The Nokota was almost wiped out during the early 20th century when ranchers, in cooperation with state and federal agencies, worked together to reduce competition for livestock grazing.

However, when Theodore Roosevelt National Park was created in the 1940s, a few bands were inadvertently trapped inside, and thus were preserved.

Today, the park conducts regular thinning of the herd to keep numbers between 70 and 110, and the excess horses are sold off.

The Nokota horse has an angular frame, is commonly blue roan in color, and often exhibits an ambling gait called the "Indian shuffle".

The Nokota horse has an angular frame with prominent withers, a sloped croup, and a low set tail.

Less common colors include red roan, bay, chestnut, dun, grullo and palomino.

They tend to be smaller, more refined, and closer in type to the Colonial Spanish horse, and generally stand between 14 and 14.3 hands (56 and 59 inches, 142 and 150 cm) high.

[2] The Nokota horse developed in the southwestern corner of North Dakota, in the Little Missouri River Badlands.

[3]In 1884, the HT Ranch, located near Medora, North Dakota, bought 60 mares from a herd of 250 Native American-bred horses originally confiscated from the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and sold at Fort Buford, North Dakota in 1881.

[1] Ranch owner A.C. Huidekoper also bred Indian-bred mares with imported Percheron stallions to make offspring more marketable to draft horse buyers, which accounts for the high degree of Percheron blood in the Nokota breed today.

[4] By the early 20th century, the feral horse herds became the target of local ranchers looking to limit grazing competition for their livestock.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, federal and state agencies worked with ranchers to remove horses from western North Dakota.

Park management felt that the horses created with the outside bloodlines would sell better at subsequent auctions.

In October 2009, the two registries disputed which had the right to the Nokota breed name, with the Association claiming that they own the legal trademark to the name.