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By Melody Perry
Tucked away from the rest of Helena sits a plain and simple stable bearing the name Bright Star Stables. It’s owner, manager, and trainer, John Frische, ensures that each and every horse that passes through his gates leaves better than they arrives. Born in Glasgow, Montana, he moved to Glendive, Billings, then finally to Helena, where he stayed at nine years old.
He began training horses after meeting a girl from upstate New York while in college. She got him a job at her father’s farm that raised, trained, and raced standardbred harness horses. For three summers he worked for Jack Sullivan, who set his foundation as a horse trainer. It wasn’t until 2000 that he began training horses professionally.
“Instinctive horse training is what I like to call it.” He says. “Her father was a really good horse trainer. He taught me a lot. And then I read lots of books, [watched] lots of videos, went to lots of clinics, and just learned over all the years because of necessity. My sister had horses, my niece had horses that wouldn’t do things, so I learned how to teach the horses to do things.”
After training horses for so long, it’s no wonder all the stories he can tell of all the clients he’s helped. “I’ll tell you one. This is Danielle. Her father calls me up and he says ‘our daughter’s 11 years old, she loves horses, she has all the Breyer horse dolls, all her friends talk about horses, she’s never been next to a real horse in her life, but she wants horse riding lessons. Can we come up and just see how she reacts to being around a real horse?’ They get up here and there’s this little girl cowering behind momma, and I mean literally twenty feet away from the round pen, and she’s just frozen, afraid of the world.”
He pauses for a moment and readjusts his seat on the edge of his bed. In his small home, he sits on the edge of his bed, letting us sit on the couch as we talk. “It took me 15-20 minutes to get her to touch the horse inside the round pen with her outside the round pen. Within an hour we finally had her sitting on the horse. After two hours she would take one hand away from the saddle. That’s how afraid she was. By the end of the summer she’s riding my 2nd level horse at a full lope in the arena with the reins laying in the saddle. She had some mental disabilities; parts of her brain were growing faster than other parts of her brain, but you know she had wonderful things. She had the desire. She found something she really loved and could communicate with the horse. Horses communicate with mentally ill people really well. I have a hundred of those stories.”
He tells one about a horse named Trouble: “The horse named Trouble that came down for a weeks’ lesson. Never name a horse Trouble. I was told the 2nd day that the girl had a horse show on Saturday and I was to get the horse ready for the horse show for this 12-year-old girl in 4H. So we just started putting stuff together, you know, I had three days.”
“The first thing when we were working with the horse, I put the saddle on the horse, I cinch it up, and the horse just goes to the ground and just lies there and looks at me and shakes. All I could read out of its mind was, ‘beat me that’s what everybody else has done, beat me’. That was the feeling I got from that horse. I pulled the saddle off, walked away. The horse looked at me, stood up, shook the dust off, and came over and stuck its nose in my belly. Never had a problem with that horse again. So I snuck up to Great Falls to watch the horse show. The horse had to follow [the twelve year old] into the arena without the other horses being there. So, she’s the first in the arena. And here’s this horse just following her, joined up. She’d been thrown out the show, three classes, a month before because her horse was out of control. That was 5 days of training, changed that horse. Changed her, but changed the horse.”
His stable’s name also holds a Cinderella story. John grins and takes us to see an old Morab mare out in his field. Bright Star is over twenty years old and still prances around the field to greet us and races around with his dog before finally settling down to be caught. Bright Star’s story is a long and twisting tale, but to keep things short, here’s an abridged version. Back in the late ’90s, John was looking for a nice riding horse and found Bright Star for eight hundred dollars. He went to see her, and after about an hour of trying to catch her before performing some groundwork, decided he’d pay the money and buy her. The next day, he came back with a trailer and spent four hours loading her into the trailer after discovering that she hadn’t left the pasture in three years and had been in a trailer accident when she was two. Finally, though, he got her home and her training began. About two months after purchasing her, he met someone with a Morgan stud, thinking he could breed Bright Star once he got her trained. Instead, he learned even more about her past. The man had owned Bright Star for a while after her horrific trailer accident where she rolled down the mountain a few times and had to be cut out of the trailer. At the vet in Butte, after about a month, the vet declared her worthless and suggested she be put down. Instead, this man paid the vet fee of eight hundred dollars, thinking he could breed to her. Unfortunately, after working with her for a few months, she was declared crazy and sold to her final owner before John, a woman who actually tried to train her. Unfortunately again, the woman gave her up after an unlucky ride where Bright Star bolted down the road for three miles at a dead run. This is how she got to John. He calls this his “dead horse walking story” after the movie. Today, Bright Star is the best-behaved horse at his stable. She can ride in a halter, English or western, trail ride, and anything else a horse ought to know. She can take people for lessons, take John on an adventure, or take young kids on pony rides. Now, his stable, Bright Star Stables, has two meanings: “I make bright stars out of horses; I make bright stars out of students.”
Despite wanting to be a pilot when he grew up, he loves every minute of training horses: “It’s taught me patience and understanding of people. It’s much harder to train a human than it is a horse. Humans should be much easier to train, but learning forgiveness of a horse gives you better forgiveness of humans too.”
Pictures by Melody Perry
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