02/18/2012 Southwest: Heartland of America

  • February 14, 2012
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 Bigheart Thoroughbreds steps up in Oklahoma

by Lenny Shulman

So, what is the logical career path for a longtime obstetrics/gynecology practitioner and nurse midwife looking to change professions? If you’re Cindi Bigheart, you enlist your family to help turn a cattle farm into a Thoroughbred operation so you can begin foaling out mares and raising racehorses. Makes perfect sense.
Five years ago Bigheart traded in delivering babies for the all-night work of delivering foals at her family’s Bigheart Thoroughbreds in northern Oklahoma near the town of Enid. And she couldn’t be happier with her new vocation.

Bigheart comes to horses through her family lineage. She is one-quarter Osage Indian, and her grandfather, a tribal chief, was full-blooded. She can remember as a child going to ceremonies at his home and listening to his people singing in their native tongue. The connection to equines was reinforced at an early age. Her father, the late Conrad “Sonny” Bigheart, and her brother Steve Bigheart both became racetrack trainers. Cindi was raised around Quarter Horses in Kansas and Oklahoma. When Oklahoma began nourishing its Thoroughbred program with the infusion of casino money to enhance purses and breeders awards, she figured it was time to spring into action.

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