Oklahoma’s Choctaw horses connect to Mississippi

Poplarville, Miss — Six foals sired by a cream-colored stallion called DeSoto scamper across a pasture in southwest Mississippi — the first new blood in a century for a line of horses brought to America by Spanish conquistadors and bred by Choctaw Indians who were later forced out of their ancestral homelands.

Choctaw horses were thought to be long gone from this region, disappearing when their Native American owners were expelled from the U.S. Southeast by the government.

But the surprise discovery of DeSoto on a farm in Poplarville 13 years ago led to a plan to help the dwindling strain survive.

“That really gives us a shot in the arm,” said Bryant Rickman, who has been working since 1980 near Antlers, Oklahoma, to restore the line.

He estimates he has bred more than 300 of the horses from nine mares and three stallions.

But having so few stallions led to a bottleneck, because the gene pool was so small. Choctaws saw great power in horses.

Ian Thompson, tribal historic preservation officer for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said their word for horse, issoba, means “like a deer” — and the deer was the tribe’s most important animal, both economically and spiritually.