Author: Erin Van Rheenen / Source: Atlas Obscura
For good luck, visitors to Grand Canyon National Park stroke the nose of a life-sized burro sculpture, its muzzle polished by thousands of hands. Like a dog on its haunches, the statue sits in the lobby of the Grand Canyon Lodge, built at the very edge of the Canyon’s 8,000-foot North Rim.
Few know the story of the real-life animal—Brighty—represented by the sculpture, much less that the burro inspired a 1950s children’s book, which was later adapted for the screen, with Jiggs the Donkey cast as Brighty the Burro (burro is the Spanish word for donkey).
Even fewer realize that the statue itself—commissioned by the film’s director and donated to the park—became the center of a bitter controversy over whether feral burros were a valuable part of Canyon history or invasive creatures who should be exterminated.
Native to Africa, burros were brought to the Americas in the 1500s by the Spanish. By the late 1800s, prospectors in the Canyon used them as beasts of burden, companions, and good luck charms— according to the professor John Wills in The Journal of Arizona History, folklore had it that a wandering burro would lead you to gold. If a miner gave up on the search for gold, copper, lead, or asbestos, however, he would abandon his burros along with his picks and pans. The equipment corroded; the burros turned feral and thrived.
Brighty himself, who lived from about 1882 to 1922, was first seen in the Canyon near an abandoned miner’s tent, sitting vigil as if expecting the tent’s occupant to return. The burro appreciated occasional human companionship, especially when pancakes were involved. He spent summers on the cooler North Rim, hanging out with the game warden Jim Owens or the McKee family, who managed the first tourist facility on the North Rim, which opened in 1917. Brighty came and went as he pleased, toting water for the McKees’ young son, but scraping off any loads he deemed unworthy of his efforts. For instance, if a hunter caught Brighty and tried to make him pack his gear, Brighty would sneak away, rubbing the pack against trees until the lashing loosened and the load fell off.
It was along the North Rim that early Canyon tourists first met Brighty, probably between 1917 and 1922. Wills writes, “Vacationers struggling to interpret, or connect with, the immense scale of the Canyon (John Muir called it an ‘unearthly’ place), appreciated the presence of a familiar creature.”
But Brighty’s hybrid existence—not exactly wild, but not domesticated enough to be consistently useful—would count against him and his kind when the park service decided in the early 20th century that it should restore the Canyon to a pre-Columbian state of virgin splendor. Having arrived with the Spaniards, the burro was not native to Arizona.
Rather than relocating the animals, in 1924, shortly after Brighty’s death, rangers began hunting burros in earnest. According to Wills, between 1924 and 1931, they killed 1,467; records show that between 1932 and 1965, rangers shot 370 more.
The hunts went on with little public knowledge, until a 1953 book—and a 1967 movie—helped mobilize a campaign to save the remaining Canyon burros.
In the early 1950s, Marguerite Henry, successful author of horse stories like Misty of Chincoteague, stumbled on a 1922 Sunset Magazine article written by Thomas McKee, entitled “Brighty, Free Citizen: How the Sagacious Hermit Donkey of the Grand Canyon Maintained His Liberty for Thirty Years.”
Henry wanted to know more about the scrappy little burro. Traveling from her home in Illinois to…
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