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Historical Long Riders
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Negley Farson was the grandson of an American civil war general who rode with Sherman as they burned Georgia from Atlanta to the sea. Perhaps that is what gave the young man his life-long thirst for adventure? Farson flew with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, took part in the Russian revolution, was present at the arrest of Gandhi, and went on to become one of the most celebrated international journalists of his day. Yet one of Farson’s adventures stands alone, his equestrian exploration of the Western Caucasus mountains. The intrepid reporter saddled up in the spring of 1929, accompanied by an aging, eccentric Englishman who lived in Moscow. With no prior equestrian travel experience between them, the two would-be explorers were soon discovering the harsh realities of life on the road. They were lashed by hailstorms, threatened by skeptical Soviet commissars, denied shelter by suspicious natives, and spent night after night in rain-soaked misery. A personal chronicle of an already exciting life, Caucasian Journey tells how Farson also discovered the seldom-seen splendours of this mountainous region with its alpine snowfields painted gold by the sun, picturesque villages forgotten by the outer world, and magnificent horsemen who were practically born in the saddle. |
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Celia Fiennes - rode from Land's End, Cornwall, England, to Aitchison Bank, Scotland in 1697. |
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Jean Paul Ferrier was a Frenchman who travelled through Afghanistan in the early 19th century. Ferrier rode from Tehran, Iran to Kandahar, Afghanistan in 1845, during which time the young Long Rider adapted local clothes and customs. In the course of this hazardous journey, Ferrier was captured, imprisoned and tortured by corrupt local rulers. |
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Henry N. Flynt - took his daughter Juliet and son Henry Jr. on a horseback journey from Connecticut to Canada in 1935. |
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It was 1937 and few places on Earth were more remote than Afghanistan. Into this hermit kingdom went Ernest Fox. Technically searching for oil and gemstones for the Afghan king, the American engineer discovered a countryside unchanged since the days of Marco Polo. For a year Fox rode a series of local horses through the mountains, valleys, and deserts of this forbidden realm, visiting such fabled places as the medieval city of Herat, the towering Hindu Kush mountains, and the legendary Khyber Pass. The equestrian engineer thus spent an exciting time on his sojourn, exploring a country which had been a highway for history since the days of Alexander the Great. Fox's book, Travels in Afghanistan, was compiled from the field notes, maps and sketches Fox brought back from his 2,000 mile horse back adventure. |
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Captain Charles Colville Frankland was an English naval officer, turned Long Rider, who set off in 1827 to explore the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. During the course of his two-year journey Frankland made an extended equestrian exploration of Syria, at which time he adopted Turkish riding clothes and met Lady Hester Stanhope, the legendary English aristocrat who had turned her back on life in London, preferring instead to raise pure bred Arab horses in the mountains close to Damascus. These many colourful events combined to impress the young Long Rider with the beauty of the life he had stumbled into. In his 1829 book, “Travels to and from Constantinople,” Frankland wrote, “The charm of the vagrant kind of life which I led for weeks in Syria is inconceivable; its constant variety, its perfect independence, the excitement of difficulty, the apprehension of danger, were so many powerful but agreeable stimulants. My wants were few and easily supplied; my bed was the ground, my covering a cloak and my canopy the heavens; in such a climate I could desire no better. I halted when and where I chose and set out again as my fancy dictated. I could live upon a morsel of Arab bread, content myself with a draught of water and sit upon the back of my horse from an hour before sunrise until nightfall without feeling fatigued. Thus I gained prefect liberty and independence.” |
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Lewis Freeman led a major equestrian expedition across the Canadian Rockies in 1925, in order to study and photograph the Great Columbian Ice Field. In addition to being a scientific success, the expedition set the precedent for Long Riders to incorporate state-of-the-art technology into their exploration efforts. While 21st century equestrian explorers are quick to bring along their lap top computers and satellite telephones, Freeman was the first Long Rider to use radio communication during his journey. The large radio (pictured here with Freeman and his dog) was carefully packed in a wooden crate and used to communicate with the outside world. |
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The most recent Long Rider discovery reveals that a Victorian era Samurai General known as Baron Yasumasa Fukushima rode from Berlin, Germany to Vladivostok, Russia in 1892. This military hero, who spoke ten languages and organized the Japanese secret service still in effect today, told the European press that he was inspired to take to the saddle because of the previous rides of Colonel Burnaby. . |
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Charles Wellington Furlong (1874-1967) led a life alternately filled with academic excellence and daredevil courage. He was a superb painter as well as being a foreign correspondent, ethnological researcher, rodeo cowboy and military attaché. For more information, please go to this page on our website which shows he was in correspondence with the most famous Long Rider of the twentieth century, Aimé Tschiffely! |
