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The World Ride |
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Click on picture to enlarge The Little Long Riders Club is reserved for children age twelve and under. The heroes of this special horse-loving club are Bud and Temple Abernathy, (pictured above) the greatest little Long Riders of all time.
Once Bud and Temple were famous from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. If you had asked any American school children in 1911 who the Abernathy brothers were, they would have given you a look of disbelief. “Everyone knows the Abernathy Boys,” they would have said. And they would have been correct, because the mounted adventures of the little Long Riders from Oklahoma Territory had taken the United States by storm. On their first equestrian journey in 1909 the tiny travellers, aged nine and five, encountered a host of Old West obstacles, including wolves and wild rivers, when they rode more than 1,000 miles from Oklahoma to Santa Fe and back – ALONE!
The following year the intrepid brothers set their sights on New York City, which they reached after a month of hard riding. Along the way the inventor Orville Wright offered to take them up in his new-fangled airplane and President Taft gave them a warm welcome when they reached the White House. Kids envied them. Women adored them. Grown men pulled hair from their horses’ tails to keep as souvenirs. This public frenzy culminated when Bud and Temple rode their Oklahoma ponies alongside Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in a victory parade witnessed by more than a million cheering New Yorkers. Even though they were only six and ten years old, Temple and Bud Abernathy were a national sensation. Then in the summer of 1911, they did the impossible. They rode nearly 4,000 miles, from New York to San Francisco, in only sixty-two days. Once again, the Abernathy Boys had made a historic ride without any adult assistance and accomplished an equestrian feat which has never been equalled. It is because of their various rides that the astonishing Abernathy Boys serve as the inspiration to a new generation of Little Long Riders.
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