Bill Dorrance: Rawhide, a Reata and a Book at Ninety-Three
Tom Dorrance's older brother was a roper and a rawhide braider who taught riding through feel into his nineties. His one book came out the year he died.
When Ray Hunt had a horse he could not get along with, the first person he asked was Bill Dorrance. Bill sent him on to his younger brother Tom, and that errand is how most histories of horsemanship introduce him: as the man who made the introduction. He was a great deal more than that.
Oregon to California
William Dorrance was born near Enterprise, Oregon, on January 19, 1906, four years before Tom, into the same ranching family in Wallowa County. He spent more than eighty years working with horses and cattle, much of it in California, where Hunt found him.
Among working cowboys he was known for two skills beyond his horsemanship. He was a roper in the old style, and he was a rawhide braider. His family's account says his start in braiding came from his younger brother Fred, who braided his first reata for him. A film made late in his life with Randy Rieman, Four Strands of Rawhide, records how he made one.
The same idea, a different voice
The two brothers are usually spoken of in one breath, and they shared the central idea: a horse can be shown what is wanted and allowed to find it, and the tool for that is feel. Their temperaments were different. Tom was private. Bill kept teaching, one rider at a time, on his own place. One account has him still riding and still teaching at ninety-two.
True Horsemanship Through Feel
His book was written with Leslie Desmond and published in 1999. Its title is its argument. Feel, the book says, is the language horses use among themselves, and a person who wants to be understood by a horse has to learn to offer and receive it. The book spends its pages on small things: how a lead rope is held, how a horse is asked to take one step, what the rider should notice before asking for the next.
It also takes care with a word. When the Dorrances and their students talk about what is natural, the book explains, they mean what is natural for the horse within its own limits. They do not mean a brand of training.
Bill Dorrance died on July 20, 1999, at the age of 93. His family's account says the book had come out only a short time before. The New York Times ran his obituary under the headline Death of a Legendary Horseman.
Why he belongs at the start
A line of teaching needs more than one kind of person. Tom Dorrance was the mind people traveled to see. Ray Hunt was the voice that carried. Bill Dorrance was the neighbor who kept the door open, who answered the question in front of him and who knew when to say: go and see my brother. A good part of what followed happened because he did.
