Enlarge The Overland Westerners were, clockwise from the top, Jay Ransom, Charles Beck, Raymond “Fat” Rayne and George Beck. (Bainbridge Island Historical Museum)

George Beck had just turned 30. He was young enough to dream big but wise enough to know that his dreams wouldn’t go far in an isolated mill town long past its prime.

So Beck — a sometime shipwright, sometime carpenter, sometime logger — decided in 1912 to become a famous cowboy.

His plan: Saddle up his horse, Pinto, and ride from his home on Bainbridge Island to every state capital in the union. At 20,352 miles, it’d be the longest ride on record. He’d do it in three years, ending in San Francisco just in time for the much-ballyhooed Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair celebrating the just-completed Panama Canal and showcasing San Francisco’s recovery after a devastating earthquake.

Beck marked it on a calendar: June 1, 1915, the day he’d pass through the exposition’s gilded gates a hero. He imagined himself and Pinto featured alongside the exposition’s biggest attractions — the Liberty Bell, a replica of the Grand Canyon and America’s first movie stars. He’d shake hands with Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. His story would be the subject of books, maybe moving pictures. His life of toil in the woods would be at an end.

He had no problem roping in three companions. His older brother, Charles Beck; their brother-in-law, Jay Ransom, of Shelton; and a kid named Raymond “Fat” Rayne signed on for the Beck-led “Overland Westerners” expedition. None was a cowboy. Far from the open range, the four men had spent their youths in sawmills and logging camps squeezed between towering forests and the shores of Puget Sound.

“Let’s go for a ride,” Beck reportedly told the three. “There’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

What the riders found at the end of their 37-month trek was neither rainbows nor gold but cold, gray indifference.

They had ridden through towering snow drifts, forded fast-flowing rivers and sweated through deserts only to find closed doors at the trail’s end. There was no place for them at the exposition, with its celebration of everything new: airplanes, automobiles and towering steel architecture.

Standing outside the gates, saddle worn and exhausted, they watched as great throngs passed by them. They had achieved what would stand as the 20th century’s longest horseback ride, but they wandered back home broker than the day they set out.

Other riders mounted similar expeditions shortly before and after the Overland Westerners. They’d log far fewer miles but go on to achieve lasting fame. There are statues and even national holidays in their honor, but the story of the Overland Westerners, told through a smattering of yellowing photos and brittle journals, has remained largely unknown, boxed up in the basements of small-town museums or hidden in the garages and attics of the riders’ descendants.

LOGGER COWBOYS

George and Charles Beck grew up in Port Blakely, a south Bainbridge Island town that had bustled with mill workers and shipbuilders during the late 1800s.

The town’s leaders could make a credible claim to “the largest sawmill in the world” in 1890, the year about a quarter of the lumber shipped from Puget Sound was milled in Port Blakely.

Workers were drawn from around the globe. Hawaiians, Basques and Irishmen came as sailors but jumped ship, joining hundreds of young men from Scandinavia and Japan in the mill.

Port Blakely’s workers regularly met early — and often violent — ends, according to Kitsap County death records. Between 1900 and 1905, six Port Blakely men died from work accidents, four drowned, two died from alcoholism, two committed suicide and one died from “self-neglect and filth.” Two men — a Guamanian mill worker and a Chilean sailor — were murdered.

The town’s heyday was brief. With saws roaring night and day, the mill quickly exhausted the nearby supply of trees. By 1900, the mill was dependent on a steady supply of logs shipped, at no small expense, from Shelton and other parts of the South Sound.

Then came three successive blows: the shipyard’s move to Winslow in 1903; the sinking in 1906 of the ferry Dix, which killed dozens of Port Blakely residents; and a fire in 1907 that destroyed much of the mill.

The mill was rebuilt, but the last year it made a profit was 1912, the same year the riders set out on their journey.

Enlarge Three of the Overland Westerners appear in this undated photo from Shelton. Jay Ransom sits between the two women; Raymond Rayne is to the right holding a newspaper; and George Beck, the journey’s leader, is to the far right. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

George and Charles’ sister, Catherine Beck, had married Ransom and moved with him to Shelton, where Ransom worked as a log boom tender. With a pike in his hands and spiked boots on his feet, Ransom pushed floating logs in booms and mill ponds, often while standing on a rolling section of timber. The 38-year-old Ransom was the only married Overland Westerner. He and Catherine wanted a family, but four children had died in infancy. Somehow, three years on horseback didn’t seem so bad.

