The Long Riders' Guild

The History of Equestrian Travel

by

CuChullaine O'Reilly

It is only fair to admit up front that I do not feel qualified to write this article. In fact there is no living expert who can claim such an honor. This is because the subject of Equestrian Travel is the forgotten mother of our collective horse scene.

Before there were show rings, or trail rides, or rodeos, or three-day eventing, or dressage, or jumping, or gymkhanas, or polo ……….    before all of those latter day events, there was equestrian travel.

If I am struggling to explain to you the “why” of its importance, I can at least adequately explain the “how” of its appearance.

The Institute of Ancient Equestrian Studies has documented a 6,000-year-old interaction between equines and humanity. Using space-age methods, these diligent scientists proved that horses were mounted, and ridden, before the Pyramids were built.  

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For 6000 years horsemen, and women, with bold eyes and dauntless bearing have overshadowed their earth-bound contemporaries.

You may be saying to yourself at this point, “So what?”

In which case I must direct you back in time.

Johannes Jensen visualized in his book, “The Glacier,” how mankind might have first cautiously approached, and then mounted, a wild horse. The world was a new place then. Humanity was obsessed with the dual daily efforts of survival and food. The horse was seen as nothing but another source of protein, a tasty, fleet-footed, chunk of meat not easily delivered to the stone-age dinner table.

Thus we will never know who made the first decision not to view the horse through the eyes of a predator?  The Celts have long cherished the oral tradition of Epona, a legendary female who could communicate with and ride horses. Regardless, some skin-clad man or woman, whose name is now lost in the abyss of time, listened to an inner voice and changed our collective history. Humanity reached out the hand of friendship to the wary equine and a new interspecies relationship was born.

Since then there has never been a more productive bonding of man and animal.

The horse was soon plowing the ground that nurtured our first hard won seeds. He helped us round up our scattered flocks. He aided our scouts to warn us of advancing danger. He even put aside his peaceful nature and agreed to pull our war chariots to the walls of Troy.

But more importantly, the horse set us free!

I must admit at this point that I despise walking.

My long-standing motto is that I never willingly walk further than from the bedroll to the saddle. I am a firm advocate of the ancient belief that God gave us horses in order to free us from the bondage of gravity.

And free us the horse did!

For what that first Stone Age horseman discovered still holds true.

Pedestrians stay in their villages.

Horsemen roam the world.

Ask any Long Rider and they will tell you that the world looks different from atop a horse. No distance is too grand. No desert cannot be crossed. No mountain cannot be conquered. No river cannot be swum. No geographic obstacle has ever succeeded in defying the combined bravery of horse and human. For thousands of years this four-legged friend has been taking horsemen to places beyond the daily definitions of dogmatic pedestrians.

Yet it was not always so.

In fact this ancient liberation which the horse brought into our collective bargain almost ceased to exist as recently as the 1950s. For a few brief moments in the world's collective consciousness the legendary candle known as equestrian travel flickered, and was nearly extinguished by the world's indifference .

To explain this statement let me first tell you about Aimé Tschiffely.

He is credited with being the greatest equestrian traveler of the 20th century. Starting in 1925, Aimé rode 10,000 miles from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Washington DC. The book he wrote, “Tschiffely's Ride” is considered the most important equestrian travel book ever written. It details the adventures of Aimé and his two beloved Criollo horses, Mancha and Gato. Not only is it an excellent read, in addition the book inspired four generations of equestrian gypsies to take to the saddle in search of adventure.  

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Legendary equestrian traveller, Aimé Tschiffely, is seen crossing a swinging rope bridge in Peru, circa 1926. 

The list of now famous equestrian explorers who were inspired by Aimé's legendary equestrian exploits reads like a “Who’s Who” of nomadic elders.

When John Labouchere rode 5,000 miles through the Andes Mountains he cited Aimé as his inspiration. When Alberto Barretta rode 18,500 kilometers through the wilderness of South America he credited Aimé with the idea. When I rode through the Karakorum Mountains of Pakistan I offered him my silent thanks. The list goes on and on and includes the names of men and women from all parts of the globe.

However what has been lost in the reaches of time is the story of who inspired Aimé Tschiffely to climb into the saddle!

It may come as a surprise to my fellow Long Riders to discover that the main root of modern equestrian travel is Russian.

In 1875 Count Zoubovitch of Hungary rode 800 miles from Vienna, Austria to Paris, France. His journey was done in such record time that few believed it would be possible to ever travel faster on horseback.

