12/16/2025
What is your why? What keeps you going through it all?
What if an ordinary schoolteacher with no real riding experience saddled up two “unrideable” horses and rode more than 10,000 miles across a hemisphere, straight into cliffs, bandits, blizzards, and jungles, just to prove a point?
Not a movie.
A true story.
And now, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story.
⬇️🐴⬇️
In 1925, a 29 year old Swiss teacher named Aimé Tschiffely was working in Buenos Aires.
He was not a famous explorer.
He was not a cavalry officer.
He was a schoolteacher with a wild idea.
He wanted to prove what old gauchos had always claimed.
That the little Criollo horses of South America were the toughest saddle horses on earth.
So he stepped into a dusty Argentine corral and chose the two horses no one else wanted.
Mancha, about 16 years old. Red and white, fierce eyed, with frostbitten ears and a reputation for violence. He would kick at anyone who came near him.
Gato, about 15. A buckskin dun, smaller, quieter, with a mind like a mountain goat. The kind of horse people overlooked until the trail turned dangerous.
They were older. Scarred. Unfashionable.
But Aimé saw something else.
He saw survivors.
Descendants of Spanish horses that had been turned loose centuries earlier on the Pampas and forced to live or die by their own wits. Storms, drought, hunger, predators. Generation after generation, only the hardiest lived.
Aimé saddled Mancha. Then Gato.
And the long ride began.
🐴🔥
They left Buenos Aires on April 23, 1925, heading north.
Ten thousand miles.
Fourteen countries.
More than three years in the saddle.
Across Pampas baked brick hard in the sun and then churned to mud by rain.
Across Bolivian salt flats that cracked lips and burned skin.
Into the Peruvian Andes, climbing to passes over 11,000 feet where the air grew thin and noses bled.
In Bolivia they rode through hailstones the size of eggs and sandstorms so thick Aimé wrapped his face in cloth just to breathe.
In Peru, above the Apurimac River, Gato slipped and tumbled off a narrow trail.
He fell toward the gorge.
A tree caught him.
They roped him up, inch by inch, while Mancha held the line on the trail.
Most men would have quit right there.
Aimé did not.
Neither did Mancha.
Neither did Gato.
🇨🇴 And then came Colombia.
The Magdalena Valley was a green furnace.
Heat that slapped the breath from your lungs.
Mosquitoes, sandflies, and insects that never stopped biting.
Plants that burned skin.
Rivers that rose overnight and turned brown and furious.
Day after day they pushed through jungle rain and deep mud.
But there were small miracles.
Coffee farmers who stepped out of their fields to stare at the little Criollos who had already come so far.
Villagers who crowded the roadside to touch Mancha and Gato and press food into Aimé’s hands.
Nights spent under palm roofs, listening to rain on the thatch and wondering if they would ever see North America.
Colombia did something to Aimé.
It nearly broke him.
Then it gave him back his courage.
By the time they left that country, he began to believe they might actually make it.
🐴🌎
Central America added its own chapters.
Bandits on narrow roads.
Revolutionaries and soldiers watching from the brush.
Snakes. Fever. Vampire bats in the night.
In Mexico, Gato took a kick from a mule and went lame.
Bandits were rumored to be nearby.
The roads were rough, the law uncertain.
Still they walked. One slow step at a time.
And then, at last, the Rio Grande.
They crossed into Texas at Laredo.
Cars roared past them now.
Automobiles honked and shied the horses.
Texas Rangers rode es**rt.
Reporters appeared in dusty little towns with notebooks and cameras.
Ranchers who had grown up in the saddle came out just to see these two small Criollos that had walked all the way from Argentina.
Across Texas and Oklahoma.
Through the Ozarks.
Into the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The cowboy age was fading.
Highways and engines were taking over.
Yet along the way people lined fences and porches just to wave at one man and two trail weary horses.
In Washington, D.C., the schoolteacher from Switzerland was invited to the White House.
President Calvin Coolidge shook his hand.
National Geographic and other dignitaries praised the journey that almost no one had believed possible.
From there, to protect Mancha and Gato from city traffic, they were shipped by boat to New York.
That final landing felt less like an arrival and more like a thunderclap.
Newspapers shouted the story.
Scientists examined the horses.
Medals were pinned to man and mounts at City Hall.
And the two old Criollos who were supposed to be too old, too plain, too difficult, stood there calm and bright eyed.
They had crossed a hemisphere.
They were still sound.
🐴🏔️
Mancha lived to around 40, passing in 1947.
Gato lived to around 36, passing in 1944.
Their remains are still honored in the museum at Luján in Argentina.
Aimé Tschiffely wrote their story in a book called “Tschiffely’s Ride,” also known as “Southern Cross to Pole Star.”
It became one of the great equestrian epics of the 20th century and lit a fire in the hearts of long riders all over the world.
And now you know.
Not just that a quiet schoolteacher rode from Buenos Aires to New York with two “unrideable” horses.
You know that he did it through salt flats and blizzards, jungles and revolutions, rivers and mountain passes.
You know that Colombia nearly broke him, and then saved his dream.
You know that the United States gave him a president’s handshake and a hero’s welcome.
You know the rest of the story.
💛
If this journey stirred something in you, save it, share it, and follow for more true horse stories that deserve to be remembered.
