NOOOOOOOOOO,,,,

After doing an interesting stealth mission where I stole an army train full of equipment, I did another rebel mission where I caught one of the main army generals. After beating the information out of him, he says that one of the men John is looking for is in a small town to the east. So I get on my horse and ride there as quick as I can, but of course the guy hasn't been seen there for months.

The tragedy strikes...

While leaving the town there's a random event where some outlaws run by with some one dragged behind their horses. I tried to take them down but one got behind me and killed me, fortunately I had a house in that town and the game auto saved at the end of the last mission so I just re-spawned there with no loss. When I left the house though some thing was strange, all the wild animals were inside the town, some even lined up in a row (wolf, bobcat, coyote, all just chilling together). So I went around killing all of them and one wolf dies right beside a scrawny black horse hitched to a post. I go over to skin the wolf but mount the horse instead (the same button), then when trying quickly get off the horse I accidentally hit the button to hitch it back up again, now making this barely alive beast my official horse...

This would not be much of a problem if not for the fact that up until now I managed to keep the same horse for the entire game!!

Very early on there was a quest where I got a tan horse, and since there was an achievement for keeping a horse for 20 missions (which is the only missable achievement in the game), I made sure to keep it as my horse. Even after getting the achievement, I continued to make sure I kept that horse (loading previous save files if it ever died), tying to keep it for the whole game. To make things worse, I have been using the auto save for a while now and when I hitched the horse it saved again, so now my last manual save point was several hours previous!

So now I'm stuck with this bag of bones until I find a new one tomorrow...