Enlarge Port Blakely’s mill was once Puget Sound’s most productive saw mill. Charles Beck worked there for several years. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

Rayne, 20, was a son of the Port Blakely postmaster. Before 1912, Rayne had been drifting aimlessly between logging camps in Kitsap and Mason counties. A photo shows him sitting with other tired loggers outside the Ransom family’s tent somewhere in the woods near Shelton.

The Beck brothers were the sons of a Danish carpenter who had settled in Port Blakely around 1880. The brothers had learned the family trade but spent much of their time bouncing between jobs in Shelton and their hometown. The 1910 Census lists George Beck as a carpenter living with the Ransoms in Shelton while the 41-year-old Charles was living with his parents and working at the Port Blakely mill.

“Logging is lousy business,” Beck was quoted as saying in a 1964 article by C.A. Osier, a Bainbridge horse enthusiast who took a keen interest in the Overland Westerners. “The woods shut down after the Fourth of July on account of fire hazards. Down again in winter months because of deep snow. We’re lucky if we work six months a year. Then we fell and buck the top timber for snuff and overalls.”

SETTING OUT

Beck’s Journal: Setting Off http://data.kitsapsun.com/projects/files/2015/05/Day1.mp3 George Beck describes the first day of the Overland Westerners’ journey.

Trading their overalls for wide-brimmed hats, fringed leather gloves and shiny chaps, the Overland Westerners set out May 1, 1912, from Shelton.

Beck marked the occasion with the first entry in what would amount to stacks of journals. Two of the journals are in the archives of the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum. The whereabouts of the rest are unknown.

A note on sources This story is based on a review of hundreds of archival documents and photos from the early 20th century. Wherever possible, I sourced directly from the written words of the people who were part of or witnessed the Overland Westerners’ journey. The two surviving journals of the trip’s leader, George Beck, were an invaluable resource, as were letters, postcards, newspaper clippings, death records, oral histories and other materials collected in the archives of the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum. Additional information was found in U.S. Census records, digital newspaper archives and the book “Port Blakely” by Andrew Price. The whereabouts of Beck’s other journals are unknown. In the 1960s, Bainbridge horse enthusiast C.A. Osier read all of Beck’s journals and wrote articles about the Overland Westerners for horseback riding publications and newspapers. My story relied on Osier’s written recounting of Beck’s journals for certain sections of the trip that were not covered by the surviving journals. The Bainbridge museum’s staff — notably curator Rick Chandler and administrative coordinator Dan Goff — were helpful in tracking down documents and making research suggestions. Most of the museum’s Overland Westerners collection was preserved by Jerry Elfendahl when he served as curator in the early 1990s. He scoured other museum archives, made numerous calls in search of family photos and letters and tracked down the bulk of the collection in a Seattle antique shop, where the items would have been sold, piecemeal, as cowboy curiosities. –Tristan Baurick

“At one o’clock p.m. the party rode from the barn fully prepared to start on this overland trip thru every state in the union,” Beck wrote in tight, careful script. “Proceeded to the capitol building,”

The seat of Washington’s government was in a smaller building than today’s gray-domed one. The first of many governors they’d meet and have their photo taken with was Marion Hay, Washington’s seventh governor. Hay was a Republican rancher and former mayor of a small Eastern Washington town. His one term in office was marked by the passage of the state workmen’s compensation law and the granting of women’s right to vote.

“Governor Hay, after all being introduced, took his hat off and we were ready for our picture,” Beck wrote. “After this being done, the governor shook hands with us and wished us luck on our great trip.”

Enlarge The Overland Westerners sold commemorative postcards to finance their trip. Tristan Baurick

Hay gave them a letter of introduction that they could present to other governors.

“These gentlemen, who are citizens of this state, are starting on a novel trip, a horseback excursion to visit every capital in the United States, ending up in San Francisco sometime during the Panama-Pacific Exposition,” the letter states. “Such courtesies as you may extend to these gentlemen while in your capital city will be duly appreciated.”

After about 15 miles, the riders stopped for the night in Tenino. Beck’s journal entry describes an evening routine that would be repeated hundreds of times over: ride to the edge of a town, look for a place to sleep, scrounge up a dinner and then hit the streets to sell subscriptions for the Westerner, a monthly magazine published in Seattle. Beck had worked out a deal in which he and his companions would sell “subs” to finance the expedition.

The magazine’s editor recounted his first meeting with Beck and crew in an issue of the Westerner.

“At the time we had no visible assurance of the stern tenacity of this quartet of young Westerners, save only that of clear eyes, square jaws and determined looks,” the editor wrote in 1912.

The article catalogs their gear (tent, aluminum cooking utensils, sleeping bags, camera, rifle) and their horses, which Beck refers to as Western “cow ponies of about 1,000 pounds each.”

