In 1763, a Mr. Shafto won a match which was to provide a person who should ride one hundred miles a day, on any one horse each day, for twenty-nine days together, and to have any number of horses not exceeding twenty-nine. The jockey accomplished the task with fourteen horses, and on one day rode one hundred and sixty miles on account of the tiring of his first horse. The celebrated Lafayette rode in August, 1778, from Rhode Island to Boston, a distance of nearly seventy miles in seven hours, and returned in six hours and half.
One of the most extraordinary feats in the way of express riding performed in modern times was that of a boy of fifteen, Frederick Tyler, who conveyed, from Montgomery to Mobile, the news of the two days’ battle, fought between the armies of the United States and Mexico in the summer of 1846. The distance, one hundred and ninety miles, was accomplished in thirteen hours; and during the entire night the boy caught and saddled his horses, none of which were in readiness, as he was not looked for by those who had the horses in charge.
A bet against time was won in July, 1840, by an Arab horse at Bungalore, in the presidency of Madras, to run four hundred miles in four consecutive days. Mr. Frazer relates, in his “Tartar Journeys,” a still more striking instance of the speed and bottom of the Arab: a horse of that breed carried him from Shiraz to Teheran, five hundred and twenty-two miles in six days, remained three at rest, went back in five days, remained nine at Shiraz, and returned again to Teheran in seven days. Another high-blooded Arabian carried Mr. Frazer from Teheran to Koom, eighty-four miles, in about ten hours. A courier, whom Major Keppel fell in with between Kermanshaw and Hamadan, places one hundred and twenty miles distant from each other, performed that journey, over a rugged mountainous tract, in little more than twenty-four hours; and the next morning set off on the same horse for Teheran, two hundred miles further, expecting to reach it on the second day.
It is, of course, among the wild races inhabiting vast level tracts, such as are suitable to the habits and constitution of the horse, that the power of holding out long in the saddle is most assiduously and most generally cultivated. There are tribes and nations who may be said to spend the greater part of their lives on horseback:—the Kirghis, for instance, in Central Asia; the Gauchos, or countryfolk of European descent, who inhabit the immense Pampas, or plains of South America; and, in a still higher degree, the Indians of the same regions. The Pampas, though fertile, are totally uncultivated, and yield the scattered inhabitants no other nourishment than water, and the flesh of the unappropriated herds of cattle and horses, that roam over them in countless multitudes. Their hardy inhabitants are thus portrayed by Sir Francis Head:—