W.B. Warren’s passion was to ride better, faster horses than his South Texas neighbors.
Born in 1904 in Harris County, Texas, to a prominent ranching family, Warren competed in many match roping and races, and insisted on raising his own horses for ranch work and personal riding.
In 1938, Ray Canada introduced Warren to Robert Denhardt. Denhardt remarked that Warren had some of the best bloodlines in the area. Two stallions that stood out were Pancho by Paul Ell and Alazan by Ace Of Hearts II, yet Denhardt personally felt that Warren’s broodmares were better than the stallions.
As AQHA was forming in 1940, Denhardt, Jack Casement, Jack Hutchins and Lee Underwood decided Warren was a logical choice for president. At that time, Warren was a director for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. He had hundreds of friends in the rodeo, match-race and ranch industries, and this garnered confidence for the new association.
One of the first issues tackled was registration. There were two groups of men with different ideas. On one side of the table, Hutchins, Underwood and Denhardt wanted the registry limited to only full-blooded Quarter Horses. On the other side, were Warren, Jim Minnick, R. A. Brown and Jim Hall. Warren brought a compromise of allowing 50 percent Quarter Horse and 50 percent other blood into the registry.
Warren was re-elected in 1941 for a second term. “He had the unique ability to put present things first, to make the impossible seem likely, settle what he could and worry about the future when it arrived,” Denhardt said of Warren.
Warren died in 1949 at 44. He was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 1985.
Biography updated as of March 1985.