Ray Hunt and a Horse Named Hondo

Ray Hunt liked to say that one horse made a different method necessary and one man made it possible. The horse was Hondo. The man was Tom Dorrance. Hunt was the one who took what happened between them and carried it down the road.

A farm boy and a buckaroo

Hunt was born in Idaho in 1929 and raised on a farm at Mountain Home, where, as he put it, crops went into the ground with horses and came out with horses. He then spent more than a decade buckarooing on ranches in Oregon and Nevada. By thirty he was, by Western Horseman's account, a good cowhand who knew a lot about horses.

He was also, in his own later telling, heading for a wreck. The horse that showed him so was Hondo, who bucked and whom Hunt could not get along with.

The meeting

Hunt was in California at the time and asked a friend nearby for advice. The friend was Bill Dorrance, who told him he ought to talk to his brother Tom, a man Bill described as pretty good with horses. Hunt and Tom Dorrance met around 1960 at a fair in Elko, Nevada. Dorrance said he would stop by Hunt's place that fall, and he did. In the winter of 1960 to 1961 Hunt took Hondo to him.

What Dorrance showed him was not a trick for a bucking horse. It was a different place to stand. Hunt had been making Hondo do things. Dorrance had him set things up so the horse could find the answer and then leave the horse alone when it did. Hondo went on to be shown in working cow horse classes. Hunt said afterward that Dorrance had saved his life.

The first clinician

Dorrance avoided attention. Hunt did not seek it either, but he would teach, and by the middle of the 1970s he was giving clinics far and wide. Western Horseman has written that he essentially invented the modern profession of horsemanship clinician: a horseman who travels, gathers riders and their own horses in an arena for several days and teaches them together.

In 1978 he published Think Harmony with Horses, a short book that has stayed in print through several editions. His teaching is usually boiled down to one line: make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy. He was just as firm that the work was on the human. The horse, he told his students, is never the one who is wrong.

What the line owes him

The writers at Eclectic Horseman put it carefully: Hunt was not the first to handle horses this way, but he was probably the person most responsible for teaching it to others. Pat Parelli has named Dorrance, Hunt and Ronnie Willis as his mentors. Buck Brannaman was Hunt's student. So were a long list of ranch cowboys and colt starters whose names never appeared on a poster.

Ray Hunt died on March 12, 2009. Memorials were held in Texas, in Australia and at Mountain Home, Idaho. His wife, Carolyn Hunt, and Buck Brannaman founded the Legacy of Legends gatherings to keep the teaching of Hunt and Dorrance in front of new riders.

Most of the people profiled on The Two Rein stand somewhere on the road Hunt opened. Where we can show who learned from whom, we do.