Burn the Ships

A Horse That Arrived Without a History

Rosa came to us with no papers, no records, no traceable bloodlines. What she had instead was conformation. Structure. The deep-boned solidity and particular elegance of a Colonial Spanish Horse written plainly in her body — enough that the Horse of the Americas Registry admitted her through direct inspection, a distinction granted to only a handful of horses in the registry’s history. She carries no strain designation we can confirm. What the registry confirmed is that she is, unmistakably, the real thing.

She came to us feral-adjacent. Not a horse accustomed to being handled, not a horse inclined toward people. Samantha Borders-Shoemaker spent years gentling her — working patiently, earning trust by degrees, building the partnership that would eventually carry them both through the hunt field and into the record books. That process left its mark on both of them. Rosa is, by any measure, the horse of Samantha’s lifetime. And Samantha is, by any measure, Rosa’s person.

Registered Information

From Feral-Adjacent to HOA Legend & Caballo de Corazon

Rosa’s trajectory is not the kind that follows a conventional arc. She began her life with us as a horse that didn’t trust people. She ended up as a nationally recognized athlete — HOA Caballo de Corazon, HOA Legend, 2022 HOA Pleasure Horse of the Year, and 2022 HOA Endurance Champion — and as a working whipper-in at the James River Hunt, now in her fifth season in the field.

Samantha brought to that process a background that spans disciplines and continents: formal education in Hunter and Dressage, and Endurance training at Butheeb Academy in the United Arab Emirates in 2017 at the leisure of Sheikh Sultan al Nahyan. That range of training informed how she approached Rosa — not with a single method, but with a willingness to follow the horse’s lead and meet her where she was.

The name was intentional. Burn the Ships — because this horse was a departure from everything Samantha had known. There was no going back to the way horses had been before her.

One Woman’s Horse

Rosa permits others to ride her. She will work, she will behave, she will do what’s asked. But she gives Samantha something different — her whole self. In the field, she follows Samantha’s lead with the responsiveness of a horse that is paying attention to one person above all else. On the farm, she plays a different role entirely: the peacemaker. When tensions rise in the herd and squabbles threaten to become something worse, Rosa moves in and breaks it up. Calm, deliberate, unhurried.

She is not currently in the breeding program, though she has one known foal on the ground: TLH Choctaw Firekeeper, “Layla,” by Prince of Choctaws. Her work on the farm now is steadier than that — she is the reliable presence that younger horses look to, the calm example that helps the green ones settle. In a herd that includes Choctaw youngstock still learning the world, that steadiness has value that doesn’t appear in a show record.