“I’m a learning junkie,” says Elisa Wilson, local mustang trainer who resides on a 40-acre off-grid property in Kila. It sounds like a real positive until she and her husband found themselves in the empty-nester portion of life and Elisa decided to get into horses. “I’m doing horses,” she says, and quickly follows up with “My husband wasn’t thrilled but I said, ‘You don’t really have a choice.’”
Like learning any new hobby or skill, Elisa had to get her hands dirty and submerge herself deep into the experience of horses—particularly mustangs, which is a lot like taking up shark diving for someone who has never been in the ocean. Mustangs are wild, meaning not just untrained but unhandled, too. They live like the flight animals that they are, constantly aware of their surroundings and as wild as any deer you’d see in a meadow. The challenge excited Elisa. “If they can do it, so can I,” she says after watching “Wild Horse, Wild Ride,” a documentary that follows an annual contest where 100 people tame a completely wild mustang in order to get it adopted and into a better life beyond holding pens across the nation.
For those who have never came across any information on wild horses being managed by the government, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) conducts routine roundups of these majestic animals in an effort to maintain a healthy animal to grazing land balance. For 17 years, the Trainer Incentive Program (TIP) was operated through a partnership between the BLM and the Mustang Heritage Foundation. That program concluded in autumn of 2023, which shifted the focus to more public online auctions rather than smaller in-person corrals where more horse-educated individuals would take one or a few home to train them for eventual adoption or sale.
Elisa was a TIP trainer for a brief time during the program’s stint but her work with mustangs started with a competition called Mustang Million—a five-day horse training competition held in Fort Worth, Texas where each contestant picks out their own mustang and has 120 days to work with it and bring it to Texas to compete.
“I didn’t know anything about wild horses,” says Elisa. “I signed up, even though I didn’t have any chance at winning—that wasn’t what it was about. I drove down to Texas, 2,000 miles each way, had a blast and met so many people and that’s sort of when I was hooked into the mustang community.” Today, Elisa’s early connections have withstood the test of time. This summer she welcomed back Mark Lyon to her farm for the fifth time to offer private lessons to those in the surrounding area. “People just show up—we’ve done liberty and colt starting, and the rest of the time we just play with horses…I’m just always trying to find different people.” Learning is a lifelong endeavor for Elisa, and she talks about the stigma that comes from horsemen and women having to “know it all.” It’s often better to admit that we are all still students in life.
Elisa picked her first mustang out from a pen in Oregon—a grey whom she named Mr. Knightly. Out of hundreds, this one kept curiously coming up to her. She dressed up as Emma and he was himself—Mr. Knightly, complete with a bowtie. They danced in the competition’s freestyle. “I had never shown a horse before in my life and here I was at Mustang Million and just having fun,” says Elisa. “I was just happy to show up.”
She’s helped countless people with their horses, whether it’s gentling or saddle training them, or even taking them back when someone else didn’t estimate the commitment or investment needed to work with these animals. Today, she reflects on the adventure she’s taken herself on, and the many horses that led the way, especially Mr. Knightly. “He’s such a good boy. He’s so light, you can ride him bridleless and he knows me and I know him.”
“I signed up, even though I didn’t have any chance at winning."