The practice of adopting a Bureau of Land Management mustang, by necessity, involves relying heavily on gut instinct. There are no birth certificates or breeding lines. There’s no list of vices. There’s no filter for experience; there’s little human contact at all for the thousands of horses in BLM holding corrals across the West. Just horse after horse with an estimated age and a few images captured in a fearful moment. 

Instead, people glean what they can from the smallest signs. Is that a scar or a shadow? Did the horse look sound in that 30-second clip? Is this the eye of a reactive horse, or the eye of an animal seeing humans for the first time? Of all the bay mares, is there something special about this bay mare? 

The uncertainty—and potential of the unknown—is what attracted Megan Weber to her mustang search. When the then 19-year-old eventer was shopping for her first mustang in 2019, she spent days online scrolling, waiting for a horse to give her a feeling she couldn’t deny. She planned to visit the BLM corral in Burns, Oregon, with a friend, where they would view the mustangs only at a distance and each choose one to bring back home to Carnation, Washington. 

“For I don’t know, a month maybe, I was just scrolling through photos,” Weber said. “I found this one horse that really stood out to me for some reason.”

She knew nothing about the horse, except for its markings, which she hoped would help her recognize it on sight. Weber arrived at the corral with an open mind, but couldn’t stop thinking about that one chestnut with the blaze and four white legs. After two days of studying the animals in holding, she thought she’d found her gelding. 

“Because they had mud up to their knees, you couldn’t really tell the leg markings,” she said. “But we had gotten one up to the chutes to have a look at him and got him in a separate paddock with two other horses. I thought, ‘For some reason, this is the one that’s calling to me.’ ”

After a harrowing journey home (Weber now can tell you what it’s like to change a flat on a trailer carrying two wild horses) her 4-year-old gelding began to settle in. And as the grime of the corrals faded, Weber was surprised to find that this chestnut had only two white legs; he wasn’t the horse she’d seen online. 

But looking back, the “wrong horse” wasn’t wrong at all. Weber is now grateful to the white-legged mystery horse who drew her to the gelding she did bring home, the horse she would name WS Remington (the “WS” is an homage to his herd area, Warm Springs), and whom she would train to be her trusted eventing partner. Five years later, she can say with certainty that the instinct to take this particular horse home, muddied markings and all, was the right one.  

Today Weber, 24, knows “Remi” inside and out and trusts the once wild gelding not only to take her around training level cross-country courses, but to safely pack around friends—and her mother, Shelly Weber, who’s taken up riding more seriously since being inspired by her daughter’s journey. 

“I feel like we’re such a great team,” Megan said. “We can read each other’s minds a little bit.”

Going Green
Megan began riding at age 10 with a natural horsemanship trainer and found her way to eventing as a teen. She’d had a horse lined up as her next project, but when the sale fell through, she decided to fulfill her dream of bringing along a young horse. A good friend, Lani Salisbury, had trained a few mustangs, and Megan became curious about the process that would eventually lead her to adopt Remi. 

“I ended up trying this one horse who was more green, and I really liked the idea of having a greener horse to work with and kind of build the relationship and train them up a little bit,” she said. “I really wanted to do a green horse, and I knew that Lani would support me if I were to go the mustang route. We ended up making it work and haven’t looked back since.”

Megan knew that while her own interest was in eventing, there were no guarantees that Remi would enjoy the sport. 

“I knew going in, it was going to be kind of a crapshoot,” Megan said. “I was like, if the horse wants to jump, cool; if not, I still have a horse in the end. It wasn’t really my end goal to do eventing. I just really wanted to do the process and have this horse that I can just have for whatever he wants to do—whatever I want to do. I didn’t really have a super set goal. In the end, it just turned out that he really loved eventing.”

For Megan to take Remi from unhandled feral horse to a dependable eventing mount, she would have to start where all mustang owners begin: by removing the BLM identification tag around his neck and haltering the horse for the first time. 

“I think it took us maybe two weeks to get a halter on him. It took me about a week to get his tag off,” Megan said. “He was pretty shut down. It was a lot of one-step-forward, three-steps-back with him for the first few weeks. We just did a lot of hanging out with him, sharing space and just being patient.” 

