Christmas 1966 at Graceland looked like a simple, happy scene. Elvis Presley wanted to give Priscilla, the young woman he was dating and would soon marry, something she would love. So he gave her a horse.
Her name was Domino, a four-year-old black quarter horse, and Priscilla took to her right away.
That should have been the whole story. One sweet gift, a girl and her horse, and nothing more.
It didn’t stay that small for long.
Once Priscilla started riding every morning, Elvis caught the bug too. He wasn’t the kind of man who did anything halfway. If he loved something, the people around him were going to love it with him, whether they had asked for it or not.
So he started buying horses. Not one or two. He bought them for friends, for family and for just about anyone who happened to be standing near him at Graceland.
Jerry Schilling, one of Elvis’s closest buddies from the group of Memphis friends who traveled everywhere with him, remembered how fast it grew. “we ended up getting 20 or so horses,” he said. Priscilla put it even plainer. “It didn’t matter if you wanted one or not, you were getting a horse!”
Years later Priscilla stood at the Kentucky Horse Park and opened an exhibit about those Graceland horses, and she talks about that whole time in her own words.
Priscilla Presley opens the Graceland horse exhibit and remembers those days
Now here’s where one Christmas horse turned into something nobody saw coming.
By February 1967, Graceland was running out of room for all those animals. Elvis needed space. One day he was driving home from buying yet another horse, this one for his father Vernon, when he spotted a big white cross standing over a lake across the state line in Horn Lake, Mississippi. He told the driver to stop.
The land belonged to a man named Jack Adams. He wanted $437,000 for the house, the cattle, the equipment and about 160 acres. Elvis didn’t haggle. He said yes right there on the spot.
He named it the Circle G, the G for Graceland. Then he filled it with around 40 horses, plus trucks and trailers that he handed out to his friends so they could all be out there with him. For a stretch he and Priscilla practically lived on the ranch. “In the morning right after breakfast he was out riding,” she said. Schilling called it “a romantic time.”
The home movies from those months are the real treat. You can see Elvis out on the land, loose and smiling, riding like a man who finally had room to spread out.
Real home footage of Elvis riding at his Circle G ranch
He bought a little trailer to stay in out there, and his own favorite horse, Rising Sun, got a stable of his own. But the heart of it all was that first present. One black quarter horse named Domino, handed to Priscilla on Christmas morning, and inside of a few weeks it had grown into a whole Mississippi ranch.