It was Halloween night in 1979 and Addison and some friends were driving in a pickup truck to a party. He remembers looking out the window and seeing herd of horses on the highway.

The next thing remembers is waking up with the pickup truck on top of him.

"They said it rolled over three times and then it landed on top of me," says Addison.

The accident left him a quadriplegic. He spent months rehabilitating at a hospital in Seattle, Washington before returning to his home on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

They were months spent working hard to regain as much of his life as he could. Once home, he struggled to adjust with the new direction his life had taken.

"I guess I didn't want to accept what happened, so I tried to kill myself," says Addison.

Before the accident, he had made a living breaking wild horses.

"We were breaking horses back then. We were still using the old method of knocking them down and bucking them out," says Addison. "When you break them the way we did, it kind of takes the life from the horse."

After reflecting on what the accident had done to him, Addison began exploring new ways to work with horses.

"I thought, man I fought real hard for my life in there and here I am doing this, you know voluntarily trying to end my life again. So I started looking at the things I could do, not the things that I used to do," he says. 

He started to take notice of how horses reacted to his attitudes and behaviors. He found that, with patience he could gain the trust of a horse and lead it.

"You help them to understand and to trust you and then work with you better." He calls the technique he now uses, "gentling the horse."

In his motorized wheelchair, he works to let his emotions and feelings communicate to the horse what he wants it to do.

"It's like in your thoughts. You think it because the horse is feeling your emotions," he says. "They follow because they're herd animals. They pick a mare to follow and all you're doing is taking the place of that mare that leads the herd."

It is a dramatically different approach to working with the horses, but Addison is a dramatically different person since the accident.

"Well it gave me patience and I think it changed me quite a bit from the way I was because I was real self-centered, prejudiced and I was kind of a rotten person and this accident helped me to understand that we all need one another," Addison says. 

On a ranch with 160 wild horses, Addison now shares what he has learned about "gentling horses" with children and young adults on the Wind River Indian Reservation. He wants to give them a chance to carry on what life has taught him.

"It's good to know that part of the tradition will still be here."

The accident that changed Stanford Addison's life 30 years ago gentled his spirit and taught him how to gentle the spirit of others.

For more information about Stanford Addison, you can visit his website at www.stanfordaddisonranch.com