Travel by Horse

Horses are a staple of western fiction. When writing or reading about them, it’s helpful to understand common terms about the way they move. Whether or not an experienced horseman can see the animal, he or she can tell how fast the critter is moving by the distinctive sound of hooves striking the earth.

Walk

Walk

A walk is a four-beat gait, meaning three hooves remain on the ground while the fourth moves. The walk is a very comfortable gait for riders. It’s smooth, producing only a slight swaying motion. At a walk, riders have no trouble keeping their butts in the saddle.

Horses can walk all day, even under saddle, but they don’t move very far very fast. The average horse will cover three to four miles an hour at a walk; some move as slowly as two miles per hour.

Trot and jog

Technically, a jog is slower than a trot, but practically—at least in western riding—both gaits are referred to as jogging. Jogging is a two-beat gait in which diagonal pairs of legs move together: left rear with right front; right rear with left front.

Jog

Trotting primarily is associated with horse shows (during which judges want to see that a horse can move at variety of speeds on command) and harness racing. Racing trotters often cover as much ground as quickly as other horses gallop. Some harness races require horses to pace, in which the legs on each side move together while the legs on the other remain on the ground.

The jog is a horse’s natural working gait. If left to his own devices (and not escaping a threat), a horse will move at a jog when he wants to cover distance quickly. Horses can jog for a long time without tiring, but many riders can’t take the pace. With a few notable exceptions, a jog can be extremely jarring and puts enormous strain on the muscles in a rider’s legs, back, and abdomen. Working cowboys who spend a good deal of time in the saddle may move their horses at a jog, but pleasure riders generally try to avoid the gait if they value their butts, which slap the saddle with each step until the rider learns to “move with the horse.”

At a jog, horses cover an average of about eight miles an hour. So-called “gaited horses” like the Tennessee Walking Horse and the American Saddlebred don’t jog or trot. Instead, their natural middle gait, a “running walk,” can cover as many as fifteen miles in an hour. Because all four hooves move independently, a running walk is a comfortable gait for riders. Both breeds are primarily pleasure, not working, horses.

Lope

Lope or canter

Lope and canter are essentially the same gait, a three-beat movement in which three hooves are off the ground while a rear leg supports the horse’s weight. At a lope, horses can cover about ten to fifteen miles in an hour; some can reach speeds of up to twenty-seven miles per hour.

Note: Horses under western saddle lope. Canter is an English-riding term, possibly derived from Canterbury.

Gallop

The gallop, a four-beat gait, is the horsey equivalent of run and averages about thirty miles per hour. Horses bred for speed, like Thoroughbreds and racing Quarter Horses, can gallop as fast as fifty miles per hour.

Gallop

In the wild, horses gallop in order to escape a threat. Most horses can gallop for only a mile or two without risking serious injury or death. (Yes, some horses will run themselves to death at the urging of a rider.)

How far can a horse travel?

How far a horse can travel in a day depends on the horse’s condition, the availability of food and water, and the terrain he is asked to cover. At a combination of lope and walk, a young horse in optimal condition can travel fifty to sixty miles a day in good weather over flat terrain, as long as he is allowed to drink and graze every couple of hours. The faster a horse moves, the more often he will need to rest, eat, and drink.

Though it may seem counter-intuitive, the longer a horse moves fast, the shorter the distance it can cover in a day. Pony Express riders galloped about 10 miles (or about half an hour) before changing horses and usually covered 60-70 miles a day, but that was an exceptionally grueling pace for the rider. A good average pace is about 40 miles per day, which is the speed the U.S. Cavalry aimed for during the nineteenth century. Over uneven terrain or in bad weather, a horse and rider would do well to cover twenty miles per day. In the mountains, ten miles per day would be a good pace.

Many cowboys carried grain—usually corn or oats—in order to get more out of their horses. Grain provides increased carbohydrate-based energy. Sweet feed, which contains molasses, was not as common unless a horse was stabled. Horses love sweet feed, but it’s not good for them except as a treat.

Remember, too, that most working cowboys preferred—and still prefer—to ride geldings over mares or stallions. As a rule, geldings are much more tractable than either stallions (which can be a handful at best and a nightmare if a mare anywhere in the vicinity is in season) or mares (who naturally establish a pecking order within a herd and can be cranky). In the wild, a mare runs the herd; stallions are tolerated only for breeding and protection.

Four Authors, Four Stories, Four Challenges

Regardless how easy some authors make fiction-writing look, all of us struggle with something in every story.

