> "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 12:37 PM 3/29/2004 -0800 Deborah Harrell wrote:
> >I finally went to see _Hidalgo_, which I enjoyed > >very much -- horses, horses, and more horses! There > >were obvious Hollywoodisms, and a bit of Disneyesque > >preachiness, but the basic story is interesting: > >former Army Scout and his mustang (already champion > >endurance racers in the US) go to the Middle East > >to race 3000 miles against the desert's best > (Arabians, > >and I suspect some Barbs and Turkomenes or > >Ahkel-tekes). I'll have to find out more about the > >lead character, Frank Horton, who was an early > >defender of the American mustang, and according to > >the credits died in the '50s. > > A good look into the claim of "based on a true > story" is here: > http://slate.msn.com/id/2096671 > Turns out that the author of the book doesn't have > much credibility. Being an Arabian fan, I _was_ surprised to have never heard of this race - turns out the Long Riders Guild (an endurance group, quoted in the Slate article) found no evidence of it: http://www.horsetravelbooks.com/hidalgo.htm "...This book contains an unprecedented study, undertaken by more than seventy experts in five countries, ranging from the Curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum to the former Sultan of Yemen. These academics investigated the historical improbability of Hopkins� claims and weighed him on his merit, not his myth. The resulting exhaustive study revealed that Hopkins had maintained a spirited disregard for the truth, plagiarized material from famous authors, slandered genuine American heroes and perpetrated a massive fraud for nearly one hundred years..." The official Frank T. Hopkins site states "According to the U.S. Remount Service Journal of 1936, he competed in and won over 400 long-distance races..." yet acknowledges that at least some of what he claimed has no documentation. Still, he _was_ apparently a champion of the mustang, and an actual horseman as well: "In recent times, the question has been raised: how much of Frank T. Hopkins is a myth and how much is history? Well, that's sort of like unhitching a horse hair rope, but FTH certainly embellished a good yarn to rival any American cowboy (and like Virgil Earp's widow, Mrs. Hopkins contrived a dime novel memoir many years after his death). His recently-discovered writings on horsemanship however, reveal a man who not only knew horseflesh and distance riding, but was ahead of his time when it came to gentling and training technique. In fact, many of today's most experienced equestrians have studied these writings and believe that Frank Hopkins was a forerunner of the natural horsemanship being taught in popular clinics around the world today..." http://www.frankhopkins.com/hopkinshome.html His actual horse-related comments frex 'letting a horse work from its natural gait' do show a degree of correct horsemanship. I will have to read that work (as opposed to his horse stories) to judge further. http://www.frankhopkins.com/legend.html WRT endurance rides, there have been thousands of miles covered by the same animals; the Criollo, sort of the South American mustang, was made famous by a 10K mile trip: "...To decide the issue, Solanet offered two of his horses to a Swiss school teacher who desired to make an intercontinental voyage from Buenos Aires to New York. Aim�-Felix Tschiffely made Mancha and Gato famous in Argentina and wrote their names in the history books of the world. The enthusiasm created by these two horses, and the fact that they not only completed the journey without incident but also lived for more than 40 years, has made Argentines take Criollos seriously ever since. Many people then copied the doctor's example and began raising them in semi-liberty..." Individual horses that have travelled multiple thousands of miles include Arabs, Yakuts (a type of Mongolian(?) pony), Saddlebreds and Camargues (semi-feral horses of southern France). Here is a list of some riders and their horses (hey, Charles Darwin spent some time in the saddle in South America, and wrote about it): http://www.thelongridersguild.com/What_is_Timeline.htm I have mentioned the Tevis Cup, a one-day 100 mile race here in the States; in 1981 a 7-year-old Arab won it in 10 hours, 46 minutes! Note that nearly all of the winners are Arabs or part-Arabs. http://www.foothill.net/tevis/TEVISWIN.HTM Note also that this is _not_ flatwork, but mountinous: http://www.foothill.net/tevis/trail/elevation.htm (I'd read elsewhere that it went from 10K feet to below sea level, but this shows 8700' -> 700'.) Debbi who still enjoyed seeing the horses and the desert! :) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
