Wild horses far outnumbered humans on the Outer Banks a century ago. But beyond legends of long-ago Spanish shipwrecks, no one really knows how they got there.
A 1926 article in the National Geographic about the “banker” horses estimated the wild herd numbered 5,000 to 6,000 along the barrier islands.
“Our quest landed us on a naked sun-baked spit, where men were driving the so-called Banker ponies along the beach into a coral made of timbers from old wrecks,” Melville Chater wrote for the magazine. “The United States seemed worlds away. The gates were flung wide, and the herd trotted forth … snorting disapproval of man and his strange ways.”
After years of DNA testing, the Corolla Wild Horse Fund — today’s caretakers of the remaining 100 or so banker horses now roaming the northern Outer Banks — confirmed their lineage, if not exactly how they got here.
Turns out, there’s truth to the legends. DNA shows the modern-day Outer Banks herd is nearly pure colonial Spanish mustang, with the occasional domestic horse — and in one case a donkey — thrown in.
The scientific confirmation has fueled an ongoing effort to separate fact from fiction and uncover the true history of the banker horses, with an eye to protecting the endangered herd’s future.
___
Coastal castaways
The herd’s story likely begins with Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a nobleman and Spanish explorer who attempted to establish a colony in modern-day South Carolina in 1526.
Spanish law then required explorers to bring horses with them to the New World, and Ayllon brought 90 Spanish mustangs when his ships set sail.
He’s believed to have landed at the Cape Fear River, but his first attempt at establishing a colony in the Carolinas was ultimately unsuccessful. Disease plagued the colony and the settlers abandoned the fort, leaving behind 80 to 100 horses that eventually spread along the barrier islands of North Carolina and Virginia, according to the Corolla Wild Horse Fund.
Researchers also found possible evidence of the horses’ history in the vessel logs of Englishman Richard Grenville’s trade expeditions to Virginia and the Outer Banks, particularly a voyage in 1585.
The fleet was damaged and forced to stop in Puerto Rico, “where ship logs indicate various livestock were purchased from the Spanish, including stallions and mares, along with saddles and bridles,” the fund writes on its website.
The largest ship in the fleet was too big to enter the shallow water of the Roanoke Sound and anchored in the Atlantic, but sustained heavy damage in the Outer Banks’ famed rough waters. The livestock aboard likely swam ashore or drowned.
Later, in the mid-1600s, political instability led to horses escaping from Spanish breeding ranches in the southeast, further populating the coastal areas.
Today’s banker horses inherited the resilience of their ancestors, and are noted for their sturdy build and ability to endure harsh conditions.
“They are capable of great endurance of labor and hardship, and live so roughly that any others from abroad seldom live a year on such food and other such great exposure,” historian Edmund Ruffin wrote in his 1856 book “Sketches of Lower North Carolina, and the Similar Adjacent Lands.”
___
Pieces to a puzzle
Science may have validated their heritage, but the story of how the wild horses survived 500 years on the windswept coast, and what their future holds, is still unfolding.
Blood sampling of the herd began in 1993, when the horses still roamed the paved areas of Duck and Corolla and often came in conflict with humans. Today, all horses taken off the beach for illness, injury or old age go to the fund’s 30-acre rescue farm in mainland Currituck County, where DNA samples are taken.
In 2020, the fund began collecting samples from the free-roaming horses, a project that continues today, with caretakers using a dart gun to take tissue for testing.
To date, the Corolla Wild Horse Fund’s DNA project has 166 horse records on file, with 122 partial pedigrees and 44 full pedigrees. A full pedigree means a geneticist has verified both mother and father.
But confirming pedigree isn’t always straightforward, and that’s where old photos can help, or mislead, when trying to put the puzzle pieces together, said Meg Puckett, the Corolla Wild Horse Fund’s herd manager.
The fund has collected decades of photographs in a huge genealogy binder that helps narrow who might be related, but that’s not enough to confirm lineage.
Take the case of an older mare named Bonita. Her parents were confirmed to be Taka and Tyrone. But there are photos of young Bonita nursing from a wild mare who was “definitely not Taka,” Puckett said.
“The photographs and other archival records are incredibly important and have helped us tremendously in identifying many of these possible relationships, but at the end of the day only the DNA can say for sure who is related to who,” she said.
Late last year into early this year, the DNA project “really began to come together” in establishing the ancestry and lineages in the endangered herd, she said. Now caretakers are working on another piece of the puzzle, developing a breed standard, starting with measurements of the horses at the rescue farm.
___
‘The future is not guaranteed’
Riptide, a 6-year-old wild horse taken off the beach due to an infection a few years ago, has already given a DNA sample and recently tolerated caretakers taking measurements at the farm.
Though no longer contributing to the population of the banker horses, he’s helping define his breed and forge a path in the future.
“We’re really building history back,” Puckett said. “The future is not guaranteed. If we have all of this, we have breed registry beginnings.”
A breed standard defines the ideal in looks and behavior and identifies size range, colors, how the animal should move, conformation and temperament.
Puckett said caretakers hope to put together a range of common physical characteristics for the breed that, when combined with research in genetics and ancestry, “will help define exactly what a Corolla Banker is and provide a blueprint for purposeful, responsible conservation breeding in the future.”
In the office at the fund’s rescue farm, there’s an incomplete family tree on the wall connecting the horses’ ancestry for decades, while Puckett’s office holds the giant genealogy binder. Today, only about 100 wild mustangs remain of the 5,000 to 6,000 wild horses mentioned by National Geographic in the late 1920s.
At the farm, 20 formerly wild mustangs are living out their days in comfort while helping researchers unravel the mysteries of the past.
“Even though they are no longer wild they are still serving a very important role in the work that we’re doing to protect and preserve this endangered breed,” Puckett said.
Kari Pugh, a former editor at The Virginian-Pilot, lives on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
___
Respect the herd
Keep your distance: Getting within 50 feet of wild horses on the Outer Banks is punishable by law. Cruelty, enticing, harboring, luring, seizing, and failure to report injury are unlawful, according to the Wild Horse Ordinance of Currituck County.
Human food can be deadly: It is illegal to feed the wild horses. Their specialized diet includes only native plants and grasses. Even food that domestic horses can usually tolerate, such as apples and carrots, can be harmful, and over the years several horses have died as a result of being fed by humans.
