Tom Dorrance: The Quiet Man at the Start of It
Tom Dorrance left his family's Oregon ranch at fifty, wrote one book and avoided the spotlight all his life. Much of modern horsemanship still traces back to him.
Ask the people who teach horsemanship today where their ideas came from and the answers tend to run back to the same place: a small, soft-spoken rancher from northeastern Oregon named Tom Dorrance. He did not run a training business. He did not tour. He wrote one book, late in life. Western Horseman magazine has still credited him, his brother Bill and his student Ray Hunt with setting off what came to be called natural horsemanship.
A ranch childhood in Wallowa County
Tom Dorrance was born on May 11, 1910, one of eight children on a cattle ranch in Wallowa County, Oregon. The family worked in the stock horse tradition of the Great Basin, the buckaroo way that reaches back to the Californio vaqueros.
By the accounts of those who knew him, he was a watcher. Milly Hunt Porter, who later edited his book, told Horse and Rider that he was often alone as a child and spent that time close to nature. His brother Bill wrote that Tom never liked to be in trouble himself or to have trouble with the stock he handled, and that this is probably why he spent so long trying to figure horses out.
Leaving home at fifty
Dorrance stayed and ran his parents' ranch until both had died. It was April 1960, when the last of the Wallowa County property had been sold, before he set out on his own. He was fifty years old.
What followed was not a career in the usual sense. He traveled, visited ranches and helped people who asked. Around that time a young cowboy named Ray Hunt, struggling with a horse he could not get along with, was sent to him. That meeting is its own story, and it is the reason most riders have heard of Tom Dorrance at all. Dorrance avoided media attention and clinics. Hunt became the one who carried the ideas to the public.
One book
In 1987 Dorrance published True Unity: Willing Communication Between Horse and Human, edited by Milly Hunt Porter. It is a short book, and not a manual. There are no step-by-step programs in it. It asks the rider to take account of the whole horse, and it returns often to the horse's need for self-preservation. One section gives the floor to his students, who describe what his help changed for them and their horses.
He is often quoted asking riders a question that sounds like a riddle: "What happened before what happened happened?" It is a serious instruction. The buck, the bolt or the refusal is the end of a chain, and the rider's job is to see the first link.
Who taught Tom Dorrance
He had an answer to that, repeated by Ray Hunt: the horse did. It is true as far as it goes, and it also leaves something out. Dorrance grew up inside a working tradition with generations of knowledge about hackamores, bridles and cattle. What he added was attention: a habit of asking what the horse was experiencing and of arranging things so the horse could find the answer itself.
What he left
Tom Dorrance died on June 11, 2003, at the age of 93. By then the people he had helped, and the people they had helped, were teaching on several continents. The words he and his brother used, feel, timing and balance, had become the common vocabulary of a field.
The rest of this section of The Two Rein follows that line outward: to Bill Dorrance, to Ray Hunt and a horse named Hondo, and to the men and women who learned from them.