Take “Making Peace,” my contribution to the Prairie Rose Publications anthology Cowboy Cravings, for example. The hero, Bennett Collier, is the elder brother of Amon Collier, the hero from “The Big Uneasy” in Lassoing a Mail-Order Bride. The brothers’ relationship composed a significant subplot in “The Big Uneasy,” and “Making Peace” puts a period on the end of that relationship’s sentence. My challenge lay in ensuring both stories could a) stand alone as complete, satisfying reads in their own right, and b) be read in any order without one giving away too many of the other’s secrets. That second point was particularly vexing, since “The Big Uneasy” provided backstory for “Making Peace.” In situations like that, there’s a delicate balance between revealing too much and leaving readers confused by revealing too little.

I understand it’s common among authors to know their characters and stories so well that they think they’ve made things clear when they haven’t. Readers will have to let me know whether I accomplished my goal with “Making Peace.”

Turns out, all four of the authors who contributed to Cowboy Cravings faced at least one issue that proved challenging, but in the end each of us became stronger for having faced her demon head-on.

Here are the problems each author faced, along with her solution:

‘Hearts and Diamonds,’ by Cheryl Pierson

Revenge sets Nick Diamond after a bride, and nothing will stand in his way. But when that bride happens to be outspoken firebrand Liberty Blankenship, all bets are off. Anything can happen when Hearts and Diamonds collide!

I think for “Hearts and Diamonds,” the hardest thing was the love scene. In a short story, it’s really tough to create a love scene that “moves along” rapidly with people who don’t really know one another. So I gave Nick and Libby a “sort of” shared background—they remember one another, but he’s several years older than she is, and they’ve lost track of one another.

Something else that helped the love scene was the fact that she was marrying someone she wasn’t in love with—and Nick reminds her of that. She lets him know, even though she might not have been in love with [villain] Carlton Ridgeway, at least she could have hoped for respectability. That plants a seed in his mind...this might just work. Because, Nick had planned to give her that, too, all along—unless she wanted an annulment.

Because a short story is so limited on word count, the love scene I wrote was one that got the point across heatedly, without going into the details of how each part of the sex they had was accomplished. And, because they share this wedding night, when the next crisis happens, they’re already emotionally closer than they’ve been when we left them the night before in their ...ahem...passion. So it was finding the right way to move the relationship along without having it seem unrealistic that was the most difficult thing for me with this story.

‘Starr Bright,’ by Celia Yeary

A stubborn rancher, a Spanish beauty...and the Texas summer heats up.

Any time we take a character—or characters—from previous stories, we try to keep them as true to their original personality and looks as possible. This shouldn’t be too difficult, unless, in my case, I used two characters who were not in the same story. In “Starr Bright,” I used Starr Hidalgo in all her glory, but I paired her with Conrad Taylor who was a character in another novel, another decade. In my mind, these two should be paired, no matter what. Since dates aren’t generally added to novels, I knew no one would ever figure that out...or care.

‘Lily and Mesquite Joe,’ by Kristy McCaffrey

Lily Kingston has long loved Mesquite Joe Riordan. Facing the truth of his past will test her resolve, but only her stubbornness can win his heart.

I wrote “Lily and Mesquite Joe” well over two years ago as a submission for Harlequin Historicals Undone, the online short-story branch of this popular series of books. It was rejected due to lack of characterization. Besides being bummed about the reject, I was completely stumped. I honestly couldn't figure out how to fix the story because I wasn’t really sure where the problem lay. So, I set it aside and let it collect cyber-dust.

When the submission call for Cowboy Cravings came, that story started waving its hand at me—pick me, pick me. Prairie Rose Publications welcomed it into the family, and kind-hearted editor Cheryl Pierson gave it a once-over, then a twice-over, and, I believe, a thrice-over. My hero, Joe Riordan, needed work, and with Cheryl’s guidance I began to see the issues that plagued the tale.

In the end, Cheryl helped me redeem Joe, and when that finally happened I had that “aha” moment of why the story was denied so long ago. So, while rejection naturally makes all of us writers run crying to our beds with a box of doughnuts, it helps to remember that finding the right home for a story is important for the health and well-being of that creation. We want to find a place where our writing can flourish. Lily and Mesquite Joe found their way into the world at last.

So… Here are my questions:

Authors, have you ever encountered a challenge that dogged you all the way through a story? How did you resolve the issue?

Readers, have you ever encountered a story in which you recognized an author’s struggle? Maybe something just didn’t seem quite “right.” How did that affect your relationship with the story?

Love in the Time of Miscegenation

She’s the sweetest rose of color this darky ever knew.
Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew.
You may talk about your Dearest May, and sing of Rosa Lee,
But the Yellow Rose of Texas beats the belles of Tennessee.

