A cream-colored horse named DeSoto walks out of the woods in Poplarville, Mississippi. He is one of the rarest horses of all: a Choctaw.

Choctaw horses belong to a group called colonial Spanish horses or Blackjack Mountain horses. They were brought to America by the Spanish. That was in the 1500s. Back then, Choctaw Indians lived in present-day Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They bred the horses. By the 1800s, they owned tens of thousands of them.

But things did not go well for the Choctaw people or their horses. In 1830, Congress gave President Andrew Jackson the power to force Native Americans from their land. The Native Americans were made to leave places east of the Mississippi River. Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole Indians ended up in Oklahoma. This huge movement of Native Americans is called “The Trail of Tears.” And for good reason! More than 12,000 Choctaw people made the journey. But somewhere around 3,000 or 4,000 of them died along the way. The Choctaw Indians who survived became ranchers in Oklahoma.