I got to wondering just how far it actually is "from the Mexicali border to ... Arkansas," and how long that might take to travel on horseback.
The distance from Andrade CA (at the eastern end of the border between Mexico and California) to Texarkana (just across the border from Texas) -- in other words, the minimum distance that could be termed "from the Mexicali border to ... Arkansas" -- is a good 1,300 miles (at least 2,000 km). Several internet sources define a moderate day's ride as about 30 miles. So if Tom rode 30 miles per day, every day (which seems unlikely), he could make the trip in about a month and a half. So it's not out of the question for him to cover that territory, but not likely to be something he'd do on a regular or frequent basis.
As for Hadley, let's say it's near Laramie in south-central Wyoming. The distance from Andrade is around a thousand miles (1,600 km), and the distance from Texarkana is about the same. So covering that entire territory would be doable, but again not something he'd do frequently.
More likely, he'd just mosey around as the spirit leads him!
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MAGolding (1231)
3 years ago
Of course the transcontinental railroad - the Union Pacific/Central Pacific line - was finished in 1869. And since then no part of the trans Mississippi west, except for southern Texas, should have been more than 500 or 600 miles from the transcontinental railroad during the 1870s and early 1880s. And during the early or mid 1880s a southern transcontinental railroad and a northern transcontinental railroad were completed.
So after that no place in the west should have been more than a "mere" 250 or 300 miles from a railroad. So that should have helped shorten a lot of trips in the west.
And on the Mavarick thread I did comment on how surprisingly far the Mavaricks managed to travel back and forth in the west during the few fictional years of the series.
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CarolTheDabbler (576)
3 years ago
I'm just going by memory here, and haven't seen Sugarfoot since its network days, but even though I recall the Mavericks being on riverboats (of course) and possibly on trains, it seems like Sugarfoot was always on horseback. (Did he always ride the same horse? Did it have a name?) If other Westerns are to be believed, they allowed horses in baggage cars, so he could have covered long distances by train without giving up his horse -- though depending on how much a "horse ticket" cost, it might have made more sense to sell his horse, ride the train, and then buy a new horse.
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MAGolding (1231)
3 years ago
Cattle on cattle drives from Texas would be driven hundreds of miles to railroad stations and then taken in cattle cars to stockyards where they would usually be fattened up, and then taken to slaughterhouses in cities like Chicago to be slaughtered. So at least some western railroads sometimes had cattle cars.
As more and more railroads were built, it became more and more common for the US army to transport soldiers by rail from one assiignment to another. And when those soldiers were cavalry their horses would also be shpped by train. So there should have been some horse cars used by western railroads. The army might have had special legal arrangements mandating that the railroads gave passage to troops, which might have required having cars for cavalry horses.
i once read a factual account that about 1890 or 1900, when all the warrior tribes had been settled on reservatons, two warriors from a plains northern tribe bought tickets on a train going south to the Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) where there were many reservations for tribes they had formerly raided. So at Indian Territory they entered a reservation of a former enemy tribe, killed a man guarding a horse herd, and drove the horses to the train station, where they bought tickets back home and passage for the stolen horses in horse cars. Thus using white man's technology to make a raid much easier and faster than in the old days.
So I get the impression that some railroads in the old west did have cars for horses, which might have been the same cars they used for cattle at other times.
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CarolTheDabbler (576)
3 years ago
That's good info, MAGolding. I've heard the figurative expression "cattle car," but never thought much about its literal meaning.
I'm guessing that a special cattle/horse car would mostly have been used when the railroad expected a large shipment of livestock. But if a particular train routinely had a lot of passengers who brought their saddle horses with them, they might have included a special car for those horses. On other routes, where saddle horses were a less common occurrence, they might have put them in a mixed-freight or baggage car.
In any case, back then it must have been a common enough occurrence that they would've had standard ways of dealing with it -- kind of like people bringing bicycles or wheelchairs on public transportation nowadays.
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