140 FAST WALKING 



Englishman claims that his horse can o^o seven miles on a 

 trot for six he can go on a canter with the same exertion. 

 Our cavalry officers on the plains — and they are the best 

 judges of distance riding alive — have arrived at a similar 

 conclusion, and all long marches are made at alternate 

 walk or trot, or walk alone. Most cavalr}^ does this. It 

 is astonishing how fast a walk can be, not in the excep- 

 tional horse, but in a large body of cavalry. General 

 Forsyth marched four troops of the Seventh Cavalry from 

 Fort Meade, Da., to Fort Riley, Kan., a distance of seven 

 hundred and twenty-nine miles. This was measured by 

 odometers, checked off by the railroad mileage w^hen trav- 

 elling along it. " The maximum rate per hour was 4.91 

 miles ; the minimum. rate was 3.20 miles. The mean aver- 

 age per hour for the entire march was 4.11 miles. It is 

 to be understood that the gait considered is the walk, as 

 that was the one pursued during the march." Now the 

 speed of the average saddle -beast on a walk is, in the 

 Eastern States, barely three miles an hour, because he is 

 not educated. If you have owned a horse which could 

 walk four full miles, you have been lucky. Most men, 

 walking a three-and-a-half-mile gait, out-pace the riders 

 they meet who are walking their horses. It takes a very 

 busy horse to out-walk a fair pedestrian. Yet here, by 

 training, we have four troops of cavalry averaging over 

 four miles an hour. 



The trot is unquestionably an easy gait for the horse. 

 But you cannot make a Southerner or a plainsman adopt 

 this theory. The Southern horse goes his so-called arti- 

 ficial gaits, or canters ; you cannot give away a trotter 

 for the saddle. The bronco canters all but exclusively. 

 The matter seems to depend on inbred habit, and compar- 

 ative statistics on the subject, however interesting, could 

 scared v be made accurate. 



