The Story Behind United Mustangs of America

There is a moment in The Black Stallion where the boy climbs onto the horse’s back for the first time. No saddle. No bridle. No one watching. Just a boy and a wild horse on an empty beach learning to trust each other because they have nothing else.

After that the horse comes to the boy on his own.

That image got into me before I could even explain what I was watching. My mom said she was nursing me when it played on the television. I don’t remember seeing it. I just remember that horses were already inside me by the time I was old enough to want anything.

What I wanted was what that boy had. Solitude and freedom with a horse. Something powerful on your side.

I grew up in a regular suburban house. My dad was a streetlight engineer for the government. My mom stayed home. Nobody in my family had anything to do with horses. I was the only one, and I had no idea how to get from where I was to where I wanted to be.

When I was nine my parents signed me up for riding lessons. My dad had no idea what world he was walking into. We went to the store first and I walked out in jeans, a wrangler shirt, a cowgirl hat, a bolo tie, and cowboy boots. I thought I looked exactly right.

We got to the barn and the instructor looked at me and said no, no, no. That’s all wrong.

She sent me to the loaner locker. English boots. Helmet. Breeches. A whole different world I hadn’t known existed. That was the world I learned in — hunter jumper, English saddle, show schedules, performance. I loved it. I loved the feel of the English saddle and the precision of jumping. I wanted to go to the Olympics.

I had a thoroughbred I loved deeply. He had bowed tendons and could only jump so high. I could have pushed him past what was comfortable for him. I didn’t. I chose the horse over the ambition. That decision quietly changed everything about who I was becoming.

When I lost him to colic my dad had always warned that horses were too expensive to keep. I thought that chapter of my life was over. Then he surprised me — he had stumbled across a newspaper article about a local Mustang roundup. We drove six hours to the BLM holding corrals in Ridgecrest California. There were hundreds of colts and fillies, all of them wild, all of them watching from a distance the way wild things do. My dad spotted a bay filly with an unusual white tip in her tail. The woman there said she had good conformation.

That was Juno. She was eleven months old. I was twenty-six.

The path that opened up with Juno had nothing to do with show arenas. I wasn’t working toward a performance. I was working toward a bond. Toward understanding. Toward becoming the kind of human a horse would choose to be with. I found mentors I never would have found inside the discipline I grew up in — including one who rode his Mustangs completely bridleless and bareback under a brand he called Enlightened Horsemanship. I wanted what he had. I went to clinics. I studied Evidence-Based Horsemanship and learned how the horse’s brain actually works and how it learns. Juno and I rode thousands of miles of trail together on the Central Coast.

I competed in the Extreme Mustang Makeover — one of the most demanding competitions in the horse world, where you take a completely wild untouched Mustang and build a partnership from nothing. I competed multiple times and placed in the top ten finals each time.

And then I found Janiece Johnson Wilson, who introduced me to the work of Monte Foreman — a master horseman who spent decades writing about balanced riding and horse handling science for cattlemen across the country. That work became the foundation of everything I now teach.

Three of my Extreme Mustang Makeover horses are in my school right now. The horses your student will learn on are horses I gentled, trained, and competed with. They are not backyard horses. They are partners.

The one from the movie. The one they have carried quietly for years without knowing what to do with it. Solitude and freedom with a horse. Something powerful on their side. The sense that somewhere out there is a horse that could truly know them if only they knew how to cross that distance.

Most of them are standing outside the gate looking in.

That is why I built United Mustangs of America. Not to put people on a show schedule. To bring them across — to the real horse, the real relationship, the real thing they have been looking for since they were kids watching a movie they can still see clearly in their minds.

I am writing a book about Monte Foreman’s horse handling science and the path that brought me here.

If any of this feels familiar the gate is open.