBaRbqte61GK8o6M12BMJX8pZzVKxWXmxr5XzL5LuJ7eMxRKDh7nCNUjhgqeHJGgl
William E. Simpson II. “Impact of Wild Horses on Wilderness Landscape and Wildfire — Preliminary Findings Report.” July 25, 2019.https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/6a30c6_98642a78546849f0a94e2687cdf35654.pdf
GrazeLIFE / Rewilding Europe. “Wild Horse Fire Brigade: Lessons in Rebalancing North American Ecosystems by Rewilding Equids.” https://grazelife.com/blog/wild-horse-fire-brigade-lessons-in-rebalancing-north-american-ecosystems-by-rewilding-equids/
NPR. “Wild horses could help fight wildfire in the west.” October 30, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/30/1131042723/preventing-wildfire-with-the-wild-horse-fire-brigade
Ilie Mitaru. “Are America’s wild horses the answer to wildfires? — a photo essay.” The Guardian, July 27, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/27/are-americas-wild-horses-the-answer-to-wildfires-a-photo-essay-aoe
Pitchstone Waters. “Not Your Ordinary Horse Ranchers.” https://www.pitchstonewaters.com/not-your-ordinary-horse-ranchers/
Pitchstone Waters. “Why Wild Horse Fire Brigade Stands Alone Among Wild Horse Nonprofits.” https://www.pitchstonewaters.com/why-wild-horse-fire-brigade-stands-alone-among-wild-horse-nonprofits/
Sierra Nevada Ally. “Testimony In Support of California’s Assembly Joint Resolution 5 For Wild Horses (AJR-5).” April 21, 2021. https://sierranevadaally.org/2021/04/21/william-e-simpson-iis-testimony-in-support-of-californias-assembly-joint-resolution-resolution-5-ajr-5/
Siskiyou News. “Spain seeks more wild horses, even as U.S. & Australia seek fewer — Why?” July 16, 2023. https://www.siskiyou.news/2023/07/16/spain-seeks-more-wild-horses-even-as-u-s-australia-seek-fewer-why/
Horsetalk (New Zealand). “How Wild Horses Deal with Death & Grief.” July 4, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180704001911/https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2018/07/04/wild-horses-death-grief-insight/
Feine Hilfen (Germany). “Der Kampf um Amerikas Mustangs — ein anderer Ansatz.” https://feinehilfen.com/der-kampf-um-amerikas-mustangs-ein-anderer-ansatz/
Horse-Canada. “Can wild horses help prevent wildfires in the West?” https://horse-canada.com/magazine/equine-welfare/can-wild-horses-help-prevent-wildfires-west/
Arizona Highways. “Horse Sense or Nonsense?” May 2024. https://www.arizonahighways.com/archive/issues/chapter/Doc.1253.Chapter.6
Wikipedia. “Klamathon Fire.” 38,008 acres, July 5–21, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamathon_Fire
Pagosa Daily Post. “OPINION: Wild Horses and Media Missteps.” July 6, 2026. https://pagosadailypost.com/2026/07/06/opinion-wild-horses-and-media-missteps/
Siskiyou News author page. William Simpson II. https://www.siskiyou.news/author/bill-simpson/
Yvette Running Horse Collin. The relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the horse. University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017. https://archive.org/details/collin-y-2017/mode/1up
Bureau of Land Management. Wild Horses and B***os Management Handbook H-4700-1.https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/uploads/Media_Library_BLM_Policy_H-4700-1.pdf
William E. Simpson II. “Rising Star.” Tears of a Cowboy EP. Apple Music, December 10, 2025. https://music.apple.com/us/song/rising-star/1858381787
William E. Simpson II. “WILD STALLION.” YouTube / Wild Horse Fire Brigade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRTVGd5CkxU
William E. Simpson II. “Spirit Horse.” YouTube / Wild Horse Fire Brigade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0gLnoNZVgA
William E. Simpson II. “Torn Apart.” YouTube / Wild Horse Fire Brigade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlBWY_HZIcc
William E. Simpson II. “Where Wild Horses Say Goodbye.” https://www.facebook.com/OfficialWHFB/posts/-special-3-day-music-event-share-widely-share-spirit-horse-with-other-groups-wer/1018975417457029/
Help Alberta Wildies Society Nancy Mace Secretary Kennedy Secretary Doug Burgum