Each member of the party would have a “typewritten copy of bylaws, rules and regulations governing the trip.” The contract with the magazine laid out a zigzagging route that dips twice into the South during two winters.

“In addition to the character of the horses used, the men themselves will affect cowboy attire to the last detail,” the article continues. “Did ever a group of Crusaders fare forth from an ancient castle better equipped?”

Their first try at selling the magazine was a bust.

“Had no luck,” Beck wrote in Tenino. “The town seems to be broke.”

Tenino wasn’t a wealthy town — it famously issued wooden money during the Great Depression — but finding subscribers would prove challenging at nearly every town they visited. That is, until the magazine suddenly ceased publication around the time the riders were plodding along the East Coast.

Enlarge The Overland Westerners pose in Shelton just before embarking on their three-year journey on May 1, 1912. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

Finding a place to sleep in Tenino would foreshadow another recurring problem. “Tried to trade for a bed but finally decided to sleep on the barn floor where we had our horses,” Beck wrote.

In the morning, they continued south to Centralia. They swung by a stable to feed and weigh the horses. Lad weighed in at 900 pounds; Bill and Dick were 950; Blaze was 965. Pinto was a trim 850. Pinto, a mottled Arabian and Morgan mix, was the only horse of the 17 used on the journey that walked the entire 20,352-mile route. Pinto averaged 18 miles a day and was never sidelined by injury.

The Overland Westerners managed to sell enough subscriptions in Centralia to buy 45 cents’ “worth of grub, which did us for supper.”

Enlarge The Overland Westerners adopted Nip while they passed through Oregon. Nip would follow the riders across the country and back home to Washington. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

Somewhere between buying candles and postcards the men were asked to join a “Wild West Show that was trying to reorganize.”

The men declined. They hunted down another barn and went to bed “all feeling fine.”

In the morning, one of the horses tried to run away. Rayne gave chase on foot. He scuffled with the horse and managed, somehow, to break the expedition’s rifle.

Rayne came back with the horse “sore as a wet hen,” Beck wrote.

On May 5, in Castle Rock, the riders slept in late, it “being Sunday morning.” The pack horse made a break when it saw the load it would be expected to carry. Beck gave the horse a “licking” when he caught him.

“He did not like it and bolted and drug me about 200 feet through mud and got away again,” Beck wrote. “I got the worse of the deal, having sprained my ankle a little.”

The riders might have taken a hint from their horses that the expedition wasn’t going to be easy, but they pressed on, staying nights in rail yards and empty sheds between Kalama and Portland.

In Vancouver, one of the horses bucked a soldier who tried to ride it. Later that night, an “old time buster” visited their camp. After a long fireside conversation, the man gave the riders their first bit charity: a few maps, a water cup and a match case. The generosity of strangers, whether a home-cooked meal from a Danish housewife in the plains of Eastern Oregon or a nickel from a orphan in Kentucky, would play a critical role in sustaining the riders.

They rode carefully through the paved streets of Portland. They didn’t stop, preferring the dark outskirts to the lights and noise of the growing city. The riders found a quiet spot along the Willamette River and cooked a “mulligan stew” with a pot borrowed from a fellow urban camper.

Beck thought he noticed a difference in the people who lived south of his home state.

“We found the people nice. It seems as though Oregon people are more sociable and accommodating,” Beck wrote.

At some point in Oregon, the riders adopted a puppy they named Nip. The black Gordon setter stuck with them the entire trip. Regularly stepped on by the horses, Nip covered large sections of the route limping on three legs.

CASCADE CROSSING

They rode south to Salem, their second of 48 state capitals (Alaska and Hawaii wouldn’t be granted statehood until 1959), where they had a photo and a handshake with Oregon’s “jolly” governor, Oswald West.

Jolly as he was, West was no horse fan. The founder of the state’s highway commission, West knew the future was in the automobile. The meandering and often muddy and rutted network of dirt and gravel roads crisscrossing Oregon and the rest of the nation would soon be straightened, leveled and paved to usher in the gas-powered age.

Beck’s Journal: Cascade Crossing http://data.kitsapsun.com/projects/files/2015/05/Cascades.mp3 George Beck describes what it was like to cross the snowy Cascade range by horse in 1912.

South of Corvallis, the riders swung east for the jagged peaks of the Cascades.

It rained on the way up, and the riders got little sleep on the rocky, uneven ground. One night, Charles Beck had his head attacked by an unknown animal. His younger brother declared the midnight attacker little more than a “mountain rat.”

