Horses Don’t Stop

They say the ponies first came ashore from a shipwrecked Spanish galleon. An accidental baptism via shoal and brine. No one really knows for sure — they’ve been there as long as anyone remembers. But in a near-restaging of their origin story, thousands assemble each July to watch them swim across the narrow channel between the Assateague and Chincoteague islands. 

Assateague is a 37-mile, uninhabited barrier island split by the Maryland–Virginia line. Chincoteague (the town and the island) sits just across the Assateague Channel, between the barrier island and Virginia’s Eastern Shore. 

With Marguerite Henry’s children’s book Misty of Chincoteague (1947), the local shipwreck legend became a national myth. The titular Misty, a real palomino pinto bought by Henry from the Beebe ranch in 1946, found pony girls everywhere. For the next decade, pony and author went on book tours and performed in horse shows. Attendance at the annual Pony Penning Week multiplied: Misty became its unofficial gospel. I couldn’t remember which grandmother gave me the book. Not Misty but its sequel, Sea Star, Orphan of Chincoteague. My glamorous Grammy read it to me when I was a kid, and I assumed it came from her. But when I asked my mom, she said it came from my Nana, who rode as a girl and once hauled their family to rainy Assateague for a pony picnic. Both felt true.

As Tim Ingold writes, “Human beings are unique among living creatures in the extent to which they have the capacity to enroll other kinds into their own life.”¹ State lines divide Assateague’s ponies: Maryland’s are managed by the National Park Service, Virginia’s owned by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company and grazed under a permit.² On federal land, horses are colloquially “wild” and legally “feral.” This classification justifies intervention, unsettling the fantasy that we can cleanly fold other creatures into our rhythms.

Equids evolved in North America but died out in the late Pleistocene (the last Ice Age). In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the Spanish, and later the English, brought them back via Caribbean and coastal landings. Unwittingly, the colonists were responsible for the species’ reintroduction: a feral ecology that quickly escaped the bounds of human jurisdiction.³ Given a second chance, horses took again to our geography, from islanded Eastern Shore marshlands to the desolate deserts and open range of the West. Most free-roaming horses on the United States mainland are federally managed under the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. They’re feral, too: “wild” here, as in Chincoteague, is mostly a feeling. Is it a mistake to conflate survival with miracle? 

Monday: Beach Walk

I drive in the dark through cornfields, wooded acreage, and small towns planned around the Eastern Shore Railroad. Signs promise world-famous seafood, antiques, and a NASA flight facility. On the causeway, traffic stalls. I roll down my windows, floored by the warmth of the air, the sunrise over the marsh, and the loblolly pines stretching up. Brake lights span the Chincoteague Bay. Eight miles in two hours. On the north end of Chincoteague, weathered houses sag in the cordgrass as if out of Misty and Sea Star. Along the main drag, vacation rentals and pony flourishes: iron silhouettes on gates, rearing statues, grazing murals. Sandy Pony Donuts. Then, just before the bridge to the refuge, McDonald’s.

At the Pony Walk. The crowd pools. I note T-shirts: VIRGINIA IS FOR PONY LOVERS 100th Annual Chincoteague Wild Pony Roundup & Swim | 1925–2025 | THE TRADITION CONTINUES…

A panicked foal has run ahead. It gallops between people and sea. “She’s putting on a show for us!” Lenses lift. Saltwater Cowboys charge. The pony jumps a barrier of orange plastic mesh and disappears. 

The rest stream down the beach against a huge morning sky. Dwarfed by the Cowboys’ full-size horses, they pass in a rush: chestnut bay palomino pinto buckskin black. They’re gone before we can take them in. (The stray foal, of course, is caught, but not until the next day. I learn from a Facebook Reel that he has been reunited with his mom, Taco.)⁴

In the 1920s, two fires tore through Chincoteague’s Main Street. Dead broke, the newly formed Fire Company improvised a fundraising solution: round up the herd of wild horses, stage a swim, hold a carnival, auction the foals. The founding members of the Fire Company became the Saltwater Cowboys, pledging proceeds to fire equipment and veterinary care. Pony Penning Week is still volunteer-run, now in its fifth generation of Cowboy (and girl) stewardship.

