Who was Bill Dorrance?

Bill Dorrance was Tom Dorrance's older brother, born in 1906, and a horseman of equal depth and accomplishment whose work has received somewhat less mainstream attention than Tom's but whose influence on the vaquero tradition and on the practitioners who worked most closely with him was profound. Like Tom, Bill grew up ranching in eastern Oregon and developed his horsemanship through decades of practical work with horses in a tradition that valued quiet, effective communication over force or spectacle. Bill was deeply embedded in the California vaquero tradition — the refined horsemanship of the Spanish-influenced buckaroo culture that valued the progression from snaffle to hackamore to two-rein to full bridle as the measure of a horse's and horseman's development — and he brought to that tradition the same philosophical depth about feel, timing, and working with the horse's nature that his brother Tom was developing simultaneously. Bill worked with horses into his nineties, maintaining the quality of feel and observation that characterized the Dorrance brothers' approach throughout his life. His ideas were documented most completely in the book True Horsemanship Through Feel, compiled by Leslie Desmond and published in 1999, which represents a systematic attempt to translate Bill's understanding of feel-based horsemanship into teachable form. Bill Dorrance died in 1999, shortly after the book's publication, leaving behind a body of influence visible in the working ranch horsemen of the West who sought him out over decades and in the practitioners like Bryan Neubert and Martin Black who carry the vaquero-influenced natural horsemanship tradition forward.