Then in 1889 Mikhail Vasilievitch Aseev made headlines. The famed Cossack horseman rode 2,200 miles, from Kiev, Russia to Paris, France, in the breath-taking time of 33 days! Using two cavalry mares named Diana and Vlaga, Aseev averaged 100 kilometers a day in his mad dash across Europe.  

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Famed Russian Cossack Mikhail Vasilievitch Aseev rode from Russia to Paris in only 33 days!

Yet it was an age of centaurs.

Aseev’s record was almost instantly dashed to pieces under the iron hooves of Dmitry Peshkov’s horse.

Like his fellow Cossack, Peshkov was born for one purpose in life, to ride horses. And like Aseev he was anxious to show a skeptical world that the best horsemen on earth resided in Mother Russia.

Dmitry departed from the village of Albanzinski, Siberia in the winter of 1889 and rode west. For 5,500 miles he and his pacer, a gray named Seriy, pounded across the frozen steppes. They reached St. Petersburg in 193 days after averaging more than 28 miles a day. A hero’s reception with the Czar awaited the Cossack and his still-fresh horse.

And here our story takes an unexpected foreign turn.

An American newspaperman, Thomas Stevens, had been ordered by his New York editor to ride across Russia and report back on what he saw.

What he saw was Peshkov!

Tearing across the steppes towards the unsuspecting reporter came a little man and his fast moving horse.

“The Cossack turned out to be a small, wiry man, twenty-seven years old, with a pleasant face of almost mahogany darkness from the long exposure of the wintry winds of Siberia. His horse was a big-barreled, stocky gray pony about fourteen hands high. The horse was well chosen for his task. He was all barrel, hams, and shoulders. His pace was a fast, ambling walk that carried him over the ground at five miles an hour and left the big chargers of the Czar’s honor guard  far to the rear.”

Dmitry and Seriy had no way of knowing that together they were about to ride into the history books, at least for a while.

Stevens did report back to his boss.  

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It was intrepid American reporter, Thomas Stevens, who rode across Russia and told the world the story of Dmitry Peshkov. 

A news story did run in New York.

But what had more lasting consequences was the book Stevens wrote soon after. Entitled “Across Russia on a Mustang” it gives us a peek into a Russia that is no more. Serfs and Czars compete on the pages for Stevens’s attention. But through it all comes riding Dmitry Peshkov.

The book was an instant hit in the United States, England, and more importantly, Canada.

For that is where Roger Pocock lived.

An exiled Englishman, and former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Pocock was always eager for a taste of danger. He decided to dine therefore on the hardships of the infamous Outlaw Trail!

“Knowing that Peshkov’s record for travel on a road will remain unrivaled, I set about to make another standard – that of horsemanship and scouting over difficult ground.”

This Long Rider saddled up in 1891 at Fort MacLeod, Canada and headed south into an equestrian challenge that even he could not have foreseen. He rode 3,600 miles through the most infamous, and bandit-ridden, portion of the American West. What has now passed into historical legend, the Wild Bunch at Robber’s Roost, the outlaws of Hole in the Wall, the desolate beauty of Brown’s Park, Pocock not only saw but crossed unscathed on his milk-white Arab gelding.

“Where are you from,” one outlaw asked him?

“England,” he answered humbly.

“England? Is that a fort?”

Yes, Pocock saw the last of the real west.  

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Roger Pocock had already been a pirate, missionary, soldier of fortune, and cowboy, when he made his 3,600 mile equestrian odyssey down the entire length of The Outlaw Trail.

His adventures however were captured in a best-selling book called “Following the Frontier.”

It sold like hotcakes in the United States, even up in the rainy depths of the state of Washington. George Beck lived there, a long way from the Utah deserts that Pocock described, and even further from the beloved steppes of Dmitry Peshkov.

Beck was a lumberjack and no horseman.

But he dreamed of making the longest continual ride in modern history.

He did it.

Sadly his remarkable feat is now all but forgotten.

Setting off in 1912 from the village of Shelton, Washington, Beck and three companions headed off to visit the capitals of all lower 48 states. More than three years, and 20,352 continuous miles later, the four weary Long Riders rode into San Francisco.

They expected to be hailed as heroes.

Instead an Irish cop told them to “get them hayburners off the street.”

Beck and his companions weren’t just disappointed.

They were broke.

