Dancing Creek is a beautiful chestnut gelding with a unique white blaze on his face. Dancing Creek likes to pretend he’s shy, but it’s usually all an act just to get your attention. Once he sees you’ve put in the effort to win him over, he’s putty in your hands!

The Choctaw horses are Spanish horses that remain from the early colonial efforts of the Spaniards in North America. These horses arrived with Hernando DeSoto in the 1500’s and by the 1800’s they had been completely integrated into some of the tribal cultures in the Southeast. In the 1830s, these small horses carried the old and infirmed on the tragic “Trails of Tears”, beginning with the Choctaws forced march from Mississippi to Oklahoma.

The horses continued to face persecution after arriving in Oklahoma as a result of a “tick eradication program” conducted by the U.S. Government. The horses who survived were those who escaped into the wooded mountains of Oklahoma.

These horses are important as a genetic resource because they have become rare, containing unique color genetics and are one of the oldest strains of horses in North America today. These horses have been pivotal in the conservation of Colonial Spanish horses in North America.

In 2005, RTF collaborated with screenwriter John Fusco to launch the Choctaw Horse Conservation Program. Dr. Phillip Sponenberg of the Virginia-Maryland
College of Veterinary Medicine, who considers this a genetic rescue effort, chose a band of seven mares from Blackjack Mountain to join a varnished grey roan tobiano stallion, Chief Iktinike, to form a foundation group to send to Fusco’s Red Road Farm in Vermont.

The horses, with their more recent roots in Blackjack Mountain, Oklahoma, went to live at Red Road Farm in Vermont and, in 2008, Chief Iktinike and seven mares arrived at Return to Freedom in Central California.