BRITTON SPRINGS, Wyo. - Three weeks ago, the horses here were running freely across the flowered meadows of the Pryor Mountains.

On Saturday, for about the price of a decent cowboy hat, you could take one home.

For a minimum $125 bid, the 57 wild horses being auctioned, including three mares with foals, were among the 146 mustangs gathered earlier this month by the Bureau of Land Management. The remaining 89, some of them females treated with a contraceptive, have been returned to the 38,000-acre wild-horse range in the Pryors.

The BLM has been culling the herd to reduce stress on the range, which agency experts say is overgrazed.

But there are wild-horse advocates, including The Cloud Foundation, who disagree about the condition of the range and the size of the roundup. Some say the roundups threaten the horses' unique gene pool, which can be traced back to the first Spanish horses brought to the Americas.

It's that uniqueness, and the mystique of wild horses, that the 200 or so people baking in the hot sun Saturday at the BLM's corral facility north of Lovell, Wyo., seemed to agree on.

"They're a symbol, an icon of history," said Jaime Johnson of Colorado Springs, Colo. "There is something so romantic about wild horses. They're a real symbol of freedom."

They're also a tool Johnson uses in a program for troubled youth at her SonShine Acres horse farm in Colorado. The youngsters train the horses as part of their rehabilitation.

"They have to take care of something else, sometimes for the first time," she said. "The horses help them so they're not so focused on their own problems."

Along with several other Western states, other bidders came from Virginia, Florida and Texas. The BLM auctioned the mustangs by tag number, but each has been named by the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center. The nonprofit center generally supports the roundups, or "gathers," as they're called. Saturday's auction was the largest ever for Pryor horses, said the center's director, Matt Dillon. In 2006, the BLM auctioned some horses online.

"That was not so good. This is better," he said. "This way, people can see them and look them over, and people have come from all over to participate."

Although some of the horses didn't draw even the minimum bid, all 57 mustangs were eventually taken, said Mary Apple, a BLM spokeswoman.

A 19-year-old stallion named Conquistador drew the highest bid at $2,500. Several others went for more than $1,000.

And those prices come at a time when the horse market is so depressed that a trained and registered horse can sometimes be gotten for free.

"We were pleased with the prices," Apple said. "We know the market for horses has been tough. The interest in these horses is because they're Pryor horses."

That's why Robert Vinzant of Lovell bought one for $225. He's never trained a horse.

"It's that lineage. It's where they come from," he said. "It something few people will ever get to have."

Sheila Leach bought a grulla-colored mare named Havasu for $1,100. Her friend whooped when Leach won the bidding. Leach has three mules and a thoroughbred on her property in Cody, Wyo. She wants to have the mustang trained for use as a trail horse. Her husband had a mustang that "didn't work out." The horse would spin and dump him.

"I hope this one today is a sweet as she looks," Leach said.

Asked what he liked about the mustang he won, Vernon Mummey said, "the price."

Mummey is director of the New Day Ranch near Billings and its Four Dances Horsemanship program. At the ranch for troubled teens, he said, he's "running about 42 kids," nearly half of them Native American.

"These kids learn trust and bonding with a horse," he said. "They connect with them and create a bond."

Mummey came to the auction with just enough for the minimum bid and lucked out late in the auction on a 3-year-old dun-colored horse named Gypsy Queen.

"We'll start training her tomorrow," he said. "It means a little something extra that we got a mustang out of Pryor."