Chincoteague and Assateague sit within the ancestral homelands of Eastern Shore Algonquian peoples, including Nanticoke and Assateague groups. The islands were used seasonally for shellfish and fishing, with year-round villages on the more agriculturally hospitable mainland of what is now Virginia and Maryland. Popular lore translates “Chincoteague” as “beautiful land across the water,” but a local historian traces it to an Algonquian term meaning “large stream” or “inlet.”

Before ponies, oysters: Chincoteague the town has been a watermen’s hub for centuries. Despite Virginia’s secession during the Civil War, Chincoteague chose to remain with the Union. The island is proud of this: an economic calculation necessary for maintaining relationships with seafood markets in Philadelphia and New York. When overharvest, oyster disease, and shifting demand gutted seafood, most Eastern Shore towns flailed. Pony tourism sustained Chincoteague.

The Virginia herd has been capped at 150. In the ’60s, wildfowl game conservation efforts almost pushed them out. Federal refuge managers blamed ponies for the degradation of migratory bird habitats: herd sizes and grazing zones came under scrutiny. In a compromise with the state, Cowboys select buybacks to live out their lives on Assateague, but most foals are sold to private owners. The auction controls the population and preserves bloodlines.

In town you can get a spiral-bound guide to the ponies, catalogued by name and lineage. This information is also available at chincoteaguepedigrees.com. Surfer Dude (1997–2015), the most beloved Chincoteague stallion in recent memory, was a flaxen chestnut, part Mustang, with one blue eye, one brown. He passed his glint-eyed defiance to more than a hundred foals.

Wednesday: Swim

For the centennial swim, Chincoteague swells from 3,000 to 50,000. Municipal lots fill at dawn and residents sell spots in their yards. Savvy visitors line Pony Swim Lane with camp chairs the night before, or reserve seats on boats months in advance. I meet a woman who is a ten-time visitor, first-time pontoon passenger. She’s getting divorced: the $400 pontoon spot is a gift to herself. The intrepid brave the marsh, coated in DEET and galoshes, staking their spots early. Toddlers and stragglers in Veteran’s Memorial Park watch the Jumbotron. We wait for slack tide, when the swim is safest. 

In the book, Misty starts to cross the water, but is so small that a whirlpool pulls her under. Paul Beebe dives and swims alongside the foal, keeping her head afloat until they make it to the other side. In a hundred years, not a single pony has drowned, thanks to the Cowboys…and perhaps the horses’ own aquatic inclinations. During the rest of the year, bands are spotted cooling off in the water along Assateague’s beaches. They say Surfer Dude’s herd even swam the Assateague Channel on its own more than once. (Riptide, his successor, was trailered over to the swim in advance. He doesn’t play well with others.)

From the opposite shore, we watch the ponies wade in the shallows down the marsh. Then whips crack. They plunge. The crowd erupts, then settles. As if by memory the horses surge in clusters, heads breaking the water.

In the quiet, their breath is loud on the surface. Beside me someone murmurs, “It sounds like a train.” Formations shift, punctuated by whistles and the Cowboys’ hey hey hey hey, a simple chant to urge them on. In the swell and murk they are water horses, borderline hippocamps. An older gentleman tells me that when he was a kid, he heard the ponies only eat fish. I almost believe him. The spell breaks with the first foal ashore: a bay colt, #36, crowned King Neptune, to be raffled off tomorrow. Amid the cheers, the rest emerge unfazed. The swim is over in five minutes.

After an hour of rest, the herd and the Cowboys parade down Main Street. Stocky, with bellies distended from salty diets and varied coats wet with saline, they appear less like cryptids and more like horses.

At the carnival grounds, speakers blare: oyster fritters, good for lunch or dinner. Funnel cakes, always. Hand-painted stalls advertise pony games and prizes. The real Misty never swam or sang, but children clutch her plush descendants who claim to do both. (At the island museum, Misty is bloated and lumpy; her taxidermied form came from a cow.)

