Probably the greatest endurance rider of all time was Frank T. Hopkins, the son of an Army scout and a Sioux mother.
Frank T. Hopkins

Hopkins rode mustangs in about four hundred endurance competitions
and won most
of them.

 6. "Cow Ponies & Buffalo Runners"

By Dr. Donald E. Worcester

Probably the greatest endurance rider of all time was Frank T. Hopkins, the son of an Army scout and a Sioux mother. Hopkins served as a courier for General George Crook and had many opportunities to test Indian ponies on long rides. "You can't beat mustang intelligence in the entire equine race," he said. "These animals have had to shift for themselves for generations. They had to work out their own destiny or be destroyed. Those that survived were animals of superior intelligence."

In 1877 a band of captured Sioux ponies was about to be shot in order to immobilize the restless warriors. Sioux chief Red Calf urged Hopkins to buy a small, white-eyed mare—although she weighed only seven hundred pounds she could carry a man all day on the run without tiring. Hopkins bought her for three dollars and later obtained an equally tough pinto stallion from an Apache. These two were the foundation for his famous White-y line of mustang endurance horses.
Frank T. Hopkins' shaking hands with Tobel, his opponent,
after a hard riding contest, which he won. The horse is "Gypsy Boy," descendant
from the little indian mare "White Y." This stallion weighed a little over 900 and
Mr. Hopkins claimed he had the best set of running gear ever placed under a horse.
(photo courtesy - The Horse, March-April 1935)
In 1886 race promoter Lucky Baldwin and Richard K. Fox, owner of the Police Gazette, offered $3,000 for the winner of an endurance ride from Galveston, Texas, to Rutland, Vermont, a little under two thousand miles. Hopkins entered the contest on Joe, a buckskin stallion taken with a wild herd in Wyoming when Hopkins was catching mustangs for Buffalo Jones. Because others found Joe difficult to handle, Jones offered him to Hopkins on the condition that he could break him to ride. By gentle methods Hopkins succeeded, and within two months was riding Joe on buffalo hunts. Jones financed Hopkins for the endurance ride, confident that a mustang could outlast any other breed. Fifty-six riders, including cowboys, horse trainers, and ex-cavalrymen set out from Galveston on September 6.

Hopkins didn't push Joe at first and the other riders soon left him behind. After a week he began overtaking them, and on the seventeenth day he passed the last rider. He reached Rutland on the thirty-first day, then waited thirteen days for the second man to complete the ride, and a few more days for the third. Both of their horses were worn down and in poor condition; no others reached Rutland.

Hopkins rode mustangs in about four hundred endurance competitions and won most of them. In l890 he was in Paris with some of his White-y horses, descended from the Sioux mare and Apache stallion, when the Congress of Rough Riders of the World offered to pay his expenses for entering one of them in a three-thousand-mile race in Arabia. Hopkins rode his pinto stallion Hidalgo and crossed the finish line in sixty-eight days, more than a day ahead of the second rider.


Dr. Worcester is an Ida and Cecil Green Distinguished Emeritus at Texas Christian University. His work has also appeared in The Historian, American Anthropologist, and Journal of Inter-American Studies.		  
 
6. "Cow Ponies & Buffalo Runners"
Worcester, Dr. Donald E. The Spanish Mustang. El Paso: University of Texas El Paso, 1986: pp. 63–64.
 

this site sponsored by
The Horse of the Americas Registry,
& IRAM - the Institute of Range and the American Mustang

email:info@frankhopkins.com