If our love affair with the fabled Kiger mustang, perhaps the most sought-after wild horse in the West, can be summed up by a single person, then listen to Betty Linnell.

As owner of the Double L Kigers and Three Creeks Ranch outside Medford, she bought her first Kiger in 1993 and fell so hard for the breed that she eventually sold off all her quarter horses and replaced them with Kigers.

“It was their beauty and their romantic history linking them to the historic Spanish mustangs that first caught our eye,” Linnell says. “But it was after using them, after seeing their stamina to go all day chasing cows in rugged terrain, that we really got hooked on them.”

Now she breeds and sells them nationwide.

Thirty years after a group of wild horses was moved to the isolated Kiger Gorge on Steens Mountain because of similarities to the Spanish horses brought to North America centuries ago, hundreds of people have become, like Linnell, smitten with the breed and its lore.

Kigers seldom end up in government sanctuaries. Most are adopted, and many fetch prices that surprise those affiliated with the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro program. Today, the Kigers are their own cottage industry. Four registries compete for authority and prestige. Kigers generally sell on the market for between $900 and $6,500, stud fees range from $250 to $850, and there’s even a KigerFest once a year.

By the time the Kiger auction takes place every three or four years – the Internet buzzes with chatter. Breeders get excited about the new stock; trainers look at their calendars, knowing they’ll be called on to tame the wild animals; and horse lovers across the Northwest – and from as far as Rhode Island, Georgia and Michigan – start booking motel rooms because they go fast in the town of Burns, population 3,000.

The hype filters all the way down to remote southeastern Oregon, 70 miles from the nearest town, to the rocky canyons and rimrock buttes of Kiger Gorge and Riddle Mountain, where two Kiger herds run free.

The government subcontracts the roundup to a Utah company, one of two such outfits nationwide. Wranglers and a helicopter sweep the wild horses from their sagebrush-and-juniper haunts.

The animals that best represent the breed are corralled, examined and freeze-branded before being released to propagate the legendary herds. The others are held for adoption.

But before the chosen return to the wild, a wrangler traps them in a steel chute and yanks out a fistful of mane hair. The hair is bound for a California genetics lab that may one day solve the mystery of their ancestry.

Then they are loaded into trailers and driven for miles back over rugged roads until they reach a bowl of land surrounded by low mountains for as far as the eye can see. The cowboys turn their rigs around and pop open the back doors. Ten mares and three stallions thunder from their confines and disappear back into the wild.

Today, Kigers are an official breed, but Bill Phillips, 80, one of the original BLM horse managers, wonders if the future might reveal the interest to be a fad. Palominos were once hot. Then it was appaloosas.

One thing the future may bring is an answer to the Kiger’s lineage.

The mane hair gathered at last month’s roundup could go to geneticist Cecilia Penedo at the University of California at Davis if the BLM grants permission.

“They obviously have characteristics in common with Spanish-type horses,” Penedo says. “The idea is to test them for DNA markers and compare them with other wild horses in the United States, as well as other breeds.”