Those are the original words to the chorus of “The Yellow Rose Texas,” a folksong dating to early Colonial Texas. The first known transcribed version—handwritten on a piece of plain paper—appeared around the time of the Texian victory at San Jacinto in April 1836.

In its original form, the song tells the story of a black man (“darky”) who has been separated from his sweetheart and longs to reunite with her. The lyrics indicate the sweetheart was a free mulatto woman—a person of mixed black and white heritage. In those days, “person of color” was considered a polite way to refer to black people who were not slaves. “Yellow” was a common term for people of mixed race.

During the Civil War, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” became a popular marching tune for troops all over the Confederacy; consequently, the lyrics changed. White Confederates were not eager to refer to themselves as darkies, so “darky” became “soldier.” In addition, “rose of color” became “little flower.”

Aside from the obvious racist reasons for the modifications, legal doctrine played into the picture as well. Until the U.S. Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1967, all eleven former Confederate states plus Delaware, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia outlawed marriage and sexual relations between whites and blacks. In four of the former Confederate states—Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—marriage or sexual relations between whites and any non-white was labeled a felony. Such laws were called anti-miscegenation laws, or simply miscegenation laws. In order to draw what attorneys term a “bright line” between legal and illegal behavior, many states codified the “single-drop rule,” which held that a person with a single drop of Negro blood was black, regardless the color of his or her skin.

"New Orleans' Voodoo Queen" Marie Laveau
(1774-1881) was a free Creole of mixed race.

Texas’s miscegenation law, enacted in 1837, prescribed among the most severe penalties nationwide: A white person convicted of marrying, "living in sin" with, or having sex with a person of another ethnicity was subject to a prison sentence of two to five years. Well into the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for the non-white half of the illicit relationship to be severely beaten or killed by irate local citizens.

The first American miscegenation laws arose in the colonies in the 1600s. The laws breathed their last gasp in 2001, when Alabama finally removed the anti-miscegenation clause from its state constitution after a referendum passed with only sixty percent of the popular vote.

Time Enough for Locks

For as long as there have been haves and wanna-haves, the haves have sought ways to secure their valuables from thieving wanna-haves. History no longer remembers the inventor of the first lock, but it is said the key was invented by Theodore of Samos in the sixth century B.C., which leads to the suspicion locks have been around much longer. In fact, crude locking mechanisms dating to the early Pharaonic period have been found in Egyptian ruins.

The first devices resembling what we know today as door locks were discovered in the palace of Persian king Sargon II, who reigned from 722 to 705 B.C. They were large, clumsy devices made of wood; nevertheless, they served as prototypes for contemporary security devices.

Bodie [California] Bank's vault, mid-1870s. Dick Rowan,
photographer (National Archives and Records Administration)

The first all-metal locks, probably made by English craftsmen, appeared between 870 and 900 A.D. in Rome. A row of bars of varying lengths, called tumblers, dropped into holes drilled through the horizontal bolt securing a door or gate. Only the person who possessed a metal bar fitted with pins corresponding to the tumblers could shove the tumblers upward through the holes, thus freeing the bolt.

No great advancements in lock technology occurred until about the fourteenth century A.D., when locks small enough to carry appeared. Traveling tradesmen used the “convenient locks” to secure their money and other valuables.

Although padlocks were known to ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, the first combination lock didn’t appear until the eighteenth century. Until 1873, most banks used combination locks of some kind to secure their vault. The secret to effective combination locks was creating a complex series of letters and numbers that would frustrate anyone who tried to disarm the mechanism. The code for the combination lock securing the mid-nineteenth-century safe in the U.S. Treasury in Washington D.C., for example, could not be opened without a lengthy series of letters and numbers that provided 1,073,741,824 possible combinations. Because determining the code by organized guesswork would require 2,042 years, 324 days, and one hour to crack, the lock was considered burglar-proof.

Combination locks had one big Achilles heel, though: It didn’t take long for criminals to figure out they could kidnap a bank employee and require him or her to dial in the correct code.

In 1873, James Sargent invented what he called a theft-proof lock. Theft-proof locks combined a combination lock with a timer that prevented the safe from opening until a certain number of hours had passed, even if one knew the combination.

Ruins of the 1906 Nye & Ormsby County Bank in Manhattan,
Nevada. The bank crumbled, but the vault survived.

By the late 1870s, theft-proof locks were de rigueur in banks all over the U.S. Though they weren’t quite unbreakable — thieves simply swapped dynamite or liquid nitroglycerin for captive bank employees and blew open safes — theft-proof locks thwarted more thieves than any previous mechanism. Called time locks these days, much more sophisticated descendants of Sargent's invention remain popular devices for banks and other high-security areas.