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The scientific findings combined with oral and written history and location prove that these horses are the animals Native American tribes would have kept and raised in the region.
findings are scattered throughout his large collection of books, including the statement that the Victor Locke family at one time owned a herd of over 700 horses. During this time and up until his death, Gilbert also collected and bred the best of the horses he found on Blackjack Mountain, preserving the strains that were owned by the Indian families of the area. In the late 1970’s Gilbert began working with Phil Sponenberg of both Virginia Tech and the Livestock Conservancy (LC) to conduct phenotypic evaluations and DNA testing on the herd. Sponenberg’s initial physical evaluations indicated that the herd had strong Spanish-type conformation across the board and, to his trained eye, were classic Colonial Spanish horses. To support these findings DNA testing was conducted with the end results proving that the Choctaw horses on Blackjack Mountain were indeed direct decedents of the horses that first arrived with Spanish settlers in the 1500’s.
Since the early 1980s, Bryant and Darlene Rickman have worked to preserve the Choctaw Horse and the Gilbert Jones strain of Colonial Spanish horses. When the grazing leases on Blackjack Mountain were closed to the ranchers in 2007, Mr. Rickman and several friends removed over 400 of the horses from the mountain. Since that time, several private landowners have provided grazing lands to the horses.
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