The heavy rain turned the trails to mud, slowing their progress and drawing down their food supplies. On another wet and frigid night, the riders packed themselves together in the corner of an abandoned cabin to keep from freezing.

“All we can do is wait,” Beck wrote. “But if it lasts much longer we will have to go back for grub. I am sure anxious to hit the trail and make our mileage but there are sure to be things we bump up against in our travels on this world’s greatest horseback trip.”

They pushed through snow drifts of up to 7 feet in the shadow of Iron Mountain. Their daily pace slowed to a few miles a day.

“She was a fright,” Beck wrote of one tense downhill stretch.

Their meals were now limited to rice and coffee, and the horses were showing signs of fatigue. Near the crest of Tombstone Pass, at about 4,200 feet, Beck reported being “dam hungry” and “dam tired.” He was running on a “teaspoon of rice for breakfast.” He admitted doubts they could push through.

Later, recuperating in a downslope cabin that smelled of a roasting bird Ransom managed to kill, Beck was ready for more.

“Did not know whether we would get through or not, but we tackled it,” he wrote May 23. “A fellow can do more than he thinks if he makes up his mind, and we made up our minds to go through or bust.”

Enlarge “This will give you an idea of the winding roads of Idaho where a fellow has got to travel 10 miles to get 6,” one of the Overland Westerners wrote on this photo, dated June 1912. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

Beck expected clear skies in Eastern Oregon, “but she sure was wet.”

The road through the high desert plain was winding and slippery with mud. Food for both man and horse was hard to come by.

When they spotted a lonely farmhouse near the John Day River, the riders were hungry enough to beg a meal.

“And we were lucky to get it,” he wrote.

Beck chalked it up to their shared heritage.

“The woman was a Danish woman or I guess we would not have got it.”

In Mount Vernon, Oregon, the riders were invited to a dance “by the woman at the hotel.” They declined, preferring a long soak in the town’s hot springs.

According to Osier, who read Beck’s journals in the 1960s before the bulk of them were lost, there was little written about women beyond heartfelt expressions of gratitude for free food.

“Apparently, there were no Don Juans among the Overland Westerners,” Osier wrote in 1964. “Nothing was written about cowgirls, or New England schoolteachers or little prairie flowers pining away for lusty bronc riders.”

Drinking was another pleasure the riders avoided. They appeared to loosen up much later in their trek when they returned to the West. At a cowboy dance in a Rocky Mountain town, Beck wrote of “jugs of alky” tucked in hidden places “where a guy could get a short snort.”

THE GREAT DIVIDE

A Remarkable Horse Pinto was a young, somewhat small packhorse in 1912. Three years later, he held the record for the longest equestrian journey of the 20th century. The Overland Westerners used 17 horses on their meandering 20,000-mile trek. Some died, others were injured. Some were just worn out. Pinto never suffered so much as a sprain in more than 1,100 days of riding. His owner, George Beck, never achieved the fame he sought, but Pinto’s legend persists among some horse breeders, particularly those who appreciate Morgan-Arabian mixes, also known as “Morabs,” and the distinctive coat of “painted” horses like Pinto. The American Paint Horse Association celebrated Pinto in a 2008 issue of its monthly journal. “We know he sported striking markings and color that would turn the head of any Paint Horse enthusiast today,” wrote Tom Moates in the journal. Pinto’s three-year trip to every state capital in the U.S. was “a singular feat worthy of praise and reflection for any horse lover, and certainly qualities sought after by Paint Horse breeders today.” Back home on Bainbridge, Pinto was allowed to roam around the island’s south end. A gentle horse, Pinto was known by the children of Pleasant Beach as “the neighborhood jitney,” recalled longtime island resident Jack Klamm in a 1994 interview. “You whistled, and he came over. You jumped on, and he took you anywhere you wanted.” –Tristan Baurick

By the end of their first month, Beck’s traveling standards had come down. He no longer looked for beds at night and he stayed clear of restaurants.

“Hay is the best bed I can get,” he wrote May 31.

Rayne, or “Fat,” as Beck called him, kept the riders’ spirits up.

“Fat liked to sing, bustin’ out with ‘Seein’ Nellie Home’ and ‘It rained all night the day I left.’” Osier copied from one of Beck’s now-lost journals.

Rayne also composed spontaneous, off-color ballads while on the saddle.

Beck recorded the lyrics to one:

I don’t give a leavus

If it rains, snows or freezes

I don’t give a good G — — D––

“Of course, you understand, I cleaned that up a bit,” Beck wrote.

The riders arrived June 18 in Boise. They handed Idaho’s governor a letter of introduction from Oregon’s governor.

