Regarding my recent article on the Abernathy brothers, the pre-teens who rode from Oklahoma to New York City in 1910, I have a few thoughts I didn’t share last week. The biggest of which is, the Abernathys were the last hurrah of the horse and the end of the “horse peoples”.
The fact that the Abernathy boys returned to Oklahoma in an automobile is a powerful and self-explanatory symbol of the waning of the era of the horse. But what do I mean by the “end of the horse peoples?”
Take a look at this advertising poster from the 1890’s.
Lay aside, for a moment, the casual chauvinism of the phrase, “savage, barbarous and civilized races,” and focus instead on who’s being portrayed on Buffalo Bill’s poster. From left to right, it’s gauchos, cowboys, vaqueros, cossacks, plains Indians and bedouins. Any semi-educated American of the era would have instantly recognized these figures as representatives of the greatest horse cultures of the 19th century. If you wanted a real rider, you found someone from one of these groups, or, if you were Buffalo Bill, you found a few of each and presented them to the world for a profit.
At the end of the 19th century, the life-styles and traditions of these horse-peoples were largely intact. By the 1950’s, they were largely gone.
True horse people ride from infancy, mounting the horse as soon as they can be put on it. By that standard, the Abernathys were some of the last Americans to be fully raised on horseback. I’d be willing to bet that, since 1920, no American had as much time in the saddle by age 10 as Temple Abernathy did.
In the 19th century, however, very young horsemen would have been everywhere across the globe. In the 1880’s, Jack Abernathy, Temple and Bud’s father, was cowboying professionally at the age 9. At the same time, Comanche boys were usually given their first pony by the age of 5. This familiarity with the horse and its ways, bred a powerful disdain for the man afoot. Like the average American circling the Wal-Mart parking lot, the average horse-culture horseman hated to walk even a few feet more than was strictly necessary. Walking was shameful.
In Europe, the horse was still the symbol of the aristocracy, even though its practicality was waning. Through the Middle Ages, young aristocrats were mounted on horses as soon as possible, at age 3 or 4. It was axiomatic that you couldn’t be a good knight if you started after puberty. Managing the horse, the weapons and the armor were too difficult to learn later in life. But gunpowder ended the era of the mounted knight, and the dawning of modern warfare slowly pushed the horse to the sidelines. After 1914, cavalry was mechanized or else, and European horse culture became an expensive hobby, not a way of life. Other than American cowboys, only the supposedly “savage and barbarous races” maintained the centrality of the horse.
But, the same technologies that changed the battlefields—gunpowder, internal combustion engines and modern state bureaucracies—ended the last of the horse peoples. The Comanche, the greatest of the native North American horsemen, were herded onto reservations; the cossacks were destroyed by the Soviets; the American cowboys all bought pickup trucks; the Mexican vaqueros and the South American gauchos were only a couple of decades behind the cowboys in modernization; and the bedouins were pushed to the margins of the desert world. The Tuareg of the Sahara might have been the last of the pure horsemen, but now they’re all driving Toyota Hi-Luxes.
Lots of various people still like to ride horses for fun, or as an expression of cultural pride and history. The few remaining Cossacks like to parade on horseback, but, just like the rest of us, their daily driver is an automobile. A few cowboys, gauchos and vaqueros still mount up and work cattle from horseback, but it’s now more of a job than a way of life. And, judging from my Facebook, my high school friends who raise cattle are just as likely to survey the range on an ATV as a horse.
That’s one of the reasons I find the story of the Abernathy boys so compelling. It’s not just that they’re riding across the country alone, it’s also that they’re at the very tail-end of the era of the horse. For them to go out on horseback and come back in a car is a detail too perfect to ignore, too poignant in its symbolism. The horse was done, and the last of the horse peoples were riding into history.
Speaking of 1900’s America…
2020’s America: "We invented fusion cuisine!"
1910’s America: "Ha, ha. You are like little baby."
One of the things I’m working on is a book about dining out in turn-of-the-last-century America. My premise is that, contrary to expectations, Americans were remarkably well-informed about various cuisines and had surprisingly cosmopolitan tastes in food. They ate a lot of things we would not have expected, like sushi. By 1910, in most American cities, there was a wide variety of restaurants, not just American, but Mexican, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Japanese and Italian. In some places, you might find things like a Korean restaurant that served hot tamales and chop suey. The dining scene was wild and wide open and Americans embraced it with both arms.
Here are a few things I’ve read over the past week that you may find entertaining.
David Shields is talking about she crabs.
Stefan Schwartze is explaining how the Portuguese taught the Japanese how to deep fry things.
From Texas Monthly comes a good story about the Texas Panhandle, the author’s grandfather and Bonnie and Clyde.
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back on Thursday with a recipe. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter and like An Eccentric Culinary History on Facebook. See you on Thursday!
Really looking forward to your book.