Over the next few months, Weber and her trainer took their time getting Remi gentled “at his speed.” There was no secret to winning over the gelding—just time and patience.

“Once he decided that we weren’t going to hurt him, and that he could trust us, everything went uphill from there,” she said. “He never did anything negative. He just was very stuck in his shell, unfortunately, until we were able to convince him that we were OK.”

Because they had spent time building trust, Remi’s first ride was uneventful. Weber remembers sliding onto a bareback pad and quietly asking the horse for a walk, then a trot.

“He was perfect. I look back at the videos, and I’m like, ‘He should have bucked me off. He should have killed me,’ ” she said. “He was a little confused, but he was pretty perfect. I couldn’t have asked for anything else from him.”

Weber’s trainer put 100 days of training on Remi and, together, they introduced him to trail riding and small jumps, doing “normal horse things,” then slowly introducing him to cross-country. Now, she calls Remi a “freight train” on the cross-country course. He wants to jump everything—occasionally even the jumps that aren’t on their course. But back then, he was skeptical of nearly every obstacle. 

“It took me a solid year, maybe two years, of him stopping at every single jump I put him at the first time, before he would have the confidence in me and in himself that he could go over the jump,” Weber said. “So it really was the last two or three years where our jumping has progressed.”

These days, Weber works as a groom for her trainer, Sarah Song Sullivan of Freedom Run Eventing in Snohomish, Washington. This June at Aspen Farm Horse Trials (Washington), Remi and Weber jumped a double clear cross-country round to place fifth in their amateur training division.

Megan shares her experiences with Remi, including GoPro footage, to thousands of followers of her TikTok, @eventingmustang. But she also enjoys the on-the-ground experience where Remi can be an ambassador for mustangs at events. 

“He has a little fan club; wherever I go, people are always like, ‘Oh, there’s Remi! I see him!’ ” Megan said. “I just love it because I think he deserves it. I am just the rider; I’m just here to show him off. It is all him.”

‘Mustangs Aren’t Made To Jump’
Following her experience with Remi, Megan was hungry to go through the process of gentling and training a mustang again. In 2021, she applied to the Mustang Yearlings Washington Youth program, a mustang makeover where contestants are given a mustang to train over a 100-day period before the horses are auctioned off at the final competition.

As Megan drove her newly assigned 2-year-old colt back to her property, a wild animal scurried across the road, and she knew she had her horse’s name: Badger. At the time, she didn’t know how fitting the name would be for the cheeky black gelding. As she brought him along, Megan fell in love with his charming troublemaker personality. The gelding was a stark difference from Remi in his first few weeks with people. 

“He picked up on things so fast,” Megan said of Badger’s early training. “But he also had a lot more personality than Remi did at the beginning, so he was a lot more reactive to things.” 

About halfway through the training challenge, her family decided that Badger would stay. It was Megan’s non-horsey dad, Steve Weber, who couldn’t see the young horse go to another owner. 

“[Badger] was like a giant puppy dog, and my dad was convinced that this horse was going to be very special,” she said.

Badger is now 6 years old and has followed Remi’s example on cross-country. He’s been going around beginner novice courses with a friend, since Weber is off with a shoulder injury. 

“​​He’s very capable of doing more and I think he likes it. He likes the challenge,” she said. “It’s just about keeping his little mind busy.” 

And as for Remi and Badger, the geldings might have been displaced from their original herds, but the two are quite at home with each other. 

“They’re very much brothers. They used to live out in a pasture together 24/7, and they would take their morning naps together and would always hang out with each other,” she said. “They’re pretty content with each other, and I definitely feel like they have a little brotherly connection.” 

Now that Megan has had these two very different, but positive, training experiences, she’s all in on mustangs. 

“Personally, I can’t see myself not riding a mustang now that I’ve gone through this process. There’s just something so rewarding about the whole process,” she said. “Getting a horse, especially the horses that have had no positive human contact, and to take them and now showing—at least one of them—at training level is really rewarding to me. 

“I’m to the point where I don’t care if I don’t go prelim, or if I have a really fancy horse,” she continued. “I just love the fact that I’m able to show that these horses are capable of doing this, because I was always told that he’s not going to be able to do more than beginner novice, and, ‘Mustangs aren’t made to jump.’ ”