They sold all their horses and saddles, except Pinto. He was the Morab gelding who had traveled with them every step of the way. While his three companions rode the rails like hobos back towards Seattle, Beck used the last of their money to ship him and faithful Pinto home on a tramp steamer.

He tried several times to interest book publishers in his and Pinto’s story but had no luck.

“I wrote it sweet enough but the deal came up sour,” he said.

Beck died dead drunk and broken hearted in a ditch, drowned in six inches of muddy water. With his master dead, Pinto was shipped off to the rain soaked depths of the Olympic Rain Forest. The greatest equestrian travel legend of the 20th century passed his last days working as a forgotten packhorse.  

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They were the most well-travelled equestrian team in the twentieth century, covering 20,352 miles.  Yet George Beck, and his faithful Morab gelding Pinto, both came to a tragic end.

Beck’s death seemed to prove that the world was looking in a new direction, towards the new-fangled automobile. No one was interested any more in a horseman’s dusty story, no one except a tough kid from Switzerland.

His name was Aimé Tschiffely and he was hungry for adventure.

Aimé left his village near Lake Biel at an early age to see the world no matter what it cost. Thus he had few talents to recommend him when he landed in England in 1915. At first he made his living as a circus fighter, taking on all comers for the sake of a few dollars. But he was smart, so he soon talked his way into a job teaching at a plush boy’s school in Argentina.

Before leaving London he became a fan of adventure travel stories. He would have learned about Beck’s record-breaking trip through America from the British press. He would have read the best-selling account of Pocock’s adventurous ride among the outlaws. He undoubtedly knew about Peshkov’s legendary journey across the frozen wastes of Russia.  

Ten years later, with the knowledge of these other equestrian legends behind him, Tschiffely set out to ride from Argentina to Washington DC.

It was a mythical trip that almost never came to be.

With no prior equestrian experience to fall back on, the 29-year-old Tschiffely ignored the legions of local Argentine critics who told him his quest to ride 10,000 miles was impossible and absurd.

Not only did this brash neophyte propose to attempt this equestrian odyssey, he said he was going to do it on two elderly horses, ages 15 and 16, owned by a Patagonian Indian.

In his own words, “They were the wildest of the wild.”

But if Tschiffely, who had only recently learned to ride, barely knew the difference between a hackamore and a halter, at least he knew his history. In his bones ran a genetic impression that whispered to him of star filled nights and wind-borne freedom.

Somewhere deep in his soul Aimé knew that though he proposed to ride into the unknown, others had ridden there before.

Of course history has proved Aimé right.

His book changed the course of equestrian travel history.

We can look back now from the luxury of our computer driven world and see how everything, and nothing, has changed in the seventy-five years since Aimé stepped up onto the back of his wild horse.

For six thousand years each generation of mankind has been supremely confident, arrogant in the reoccurring belief that theirs is the ultimate expression of the human experience. Meanwhile the horsemen and women of history have watched from the sidelines while fires were lit, wheels were invented, pyramids were built, railroad lines were laid, automobiles were driven, and computer screens were peered into.

Throughout this vast never-ending stream of human experience and effort one thing has run through our collective unconsciousness, the need for terrestrial freedom.

Six thousand years after Epona first grabbed a handful of mane and swung on board that wild forest pony, we, her grandchildren, still dream of imitating her bold move.

We long for the blood stirring sound of horse’s hooves pounding across the steppe.

We long for the sweet smell of the leather saddle that takes us to adventure.

We long for the feel of the gentle rain in our face, the hot sun on our back, and a happy horse between our legs.

And most of all, like Aimé, and George, and Roger, and Dmitry, and Mikael, and all those other forgotten equestrian heroes and heroines, we long for our eyes to be filled with the sight of a wide, free horizon.  

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For 6000 years that altar of travel, the saddle, has been calling some of us to roam the world, like Dmitry Peshkov.  

So what's stopping you?

For that is what we Long Riders are, and this pathetic attempt at story telling is what we are about.

See you on the trail, saddle pals.

CuChullaine  

“Tschiffely’s Ride” by Aime Tschiffely, “Across Russia on a Mustang” by Thomas Stevens, “Following the Frontier” by Roger Pocock and “Khyber Knights” by CuChullaine O’Reilly are part of the world’s largest collection of Equestrian Travel titles.  These books are featured at www.horsetravelbooks.com or can be ordered from your local bookstore.

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