“Riding horseback was nothing to me. I enjoyed it and have often wished that I kept account of the miles a good horse has carried me over the plains of Texas, into Mexico, and up the northern trail as far as Canada,” wrote buffalo hunter and cowboy Frank Collinson. Collinson tells the story in his book, Life in the Saddle, of how he traveled the untamed West back in the 1870s.

While headed to Lincoln County, New Mexico to fight in the Lincoln County wars, Collinson met up with Sam Coggin, after whom Coggin Park, among other things, in Brownwood is named. Coggin convinced him that the wars would get him killed, and that for free, as no one was paying anyone anything to die. He talked Collinson into hiring on with his cattle outfit instead. Collinson worked for Coggin for several years, grazing and driving cattle from the Coggin ranch on Clear Creek in Brown County, up to Palo Duro Canyon and into New Mexico, and later chronicled many of his long and eventful rides through the countryside.

If you have ever ridden horseback from one destination to another, you will know there is no better way to really see, to actually feel, the country around you than from the back of a horse. You notice things this way. There is a slow, driving rhythm to the trip, a sense of being part of the land itself. You learn to see what your horse sees. It’s not at all the same as zooming through from town to town in a car, noticing only road signs and seeing the land in between as nothing but an obstacle to overcome.

“I remember well one ride I made,” Collinson wrote. “I left the Colorado River country in Texas in March and rode my horse, Greyhound, belly deep into the Pacific near Los Angeles, and got back to Brownwood on Christmas day. I have the hoof of Greyhound on my desk. He was raised by Charles Jones on Clear Creek in Brown County, Texas. His brand was a circle with an I in it.” I don’t know if Charles Jones was connected to Coggin’s ranch on Clear Creek. I poked around a bit, trying to find out, but didn’t come up with anything.

Collinson tells how he rode out from Palo Duro Canyon west, and did not encounter a single solitary soul for an entire ten day journey. I guess it is human nature to want what we don’t have. Maybe Collinson and his like would have loved to trade the hot, dusty transport of horseback for an air conditioned, 75 mph ride that could wrap up his ten day journey through the wilderness in just a few hours. I somehow doubt that though.

To see thousands of basically unmapped miles between here and Canada on a horse must have been an adventure that would deeply change a person. To learn firsthand the wildness of empty land, the utter silence of vast mountains and hidden valleys, to see the sunset from a hill somewhere that has no name–I imagine that would teach ways to understand what living is all about that can no longer be easily found. Truly, I am jealous of Collinson. At least his book is out there. You can even rent it for free on Internet Archive. Reading the book is probably the closest most of us can ever get now to feeling what it was like to wake up one morning in Brownwood, Texas and decide to ride your horse out to California, dip him in the Pacific and ride back, simply for the pleasure of the journey.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns and articles appear periodically on BrownwoodNews.com