How Far Can You Ride in a Day?

I started riding when I was 50, after my wife, Nancy Marie Brown, bought two horses in Iceland and brought them to our central Pennsylvania home. (She told the story in a wonderful book, A Good Horse Has No Color.)

Gaeska, a mare, and Birkir, a gelding, were friendly and gentle. I learned to ride on Birkir. Nowadays I ride a chestnut mare, Saedis. Nancy and I ride four or five times a week, mainly on the dirt roads and trails leading out from our current home in Vermont.

We’re pleasure riders. For Sheriff Gideon Stoltz, the main character in my historical mysteries, riding is a necessary part of the job.

In the 1830s, a county sheriff like Gideon would have spent many days on horseback patrolling his jurisdiction. A question I often need to deal with in my fiction is how far and how fast Gideon or someone else can get from one place to another.

icelandic horses in vermont

A human typically walks at around 3 miles an hour. (In early America, some people were prodigious perambulators, covering 30 and even 40 miles a day and journeying many hundreds of miles on foot – also known as traveling “by shank’s mare.”)

A horse walks somewhat faster than a human, at about 4 miles an hour. It trots at around 8 miles an hour, a good working speed; canters at 10 to 17 miles an hour; and can gallop (essentially a fast canter) at 25 to 30 miles an hour for fairly short stretches, say a mile or so.

But the distance you can cover on a horse depends on much more than the animal’s speed: it’s also governed by topography (hills or mountains or level ground); the horse’s fitness, surefootedness, and willingness; the weather; and the surface on which the horse is ridden.

Looking at old maps and reading historical documents, I knew that the roads in Gideon’s county should be rudimentary – as they were in early 19th-century Centre County, my old home and the model for my fictional Colerain County, Pennsylvania.

Many early roads were studded with stumps: it was much easier and quicker to chop off trees below wagon-axle height than to pull out their roots and create a smoother, more uniform roadbed. Rocks, gullies, exposed tree roots, and, at times, knee- or axle-deep mud also impeded travel by horse or wagon.

Marshy areas might be traversed by a corduroy road, a line of logs laid down side by side, resting on log sleepers placed lengthwise – a tippy, uncertain surface that water seeped up through. On a plank road, the logs were split lengthwise or their tops were hewn flat. (The main thoroughfare in Port Matilda, the small town near which we lived in central Pennsylvania, is named Plank Road, commemorating the real item from an earlier era.)

There were toll roads of various lengths funded by the state or by land speculators or investors who obtained charters from state or local governments. Roads leading to towns and gristmills were standardly two rods wide (33 feet), so that if two wagons met, they could get past each other.

Near our Pennsylvania home, I used to hike up through a gap in the Allegheny Front on an abandoned road (probably a toll road) now overgrown with mountain laurel and trees; it was about 15 feet wide, and every hundred or so yards a pullout had been dug into the slope so that a rig could be backed downhill and to one side, allowing an oncoming conveyance to pass.

I read the following in an old journal describing an 1820 trip through the Seven Mountains, a sprawl of rugged ridges featured in certain scenes in the Gideon Stoltz mysteries: “We found the road extremely rough owing to a turnpike which had been made from this place to the great valley. The stones on it having [been] broken somewhat smaller than a man’s head.” You wouldn’t have ridden a horse on such a road any faster than a walk.

By the 1830s, wooden bridges had been built across watercourses on some established routes of travel. Elsewhere a rider would need to find a ford, a place where the stream was shallow enough that the horse’s hooves could reach the bottom, letting it walk through the flow. Wagons used fords, too.

In A Stranger Here Below, Gideon recalls how, two years earlier, on his way to Colerain County from his birthplace in more-settled southeastern Pennsylvania, he swam his mare Maude across the mile-wide Susquehanna River, since he lacked money for ferry passage or the toll for the long covered bridge in Harrisburg, the state capital. (Known as the Camel Back Bridge, that wooden marvel was built between 1813 and 1817, engineered by Thomas Burr, cousin of Vice President Aaron Burr, who had ended the life of Alexander Hamilton – and his own political career – in a duel ten years before.)

In general, a rider could reasonably cover around 30 miles a day on horseback on good roads – about the same distance a person might vigorously walk. By pushing a horse to the point of exhaustion, a rider might cover 50 or even 60 miles (again, depending on terrain, weather, and footing). At times, people rode their horses to death, as when fetching a midwife or a doctor, or trying to escape pursuit.

Gideon hasn’t needed to ride Maude that hard, but she has carried him all over Colerain County and into adjacent Greer County. On his journeys, he must take into account getting her fed (on grass or hay), watered, and rested. In Nighthawk’s Wing, Maude is about to lose a shoe, so Gideon interrupts his trip to get her shod – and gets a tip from the local blacksmith on a stranger who rode to the area earlier, and who may have murdered someone.

Maude is a rather nondescript, smallish bay mare. Gideon also owns Jack, a stout black wagon horse willed to him by his former mentor, Judge Hiram Biddle. Gideon’s adventurous and increasingly independent wife, True, rides Jack, who starts out balky and lazy under saddle but is gradually reformed into a good traveling mount. True’s brother Jesse’s horse is a hammer-headed, ewe-necked roan as ugly and ill-tempered as his owner.

Horses in the Gideon Stoltz mysteries have their own characters and opinions, their virtues and vices, as real horses do. Just as they were a key part of life and travel in the 1830s, they play an essential role in my novels. An enthusiastic rider myself, I enjoy working this rich aspect of American history and culture into my fiction.