Buck Brannaman: The Line Carried Forward

If Ray Hunt opened the road, Buck Brannaman is the best known of the people who stayed on it. He is a clinician in the form Hunt created: he travels, riders bring their own horses, and for several days he teaches them together in one arena.

Hunt's student

Brannaman learned from Ray Hunt, and through Hunt from Tom Dorrance. He has never presented what he teaches as his own invention. The vocabulary is theirs: feel, timing, balance, and the instruction to set things up so that the horse finds the answer. Brannaman and Hunt's wife, Carolyn Hunt, are the founders of the Legacy of Legends gatherings, which keep that teaching in front of new riders.

The Horse Whisperer

In 1995 Nicholas Evans published the novel The Horse Whisperer. Brannaman is widely described as an inspiration for its main character, and when Robert Redford filmed it in 1998 Brannaman worked on the production as the lead equine consultant. The film put the words horse whisperer into everyday speech. Brannaman has been known to laugh the phrase off. As the documentary about him shows, he does not claim to speak to horses.

Buck

That documentary, called simply Buck, was the first film by director Cindy Meehl, who decided to make it after attending one of his clinics. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, where it won the audience award for United States documentaries, and opened in theaters that June.

The film follows him through a season of clinics. At the time, reviewers noted, he was on the road about forty weeks of the year teaching four-day clinics. It is frank, as his own book is, about the violence of his childhood, and it lets him draw the line himself between how he was treated and how he chooses to treat horses. One sentence from it has been repeated ever since: often, he says, he is not helping people with horse problems but helping horses with people problems.

Books

He has told his own story in print in The Faraway Horses, published in 2001, and gathered the stories of riders he has worked with in a second book, Believe.

Where he stands in the line

The Two Rein is built on a simple question: who taught whom. For Brannaman the answer is unusually clear and he has always given it himself. Tom Dorrance worked it out. Ray Hunt carried it to the public. Brannaman took it to a wider public still, including people who had never been near a ranch, and sent many of them back to the two books where it started.

More on Brannaman's teachers, his students and his work is on the way in this section.