“Anyone who has the ability to stick to a saddle-horse is entitled to the kindest consideration at the hands of the Governor of Idaho,” Gov. West wrote to Idaho’s Gov. James Hawley.

West also asked Hawley, a former horse trader, to help the Overland Westerners find fresh horses — but to go easy on them, “otherwise they might suffer at your hands.”

Beck decided to handle the trading on his own.

“We had no scratch worth counting,” Osier quotes from a rare fragment of Rayne’s journals. “So (Beck), who did the trading, used gab for money.”

Enlarge The Overland Westerners meet with Gov. James Hawley in Boise, Idaho on June 18, 1912. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

Clearly worn out, the horses’ value was not in their hooves and muscle but in their legend, which was sure to grow once the world learned of the Overland Westerners, Beck assured an Idaho rancher.

“He’s a showpiece,” Beck said of one of their horses. “You’ll have barrels of fun showing him off.”

The pitch worked. The rancher even threw in dinner and a night’s rest at his ranch.

“Even Governor Hawley, had he been asked to do the dealing, couldn’t have done it better,” Rayne wrote.

Pinto was never part of the bargaining. After proving his resilience through the Cascades and across Oregon’s dry plains, the Overland Westerners resolved to get the horse through the entire journey.

“Sound as a dollar,” Charles Beck wrote on a photo of Pinto that he sent to his parents. The photo shows a stocky, glossy-coated Pinto in a grassland near Livingston, Montana.

Pinto was nearly lost a few days later during the crossing of Montana’s Powder River. At the river’s midpoint, Pinto lost his footing and tipped over. The heavy gear on his back spun him belly-up. He thrashed his legs helplessly in the air until Ransom heaved him upright and pushed him to shallow water.

In Dillon, Montana, the Overland Westerners stopped to have boxes of promotional calendars and postcards printed. The riders needed to diversify their income after magazine subscriptions failed to meet expectations.

Enlarge The Overland Westerners posed for a photo outside each state capital they visited. Not always were the governors available. In Pierre, South Dakota, they had to settle for the secretary. From left to right, the riders are Raymond Rayne, Charles Beck, George Beck and Jay Ransom. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

The one-sheet calendar was decorated with each rider’s portrait and a large group photo with Gov. Hay in Olympia. At the bottom was a map of their route and a rhyming quote purportedly from the lips of Pinto.

“Twenty-thousand miles I am supposed to travel,” Pinto says under his portrait. “Thru mud, sand, rocks and gravel. And if I receive the proper care, you will surely see me at the fair.”

Their postcards boasted of “the greatest traveling feat ever known to the history of horse flesh.” They’d face rocky passes, snow capped peaks, hot and sandy deserts and various “lurking dangers” on a “seemingly endless road.”

The long ride through eastern Montana, the Dakotas and Minnesota produced journal entries that matched the sameness of the landscape. Beck described a pattern of nights in barns and mornings spent brushing hayseeds from their hair and manure from their clothes.

In Medora, North Dakota, Beck gushed about the authentic cowboy culture he saw all around him.

“This is a quite a cowboy town,” he wrote. “Nearly everyone wears boots.”

In Huron, South Dakota, the local newspaper published a front-page story in advance of the Overland Westerners’ arrival. It had high praise for Pinto, a horse “of wonderful ambition, energy and endurance.”

The publicity apparently didn’t help because Beck’s journal continued to dwell on empty bellies and empty pockets.

One night, Rayne’s wallet fell into a manure pile while they slept in a hayloft.

“We didn’t bother to look much for it ’cause there was hardly anything in it,” Beck wrote.

In Minnesota, the Mankato Daily News was impressed with the riders’ tans but mistakenly identified them as Montana ranch hands rather than Washington loggers.

Other embellishments might have been encouraged by the riders. The near-disaster in the Powder River was solved, the article states, when one of the riders lassoed Pinto from the riverside and yanked him to safety. The climb through the Cascades — impressive enough in Beck’s recounting — now featured snowdrifts two times as tall.

The Overland Westerners were passing through south Wisconsin when they stopped for a melancholy Thanksgiving.

“No invites for a turkey feed,” Beck wrote. “Although we are practically busted, we’re thankful for our good health and for the willing horses which had taken us so far along our road.”

They cooked a “gump stew” made richer thanks to the random and perfectly timed intersection of a flying rock and a passing rooster.

“It seems a good-sized rooster got in the way of a rock which Fat happened to throw,” Beck wrote.

DOWN SOUTH

The riders started the new year “dead broke” in Kentucky.

