The first thing I needed was a few good horses. The phrase “good horse” means different things to different people, but essentially, a good horse is one suited to the job being asked of it. Horses come in a lot of shapes and sizes; I wanted Pony Express horses. Long and lean, built to travel but with enough bulk to handle hard work, thing like a marathon runner with the physique of a Navy SEAL. some-At that time, in January 2019, my girlfriend, