- from Siskiyou News
Time and time again, ranchers have shown they are versatile and multifaceted in their skills and abilities.
Siskiyou County ranchers, Michelle Gough and William Simpson at Wild Horse Ranch locally filmed and produced a music video that has been honored by several film and music festivals by being ‘Officially Selected’ and even winning the top honor at one Film Festival.
This music video celebrates the natural beauty and history of our County.
According to the doctoral *dissertation by Dr. Yvette ‘Running Horse’ Collin, in 1580, British explorer Sir Francis Drake explored the Pacific coast along the Oregon-California border and inland regions.
Drake and his team recorded seeing the local indigenous peoples living alongside wild horses along the OR-CA border.
To put that into proper historic perspective, Christopher Columbus had first discovered North America in 1492, just 88-years earlier.
There is no plausible way that in just 88-years, the Spaniards could have imported enough horses, and then of those, having enough escape, to then breed into tens of thousands and then be distributed across the entire North American continent with enough distribution to be living on the OR-CA border. That is a fiction.
According to a discussion that William Simpson had with Professor and geneticist Gus Cothran at Texas A&M University, it is not an unreasonable assumption that splinter populations of wild horses survived the Ice Age and were located in isolated herds in our region. In fact, there are horse fossils found in Oregon and Northern California.
The award-winning music video ‘We Are the Wild Horses’ celebrates our local natural history, which was further documented by the local famous cowboy, George F. Wright who was born in Hornbrook, CA in 1897, was a BLM range rider and Jackson County Deputy Sheriff… George’s parents, Thomas Jefferson Wright and his indigenous bride settled in Hornbrook, CA in 1851. Thomas had several sons, including George who settled along the tributaries of the Klamath River, along Scotch Creek, Camp Creek and Jenny Creek. George Wright maintained a diary that frequently mentions ‘wild horses’ living naturally in the region.
More about George F. Wright here: https://sierranevadaally.org/2022/04/04/the-american-heritage-of-wild-horses/