Beck imagined the South a place of fertile fields and plentiful food. The farms did appear prosperous, but the people working in them didn’t.

Beck’s Journal: Charity from an Orphan http://data.kitsapsun.com/projects/files/2015/05/Orphan.mp3 In Kentucky, George Beck receives help from an unlikely source.

“The people take a great interest in our trip and gather around and ask questions but the poor devils have got no money,” Beck wrote after trying to sell postcards in one of the first Kentucky towns they encountered.

A livery manager locked up their horses, insisting on an extra 90 cents before he’d release them. The riders hit the streets again, trying to drum up the cash.

They got help from an unlikely source.

“When we were trying to raise the money, a little orphan boy, about 12 years old, gave us his last nickel,” Beck wrote.

He took down little Oran Smith’s name and promised to pay him back.

“Someday I am going to make this good little fellow a present,” Beck wrote.

Enlarge This undated photo taken by one of the riders was labeled only ''Deep South.'' It appears to show a child doing laundry. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

Two legs of the trip would run through parts of the South. From Kentucky, they’d pass through Tennessee, Alabama and Florida before heading north through the Atlantic Coast states. Once they hit Augusta, Maine, they’d head back south through New York and Pennsylvania and eventually cross through Kentucky again on the way to Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Beck’s Journal: The West is Good Enough http://data.kitsapsun.com/projects/files/2015/05/West.mp3 Traveling though the South makes George Beck realize how good life was in the West.

Beck’s scant knowledge of the South’s black population was rooted in stereotype and early 20th century popular culture, which often presented African-Americans as joyful servants. He was surprised, then, to find few happy tobacco and cotton field workers. In rural Tennessee and Alabama, they weren’t eating mounds of fried chicken or singing cheery songs. Instead, Beck found the worst poverty of the trip.

Enlarge Six children pose atop George Beck’s horse, Pinto, in Louisiana in 1913. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

“This is colored country,” he wrote. “The colored Mammies sit around with swabsticks in their toothless mouths. We had heard of Dinah’s fried chicken, and corn pone, and living high on the hawg, but we saw but few battered fowls and the corn crop must have been short. Also, we heard few darkies ‘singin’ soft and low.’ They sure weren’t buying our wares. They were dragging their feet with their soles floppin’ — the few who had shoes.”

The worst food of the trip was found in Georgia.

“I don’t think I ever run into such poor grub anywhere as you get through this country,” he wrote somewhere east of Macon.

Later, after a supper of “such junk,” Beck declared the entire South “a joke.”

By the time he reached Virginia, Beck’s views had softened — or at least the food had improved.

“We ran into some real eatments, and I’m speaking of Virginia Ham,” he wrote July 28, 1913, in Richmond. “Smoked bacon, yams and real fried chicken and real corn bread. We almost ate ourselves out of our britches. Fat took on another 10 pounds.”

To a reporter at a Richmond newspaper, the riders appeared a bit bored by the “effete East.”

“They have encountered very little excitement,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. In contrast, their experience in the wilder West was beset by “all sorts of dangers and difficulties.”

The paper gave an account of the horses after 8,000 miles of travel.

“Six horses have already been left behind. Three of these tried to walk on a railway trestle and were injured, one of them was killed by having a sharp stick driven in his side while walking through timber, and the other two simply lay down and quit,” the paper reported.

NEW ENGLAND

Beck didn’t have much to say beyond arrival and departure dates as they made their way through Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

He did note a stop at Yale, “where Judge Peters, from our Bainbridge Island, went to college.”

In Danielson, Connecticut, a “moving picture showman” grabbed the riders off the street and put them on a stage.

“I made a talk,” Beck wrote. “The house was packed to the doors and they say I did well.”

Boston didn’t make much of impression, beyond its cold rain, high prices and rules against selling things like postcards and calendars without a permit.

In New Hampshire, they met a Canadian mounted policeman named Baker who gave them $15 — about $350 today — “partly because he liked Pinto and Nip so much.”

New Englanders weren’t interested in buying many postcards, but they were generous with the riders.

A butcher in Maine took the riders home for dinner and insisted that Beck, who had an untreated knee injury, see his family doctor. Once patched up, the butcher paid the bill and handed the riders $25 in cash. The equivalent of nearly $600 in 2015, the money eased their travels as a fall chill set in.

WESTWARD

From Maine they moved southwest toward Ohio. Through Michigan and Indiana and south through the “catfish and paw paw country” of Arkansas and Mississippi, the traveling was uneventful. They still slept in barns but complaints about food — or the lack thereof — had subsided.

