What did traditional horse breaking look like before natural horsemanship?

Traditional horse breaking before the mainstream adoption of natural horsemanship principles varied considerably by region, cultural tradition, and individual practitioner, but the dominant approaches in the American West and in many other contexts relied on varying degrees of force, restraint, and the wearing down of the horse's resistance as the primary method for achieving a horse's initial acceptance of a rider. The classic bronc-riding approach — throwing the saddle on an unhandled horse, cinching tight, and having a rider get on and ride through the horse's bucking until it stopped — was perhaps the most extreme version and one that produced horses that had been overwhelmed rather than genuinely trained. More systematic approaches involved progressive restraint — hobbling, scotch hobbles, blindfolding, and other devices that restricted the horse's ability to resist — that allowed saddling and first rides without the bucking that unrestrained horses typically produced, but that produced compliance through inability to resist rather than through genuine acceptance. The Thoroughbred racing industry historically used an early saddling protocol in which foals were handled and saddled at a young age, with yearlings typically being backed through a combination of progressive desensitization and management rather than the forced approaches of ranch horse breaking — a tradition that produced more systematic preparation but was still oriented primarily toward behavioral compliance rather than the quality of understanding that natural horsemanship values. Regional variations existed: the California vaquero tradition that the Dorrance brothers came from was historically more patient and systematic than many other western traditions, producing finished horses through a multi-year progression that valued genuine softness alongside behavioral performance. The diversity of traditional approaches means that natural horsemanship was not simply replacing a monolithic tradition but selectively emphasizing and making mainstream certain existing principles while specifically rejecting the force-based elements of other existing traditions.