Stories from the Road

Special Illustrated article about Tschiffely’s Ride

Charles Darwin, Scientist and Long Rider

Though he is known today as "the father of evolution," English biologist Charles Darwin was also an avid equestrian traveller.  During the five years in which he made his scientific journey around the world, Darwin took every opportunity to explore the continents of South America, Australia and Africa on horseback.  The scientist-turned-Long Rider wrote of "the pleasure of living in the open air with the sky for a roof and the ground for a table."  Extracts from his round-the-world diary provide clues about his equestrian adventures, beginning with his ride into the jungles of Brazil in 1832.

Green Hell

Many places come to mind when one thinks of the dangerous and unexplored places of the nineteenth century world. Africa and Tibet, for example, both challenged brave explorers in that previous age. Yet one continent offered all the adventure a daredevil could want. South America was still politically unstable and geographically challenging. It was exactly for these reasons that George Whitfield Ray sailed into Buenos Aires in 1889. A Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, Ray was a part-time missionary and full-time adventure junky. Within a short time he had managed to acquire a job as “Official Explorer for the Bolivian Government”. Shortly thereafter he began a series of explorations which still make for hair-raising reading. His story describes a journey so brutal that it defies belief. The horses were repeatedly attacked by vampire bats. Then Ray and his horses were reduced to sucking dew off leaves to survive. By the time he discovered the “lost” tribe he was seeking, Ray’s clothes were in rags, held together by horse hair thread. The intrepid Long Rider did eventually return to civilization, but not without paying a price for his boldness. He lost two toes to blood-sucking insects whose bites also caused much of the flesh on his feet to rot off.

A Shoot Out with Mexican Bandits
At first glance one may wonder how qualified were the two young men who set off from a Texas border town bound for Mexico City in 1931. The author, Joseph Goodwin was a Yankee with an itchy foot and a taste for peril. In contrast to this homespun hero was his companion, Robert Horiguichi, the sophisticated, multi-lingual son of an imperial Japanese diplomat. To say these two mismatched, would-be equestrian explorers were unprepared for the deserts, quicksand and brigands they encountered in the Mexican wilderness would be a mild understatement. Luckily before leaving the Lone Star state they had procured what they believed were all the necessities for explorers, including a canteen, an old pistol, and a portable typewriter to chronicle their soon-to-be-famous equestrian escapades. Along with their mustangs, the amateur adventurers set out to prove that the dangers of the road were as welcome as the pleasures, something for which they did not have to wait long to discover. In one particularly harrowing episode, they became the only Long Riders in the 20th century to survive a gunfight with Mexican bandits.

The Long Ride in Mexico
Graham Greene was a prolific English novelist whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Throughout his life, Greene was obsessed with travelling far from his native England, to what he called the "wild and remote" places of the world. A 1938 trip to Mexico resulted in the book The Lawless Roads. During the course of that trip, Greene made an equestrian journey into the jungles in search of the ancient city of Palenque.  An excerpt from The Lawless Roads is entitled The Long Ride.

The Senorita Passes Through
After having been inspired by Aimé Tschiffely, Ana Beker set off to ride from Argentina to Canada. As the weary Long Rider was nearing the end of her epic 17,000 mile journey, she made a lasting impression on a small child. That incident would have gone unrecorded if the Long Riders' Guild had not received an email from Suzanne Copenhagen, who wrote to say that she recalled Ana Beker riding into her parents' front yard in 1954 to seek shelter for the night!

"I was not quite six years old when Ana Beker stayed overnight at our house outside Sandy Spring, Maryland, while her two horses enjoyed the hospitality of our barn," Suzanne wrote. She then provided her eye-witness account of meeting the Long Rider.

Belly Up to the Bar
Verne Albright set off on a journey from Chiclayo, Peru, to Los Gatos, California in 1966. His intention was to introduce the Peruvian Paso horse into North American equestrian culture. He succeeded. But along the way the American Long Rider encountered some strange cultural traditions.

Hoofprints of Patagonia
In 2013 French Long Rider Capucine Lelièvre set off with two friends to explore southern Argentina. Her article, "Argentine à Cheval,"  describes how “Equestrian culture is very much alive at the end of the world". (PDF)