The Mare Who Reveals Herself Slowly

Etta looks white. On a dry day, standing in the paddock, she presents as a clean, pale horse with little to announce herself beyond her size — and at 15 hands, she is already the tallest mare on the farm, sitting at the very peak of the breed standard. She is striking, but the full picture is hidden.

Give her a bath, or wait for rain, or watch her come in from a hard summer morning — and there she is. Beneath the white lies a blue roan medicine hat, a tobiano pattern that surfaces in wet coat like something developing in a darkroom: the mask of color over the poll and ears, the roan working through the body, the markings clarifying as the water moves through her. She is a blue shadow pinto, and the shadow only lifts when she is wet. It is one of the more unusual things you will see in a pasture, and people who witness it for the first time tend to go quiet for a moment.

Her personality carries no such concealment. Etta is as sweet as they come — direct, affectionate, and entirely clear about her preferences. Chief among them: she prefers the company of a stallion. Put her in a mixed band of mares and geldings and she is polite but restless. Pair her with her stallion and she settles completely, content and at ease in a way she simply is not otherwise. She is a mare built for the family band, and she knows it.

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Built to Move, Bred to Work

Etta’s trot is immediately notable — a massive, ground-covering extension that recalls Manny’s movement and turns heads for the same reason. It is not trained into her. It is simply the way she goes, a consequence of structure and breeding that expresses itself every time she decides the paddock needs crossing at speed.

She also pivots. Not casually, not as a training trick — she can pivot cleanly on one hind leg, rotating left to right with an ease that speaks to a specific kind of athletic intelligence. This is not a quality most people think to look for in a small Spanish mare, but it came in very practical use in her early years in Oklahoma, where she worked cattle. A mare who can cut, pivot, and hold position without being asked twice is a mare who was paying attention to the job. Etta was paying attention.

Deep Choctaw on Both Sides

Etta’s sire is SS — Strong Seed — the same grandsire who appears behind Prince of Choctaws through Big Muddy Miracle. It is a name that carries weight in this program: the stallion Bryant Rickman could call from the bottom of a mountain, who would come running down with his band of mares behind him. The human-bondedness, the willingness, the particular quality of attention these horses give their people — SS transmitted it reliably, and Etta received it.

Her dam, Rosetta, carries two strong lines of foundation Choctaw blood into the pedigree. Through McGee Creek Bandit, Etta traces to Geronimo T and Metoaka on one side, and to the Brame Family Choctaw Stallion through both Shelia and Dixie on the other. Through White Painted Lady, Choctaw Ricochet and Kiamichi Susie converge — the latter carrying Choctaw Chief II and Miss Kiamichi Penny, a line that appears across much of the Rickman program’s most carefully preserved stock.

Etta’s pedigree reflects the kind of concentration that takes generations of deliberate breeding to achieve and a single careless cross to dilute. Her pairing with Fichik Okchako — our only non-overo stud and himself a horse of serious Choctaw pedigree — is a cross built to carry that depth forward.

A New Pairing, a First Foal Coming

Etta’s previous pairing with Chief Blue Streak produced Rapha — our first farm-born foal, who did not survive his first day. Rapha’s loss led to LWO testing across the entire herd, which confirmed that both Etta and Blue are carriers. That knowledge now governs every pairing decision on the farm, and it is the reason Etta is now paired with Fichik Okchako rather than Blue.

Fichik Okchako is the farm’s only non-overo stallion — a pairing specifically chosen to eliminate the LWO risk entirely. Their first foal together is expected in June 2026, and it represents more than a new addition to the farm: it is the first foal from a pairing that was built around what we learned from Rapha, and that is not something we take lightly.