In the corral, a hundred foals cluster near their mothers. Stallions regroup their bands. Most drop their heads to the hay. In this reprieve from the week’s choreography, the ponies are real to us. Their wildness, subdued to a suggestion, is compelling. Along the fence, people note their favorite foals, saying “I need him.” They need the Cowboys, too. On the Chincoteague Facebook page, a new thread forms: which Cowboys are single?

I want to know the town and its memory of itself. The language everywhere is moral: save, rescue, steward, protect, love. The Saltwater Cowboys play two characters: the cowhand and the public servant. They claim theirs is the best-treated “wild” herd in the United States. Throughout the year, even small signs of injury and illness are grounds for a roundup and a vet exam. When Foal #84 was born without a hoof (fatal for any wild horse), the Cowboys found her a home and a surrogate dam (a foster mare). Other foals were kept for extra care in the weeks leading up to the auction. Healthy ponies sustain, and are sustained by, the micro-economy.

Old Neptune’s Bookshop is the first place I’ve been on the island without pony iconography. Bob, the owner, and I chat about the used book trade. He remembers the anarchist sellers of  1970s New York who vanished when the cops came to squash so-called fugitive stewardship outside sanction. He mulls on his work’s challenges: the ethics of appraisal and the keeping of twentieth-century relics. Some things can’t be sold. I ask finally if he and his wife go to the annual swim. He shakes his head: they went once, haven’t been back.

Thursday: Auction

I watch Thursday’s auction on Delmarva Sports Network, to which I have purchased a digital subscription for $6.99, and YouTube. On screen, the foals look smaller. Saltwater Cowboys bring them out in tandem with the auctioneer’s rattle. I think of Young Thug’s “Digits”: Hustlers don’t stop, they keep going. Popularly misheard as: “Horses don’t stop, they keep going.” 

A hundred foals in four hours. 

#7, #20, #22, #40, #72, and #78 carry Misty’s line — great-great-great-great-great-grandfoals. Bidders lean in. Suzanne Youngkin, the First Lady of Virginia, wins #78 and names her Lady.⁷ #100 looks like Sea Star. At just six days old, she didn’t swim but came over in a trailer with her mother and the rest of the tiniest foals. She won’t be ready for her new home until the fall. #56, the highest-selling buyback, goes for an all-time record-breaking $100,000. She is tax-deductible for her winners, a group called the Buyback Friends of Chincoteague, who get naming rights (Marguerite of Chincoteague) and a photo op. Trailers become reliquaries. At the auction, two economies meet: Chincoteague’s tourism and the national horse show circuit (pedigrees, eventing, jumpers). The pontoon boat woman told me she paid just $750 for her filly in 2015. The 100th Annual Chincoteague Pony Swim & Auction raised over a million dollars.

A few nights after Chincoteague while visiting my parents I dream I’ve inherited a coastal farm from an elderly woman who disappeared under murky conditions. I move through a patchwork of railroaded rooms with short ceilings and rosebud wallpaper, past a glass brick bathroom, into a corral. Three emaciated foals press toward me. In a closet I find brown sugar, oats, grain. Feed recipes are written on the bags and I can barely make them out. I’m awake before I can start mixing.

On the cover of Sea Star, a colt tests his legs in the sand. His tail curls in a sideways S. When I find my childhood copy, it’s clearly inscribed: “To Genevieve Love Grammy.”  I read on as the Beebe children decide, reluctantly, to sell their beloved Misty to a New York movie man. They need the money for their cousin’s college fund. Shortly after, they find a tiny foal with a star between his eyes lying beside an unresponsive mother. 

In Misty, Phantom, the filly’s mother, evades capture year after year. When Paul and Maureen finally catch her alongside Misty, they let her go because she’s too wild. In Sea Star, Phantom still roams free, slipping the Cowboys’ grasp. The pedigree database says the real Phantom was a “smoky black tobiano female with star, four stockings, bred and owned by Beebe’s Ranch.” Chincoteague’s ponies live across registers: catalogued, imagined, remembered. The shipwreck gives them their halo. It flatters us, casting the swim as a fated return rather than managed spectacle. It’s hard to argue with a story that draws 50,000 people to a salt marsh. And why would you? Recent research even suggests the legend may be plausible.⁸

On Friday, the ponies swim back to Assateague. They say an elephant never forgets, but what does a horse remember?