“Men and horses feeling fine,” Beck wrote in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The wheat and cornfields of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas went by with ease, although it was getting “nippier and nippier” by the time they rode through Oklahoma in early November 1914.

The Overland Westerners courted press coverage wherever they went, but end results were sometimes baffling. A Nov. 12, 1914, article in an Oklahoma City paper probably elicited the most head-scratching.

On pink newsprint, the headline blared the claim — later refuted by Beck — that the riders were after a $20,000 prize offered to them by a stockmen’s association. They’d win it if Pinto is able to cover the last 3,500 miles before June 1.

“If Pinto showed the craving, he would be fed on humming birds and champaign now,” the article states.

Enlarge George Beck poses with Pinto on June 18, 1914 outside the Texas capitol building in Austin. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

A Nebraska paper carried a similar story. The riders, it claimed, were earning a dollar for every mile they covered.

“The guys who wrote those stories must have got back of a bar and nipped plenty,” quoted Osier from one of Beck’s journals. “As for the $1 a mile and $20,000, I sure hope that comes true. As of now, we’re hustling our expenses and sleeping on barn floors, in haystacks and abandoned shanties.”

The final stretch of their journey, through the arid Western states — Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah — went smoothly. The riders were starting to feel at home and among people who understood and appreciated what it took to cover great distances on horseback. It was a nice change from the puzzled curiosity they received in the Midwest and South.

“We’re getting back in the West where folks were really interested in what we had done,” Osier quoted from Rayne’s journal. “All the talk was horses, gear and the trip.”

People they met offered free meals and stables. Crowds gathered to see them pass through. An old cowboy in Wyoming offered to change Pinto’s shoes just to say he had shod the famed horse.

In Salt Lake City, the manager of Loew’s Empress Theatre booked an event with the Overland Westerners. The manager, John M. Cooke, was impressed enough to act as their booking agent in the theaters on remaining route through Nevada and California.

“This is a wonderful feat as far as the stamina of man and horse goes,” Cooke wrote to another theater manager on official Overland Westerner letterhead. “It looks to me like it will be a big winner. The few times they have appeared in theaters during their travels, they have drawn big business, and with you under the conditions as they are, I believe it should pull very big.”

It was a heady time for the Overland Westerners. In the last leg of their journey it appeared they were finally getting the adulation they had imagined when setting out from Shelton three years before.

SAN FRANCISCO

Glory Riders Completing the 20th century’s longest horseback ride didn’t bring riches or fame to the Overland Westerners. But when it comes to epic rides, it’s not impressive mileage that guarantees recognition, said CuChullaine O’Reilly, founder of the Long Riders Guild, a group of equestrians whose members have undertaken journeys of more than 1,000 miles. “There is always the fickle public to take into account,” he said. He notes the journey of Bud and Temple Abernathy, two brothers who rode in 1911 from New York to San Francisco. They covered nearly 4,000 miles — not even a quarter of the distance covered by the Overland Westerners — but did it fast — riding for just 62 days — and they did it young — Bud was 11 years old and Temple was 7. The trip couldn’t help but grab attention. They were treated to a victory parade, a White House visit and their hometown erected a statue in their honor. In 1928, Swiss long rider Aime Tschiffely completed a 10,000-mile, three-year journey from Argentina to Washington, D.C. Like the Overland Westerners, Tschiffely’s trek was long and arduous. Unlike the Overland Westerners, Tschiffely wrote a best-selling book about his experience. He has a statue or two and even a national holiday in Argentina. Most long riders get little more than the congratulations of other long riders. O’Reilly cites a Russian rider’s 19,000-mile journey from the south tip of Argentina to the north edge of Alaska. “After five grueling years in the saddle, no one was on hand to record (his) arrival at the top of Alaska,” O’Reilly said. That’s pretty much how things happened for the Overland Westerners. “Their example has served as an ironic lesson for those who now ride in their hoofprints,” O’Reilly said. “You don’t ride to find glory. The journey itself is the reason for going.” –Tristan Baurick

After a show at the Empress in Sacramento and a visit with one last governor, the Overland Westerners traveled their final 100 miles.

They arrived in San Francisco 100 years ago — June 1, 1915 — just as they planned.

The equivalent of six coast-to-coast trips across the United States, the journey ranks as the longest horseback ride of the 20th century, according to the Long Riders Guild, an international group of equestrians who undertake trips of more than 1,000 miles.

Reaching their goal was something to be proud of, but it did not produce the ending Beck had promised.

After 1,127 days in the saddle, Beck admitted in San Francisco that “the pot of gold we had been pursuing had moved out, way out into the Pacific Ocean.”

