Willis J. Powell
author
Willis J. Powell is the author of Tachyhippodamia; on The New Secret of Taming Horses to which John Solomon Rarey's work, Taming of Wild Horses, was appended for publication. This book was issued before Powell died in 1848, but no publishing date is stated in the book itself. A later reprint was in 1872, in Philadelphia, by the W.R. Charter publishing house. It can still be purchased as a rare book and as reprinted by the University of Michigan. Powell mentions the Irish "horse whisperer" Daniel Sullivan in the preface to his own book, and says that Sullivan may have possessed the same method. Later in that same book, Powell recounts hearing of a man who had lived a century earlier and who had a secret method of taming horses, and resolving to discover that method.
Powell traveled from Louisiana to Mexico, living there for about 12 years, and then to Cuba, Guatemala and California, taming horses. He apparently made a good living doing so. He also was a polyglot, speaking five languages: English, French, Greek, Latin and Spanish.
The method
Powell says that the way became clear before him when he first realized that horses only offer resistance to humans because of fear.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q8022076. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1848 and 1872.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willis J. Powell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.