Two Bits---The Gold Standard
Bruce Weary DC
best endurance horse ever.
I would like to throw a candidate into that discussion.
I came across this story, which is archived in our local museum and
related in Sharlot Hall's book,
"Cactus and Pine." I will paraphrase where I can, and quote when I should.
In 1864, in Prescott, Az., the northern Arizona military post, Fort
Whipple was just being built, and mostly with pine
logs which were hauled in by pack horses....."brought from Texas and
condemned to be shot
because of sore backs and piteous condition......one suffering
wreck....was recognized as a famous
race horse once owned by Custer's regiment." Capt. Charles Curtis was
urged by a groomsman
"to buy the poor creature and let him care for it. The old race horse
responded to food and rest,
and as his sores healed and his gaunt sides filled out, his legs showed
all their old-time speed. Curtis once
wrote me that he had more than once 'cleaned up a hatful of Mexican
dollars' at local races; but it was as a scouting
horse that Old Two Bits--named in derision when he was a skeleton from
abuse and starvation--
showed his remarkable intelligence. Trained in the Indian wars of the
Plains, he seemed to know every
trick of Indian attack and was coveted as the mount for the scout of the
most dangerous service."
Fort Whipple came under attack from Mojave, Apache and Yavapai
tribes, and it was decided that a single
rider might escape detection better than a group in going for help at
Fort Wingate--in New Mexico--about a five day
ride by their reckoning. (Check out the distance on a map.) Capt. Curtis
loaned Two Bits for the ride to Fort Wingate.
"Shot from ambush beside the trail and mortally wounded, the old
horse out ran the Apaches and, when his wounded
rider fell off for loss of blood, Two Bits went on to Fort Wingate,
where the sight of the bloody saddle and
pouches and his own wounds told the story.
The old horse headed the relief party and led them back to his fallen
rider and there dropped dead. The troops,
to all of whom the old race horse was a familiar comrade, buried him
under a heap of lava boulders
beside the old Government Trail a few miles west of old Fort Wingate,
New Mexico."
There is a moving poem written about this adventure that includes a
passage that says the tired horse, traveling
in the dark, was within about a half mile or so of the fort, when
"...the daybreak bugles of Wingate rang
and a faint neigh answered the reveille."
What a good boy. Bruce Weary
Barbara HB
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:54:33 -0700
> From: bwe...@cableone.net
> To: Ride...@Endurance.net
> Subject: [RC] Two Bits---The Gold Standard
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D'Arcy Demianoff-Thompson
In my opinion, which more than likely only matters to me, Old Two Bits goes down as the best endurance horse in history in my book.