Beck had failed to make arrangements for a place at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Even the free-for-all of the 65-acre “Joy Zone,” with its pretend Samoan village, alligator farm and sumo wrestlers, had no room for the riders. No one was going to bump “Luna, the Best Formed Woman in America” or “Captain, the Horse With a Human Brain” from the show houses for an act made up of four saddle-sore loggers and a tired dog.

The exposition’s promoters shook their heads when Beck gave them his pitch. They already had a cowboy show, they explained. Unlike the Overland Westerners, with their dirty jeans and scuffed boots, the cowboys of “The 101 Ranch” wore bright kerchiefs and spotless white hats. They had pretty girls, gunfights, roping, tying and bulldogging. The best trick Pinto could do was stand still when Beck heaved Nip onto his back.

“It turned out we were just four men on tired, footsore plugs,” Beck wrote.

A different cross-country trip to the exposition — this one in a shiny new convertible — had no problem attracting national attention. The 27-day journey by New Yorker Ned Post and his mother, Emily Post, was serialized in one of the country’s largest magazines and was quickly expanded into a book that made Emily, its author, famous.

The Overland Westerners disbanded within days of their arrival. Ransom, Rayne and Charles Beck sold their horses and gear to buy train tickets home.

George Beck stayed a while longer, trying to sell his story to magazine editors, vaudeville agents and movie studio executives. He managed to meet with Jack London but the nation’s most popular adventure writer “didn’t want any part of it,” Beck wrote.

He eventually found passage for himself and Pinto on a steamship bound for Seattle.

BACK HOME

George Beck returned to Port Blakely, where he ran the Please-U Theatre, a little movie house that opened during weekends in the town’s Masonic Temple. He went back to carpentry and shipbuilding and took up drinking.

He had a reputation for showing up to job sites hung over and sometimes a little drunk. The quality of his work, whether sober or sodden, never wavered. The timekeeper at the Winslow shipyard had a standing order not to dock Beck’s pay, no matter how “under the weather” he was, out of fear he’d quit and go to work for a competing shipyard.

There’s scant information on Charles Beck after 1915, but the 1920 Census lists him as a 50-year-old saw filer who lived with his mother in Port Blakely. He died not long after.

Rayne, 28, had found a job as a clerk in Seattle, according to the Census.

Ransom was, in 1920, back working the booms in Shelton. He and Catherine finally had a child — a girl named Erna, who was born in 1919.

In 1920, George Beck talked a friend into driving him to New York City for another unsuccessful attempt at finding a book publisher.

Enlarge The Overland Westerners sold promotional calendars to help finance their journey. Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

In 1928, Swiss equestrian Aime Tschiffely achieved the fame that had eluded Beck. Tschiffely’s ride from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Washington, D.C., took about as long as the Overland Westerners’ trek but it covered half as many miles. What he lacked in mileage he made up for in book sales. His “Tschiffely’s Ride” still is in print today. There are statues and riding events in his honor. In 1999, the Argentine Congress declared Sept. 20 — the day Tschiffely finished his ride — “National Day of the Horse.”

Late in life, George Beck was known to wander Bainbridge Island’s logging roads alone with Pinto. In 1941, he had a poem about Pinto published in the Bainbridge Island Review.

“Let me tell you a story that is most unique of a little horse with a world of hidden fame …” he wrote.

A Poem for Pinto http://data.kitsapsun.com/projects/files/2015/05/Pinto_poem.mp3 George Beck wrote a poem about his trusty steed in 1941.

Beck tried, off and on, to write the Overland Westerners story himself.

He drowned in a roadside ditch before he finished.

Pinto continued to roam around the ghost town of Port Blakely and the summer homes that popped up in nearby Pleasant Beach. His neighborhood food pilfering was tolerated just as he tolerated the kids that climbed on his back and whistled for rides.

In February 1934 — nearly 20 years after the Overland Westerners finished their journey — Ransom, now a widower, announced he’d repeat the trip. This time, his companions were a tavern manager and a cook, both of Shelton. It would be no mere ride this time; Ransom planned to make a show of it. He hired a film crew and dressed accordingly: 10-gallon hat, high-heel boots and six-shooters on his hips.

“Appearances will be booked in vaudeville houses where the rovers will put on skits and relate experiences for the amusement of the patrons,” a Shelton newspaper reported.

The second journey would, in the end, attract less attention than the first.

So forgotten was his record-setting feat in 1915 that Ransom’s hometown paper failed to mention it. The 1934 expedition, the paper said, would be a history-making trip — “the like of which has never been attempted in America.”