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Historical Long Riders
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Oscar Wilde - rode through the rugged terrain of the Peloponnese mountains to reach Olympia, Greece in 1890. In his prize-winning poem, Ravenna, Wilde "galloped, racing with the setting sun, And ere the crimson after-glow was past, I stood within Ravenna's walls at last!" Wilde detested train travel, and told reporters, "The only true way, you know, to see a country is to ride on horseback." |
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Historically the world of equestrian travel has contained an exciting mixture of unique men and women. Some are adventurers seeking danger from the back of their horses. Others are travelers discovering the beauties of the countryside they slowly ride through. A few are searching for inner truths while cantering across desolate parts of the planet. Then there is Messanie Wilkins. She was acting on orders from the Lord! In 1954, at the age of 63, Wilkins had plenty to worry about. A destitute spinster in ill health, Wilkins had been told she had less than two years left to live, provided she spent them quietly. With no family ties, no money, and no future in her native Maine, Wilkins decided to take a daring step. Using the money she had made from selling homemade pickles, Wilkins bought a tired summer camp horse and made preparations to ride from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. Yet before leaving she flipped a coin, asking God to direct her to go or not. When the coin came up heads several times in a row, one of America’s most unlikely equestrian heroines set off. What followed was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable equestrian journeys. Accompanied by her faithful horse, Tarzan, Wilkins suffered through a host of obstacles including blistering deserts and freezing snow storms, yet never lost faith that she would complete her 7,000 mile odyssey. Last of the Saddle Tramps is the warm and humorous story of a humble American heroine bound for adventure and the Pacific Ocean. |
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Blame it on the Czar ! If Harry de Windt, that dashing 19th century Long Rider, had been allowed to follow his original plan, he would have galloped to India via the Central Asian satraps of His Imperial Russian Highness. When suspicious St. Petersburg put a halt to Harry’s Russian route, the intrepid equestrian explorer determined to reach his goal via the Shah’s empire instead. What followed was a ride to remember as Harry de Windt, lecturer, author, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and equestrian explorer par excellence, saddled up in 1890 and set off to examine the forgotten corners of Persia and Baluchistan. The resultant journey was literally one for the record books as the redoubtable Harry proved time and again that he wasn’t going to be put off by a few minor inconveniences such as the weather, which ranged from an arctic storm in Persia that froze his cigar to his lips, to a howling desert wind in Baluchistan with temperatures nearing 120 degrees Fahrenheit! Neither was handsome Harry bothered by the less than ideal accommodations he discovered. “The floor was crawling with vermin but in Persia one must not be particular,” he casually observed. Nor was our author overly concerned about his physical safety, dismissing the fact that the last foreign traveler who attempted this route had been “waylaid, robbed, tied to a tree, and left to starve.” Though it reads like a mounted Jules Verne novel, A Ride to India is replete with the author’s scientific observations and appendices, including details from his exact route, “road overgrown, much camel thorn,” to Harry’s “Table of Languages in Baluchistan.” Part science but all adventure, “A Ride to India” takes the reader for a canter across the Persian Empire of a romantic and bygone age. The intrepid de Windt subsequently undertook an even more hair-raising journey - he travelled from Paris to New York by Land! |
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At first glance Theodore Winthrop didn’t look like a hardened equestrian adventurer when he set out to travel across Washington Territory in the early 1850s. The twenty-five-year-old was a recent graduate of Yale and a confirmed East Coast intellectual. Winthrop didn’t let his education handicap him however. Instead he set out to ride horses and canoes across some of the most remote portions of the early United States. The resultant book, Saddle and Canoe, is a vibrant picture of frontier life in the Pacific Northwest and covers the author’s travels along the Straits of Juan De Fuca, on Vancouver Island, across the Naches Pass, and on to The Dalles, in Oregon Territory. Throughout his journey Winthrop spent much of his time among both pioneers and Indians, whose picturesque descriptions are found within the pages of this historic travel account. Never one to hold back his opinions, the Yankee traveler thus regales the reader with personal observations and blunt honesty on a host of topics, people and places. |
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Don Worcester - rode across the Mojave Desert - twice - with his younger brother, Harris (below) in the 1930s. The boys were aged 15 and 13. |
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Harris Worcester - rode across the Mojave Desert - twice! - at the age of thirteen in the 1930s. |
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Arthur Young - rode more than 5,000 miles on seven journeys in the late 1700s across England, Ireland and France. |
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He heard the word “impossible” the day he was born. But Colonel Charles Young, the son of freed slaves, spent his life proving that he was a winner in every sense of the word. Born in dire poverty in Kentucky in 1864, Charles Young overcame extreme prejudice and became the third African-American to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point. An accomplished linguist, Young spoke Latin, Greek, German, French and Spanish, talents he used during a distinguished military career that saw him serving in a variety of campaigns, including an excursion into Mexico in search of Pancho Villa. Young's brilliant and aggressive operations in Mexico won him the rank of colonel. After commanding Fort Huachuca, Young was medically retired in 1917 for high blood pressure. With the United States having just entered into the First World War, Young was anxious to assume combat command in Europe. To prove he was medically fit, Colonel Young determined to seek a personal meeting with the Secretary of War. “I rode on horseback from Wilberforce, Ohio to Washington DC, walking on foot fifteen minutes in each hour, the distance of 497 miles to show, if possible, my physical fitness for command of troops. I there offered my services gladly at the risk of life, which has no value to me if I cannot give it for the great ends for which the United States is striving.” Though he was re-instated as an officer in the United States army, Colonel Young did not see service in Europe. Upon his death in 1922, an outpouring of national grief was awarded to this overlooked hero, who was then interred in Arlington National Cemetery, reserved for America’s war dead. Click here to read a story about Charles Young's life. |
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According to his own pen, young
British Subaltern George Younghusband was, “sick of the
pomps and vanities of this civilized world of ours.” Though stationed in
colourful India, Younghusband decided to spend his army leave by exploring
southern Burma on horseback. In early 1887 the adventurous, if
inexperienced, equestrian explorer set off with a Ghurka orderly, a Madrassi
cook, an interpreter known as “the Archbishop” and the hero of this tale,
Joe the Burmese Pony. There is no tale in all of equestrian travel
literature which paints a picture of a more loveable scamp than Joe, this
delightful four-footed rascal. This story deals with Younghusband’s Burmese
pony, who despite his diminutive size, gave the professional horseman more
than he bargained for. “Having been a cavalry soldier for some years, and
rather fancying myself a decent rider, I had never viewed this small atom of
horse-flesh otherwise than in the light of a means of conveyance when I was
tired. However, he very soon knocked all that nonsense out of me; for he
went off like a streak of lightning, stampeded the two elephants, who
immediately devastated the village, and shed my goods on the roofs of
houses.” What follows is the good-hearted tale of a young man, discovering
an enchanted country, aboard a once-in-a-lifetime horse. Younghusband's delightful book, Eighteen Hundred Miles on a Burmese Pony takes the reader on a mounted journey complete with the requisite adventures, but with the added delight of a pint-sized hero you’ll never forget. |
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Lieutenant Zubowitz - Rode from Vienna to Paris in November 1874. |
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