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"Two-Gun Nan" Aspinwall-Gable - After a five-year search, The Long Riders' Guild is able to confirm the legendary equestrian journey of the first woman to ride across North America alone. Nan Jane Aspinwall-Gable led an extraordinary life, which included being a headline act as a sharp-shooter in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. According to recently-discovered documentation, a disagreement between rival showmen Buffalo Bill Cody and Pawnee Bill led to the circumstances under which Nan made her solo transcontinental ride. Could a woman ride from the Pacific to the Atlantic alone? the showmen argued. Nan set off in September 1910 to prove it was possible. Mounted on her thoroughbred, Lady Ellen, the lady Long Rider carried a letter from San Francisco Mayor McCarthy addressed to his colleague, Mayor Gaynor in New York. During the course of the journey, Nan refused to allow anyone else to care for Lady Ellen, even to the point of shoeing the horse herself fourteen times. After months on the road, Two-Gun Nan and Lady Ellen arrived in New York on July 13th, 1911. According to newspaper reports at the time, the hardy equestrian traveller was awarded a diamond medal for endurance by Richard K. Fox, the long-time publisher of The National Police Gazette. In an amazing historical aside, the story of Nan's medal was later plagiarized by the notorious equestrian travel charlatan, Frank Hopkins, whose story was recently made into the fictitious movie, "Hidalgo." Although researchers have spent years trying to find information about this amazing Long Rider, her story was only uncovered thanks to the diligent academic research of Mary C. Higginbotham. For decades, equestrian researchers had fruitlessly searched for clues to the ride and life of Nan Aspinwall. Mary discovered that Nan's work as an entertainer and traveller was undertaken under her married name of Nan Gable. The Long Riders' Guild is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of the story of Two-Gun Nan entitled "In Genuine Cowgirl Fashion." This book contains all of Mary Higginbotham's unique research and will be amply illustrated with never-before-seen photographs of Nan in the saddle and on the stage. |
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Friedrich Gerstacker - rode from the Atlantic to the Pacific, across the Cordillera Mountains, from Argentina to Chile in the winter of 1850. |
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While the annals of The Long Riders’ Guild are full of daring tales written by intrepid men and women, few equestrian explorers can match the James Bond-like escapades of the Scottish Long Rider, Parker Gillmore. Gillmore was already a seasoned world traveller, big game hunter and prolific author whose journeys had taken him to dangerous parts of North America and Africa, when the British government offered to send him on a secret mission for Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. The date was April, 1879 and the job was simple. Gillmore was to mount up at Cape Town, South Africa, ride more than a thousand miles alone into the heart of the African continent, whereupon he was to negotiate with local native rulers, urging them to allow their warriors to become part of the English army. When that bit of mounted diplomacy was accomplished, the amateur ambassador was to ride back and report on his success. Mind you, there was one bit of bother. Forty thousand warriors in the deadly Zulu army, under the command of their wily leader, King Cethshwayo, had gone on the war path against the English red coats. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the overly optimistic British force which initially took the field suffered a deadly defeat while camped at Isandlwana, where nearly every soldier was killed. Thus Africa was ablaze in what amounted to a genocidal gang war when Parker Gillmore was asked to ride into this blazing cauldron of danger and deceit. The resultant equestrian journey became a litany of courage and suffering. In his book, A Ride through Hostile Africa, Gillmore recounted how he drove away lions intent on eating his horses, crossed the edge of the deadly Kalahari desert, endured starvation, went without water and became lost on the trackless veldt, before he even managed to find the tribal chiefs he had been sent to negotiate with. One such meeting resulted in the chief informing the uninvited Gillmore that he was prepared to have a hundred of his nearby warriors spear the impudent Scottish Long Rider to death. At which point the cool Gillmore pointed both his pistols at the chief and advised the local regent that if a spear moved the king would proceed the equestrian explorer to the happy hunting ground. Thus, with little to show on the diplomatic front, Gillmore turned his weary horses, Bobby and Tommy, towards the safety of faraway Cape Town. Yet his troubles were far from over. Raging rivers blocked their path and Gillmore was tormented by an “African fever” so severe that at one point he passed out under a tree for nearly twenty-four hours. Luckily, when he awoke, the Long Rider found his horses hovering overhead, as anxious as he to escape from the many perils surrounding them. At last, after a ride that should have made him a hero, the near-dead Gillmore rode into civilization, where he was promptly informed that the Zulu war was over, hence his services were no longer required, and that during his absence his beloved wife of twenty-five years had died and been buried. Years later the famous English author, H. Rider Haggard, penned several novels about an intrepid big game hunter named Allan Quatermain, a fictional hero whose adventures in turn helped inspire the creation of Indiana Jones. Yet few now remember the real life Long Rider, Parker Gillmore, whose equestrian journey across African rivaled any fictional account either on the page or the silver screen. |
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James Gilmour was a Scottish missionary who arrived in Mongolia in 1882. He learned to speak fluent Mongolian, then adopted the lifestyle of his hosts by living in their yurts and fitting himself, as far as possible, into their equestrian lifestyle. He spent twenty-one years exploring Mongolia on horseback, before dying in the steppe kingdom. |
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The “soldier-author” was how Willard
Glazier billed himself. A penniless schoolboy at the beginning of
the American Civil War, Glazier enlisted in a cavalry unit of the Union Army
of the Potomac and was soon captured by Confederate troops. After a daring
escape, he was recaptured, only to escape a second time, before finally
reaching the Union lines again. At the conclusion of the conflict Glazier
wrote a book describing his wartime experiences. When every New York
publisher rejected him, the young cavalryman self-published his work, hoping
to make back his costs plus a hundred dollars profit. Instead, to his
delight, the book took off like wildfire, selling 400,000 copies. With the
$75,000 profit realized from his efforts, Glazier determined to ride “from
Ocean to Ocean.” Leaving New York state in 1875 on his horse, Paul Revere,
the former trooper set out to see the mighty Pacific, many miles and many
unexpected adventures away. Ocean to Ocean on Horseback is Glazier at his best, complete with every sort of mounted adventure, and includes an account of how he was kidnapped by Arapahoe Indians. |
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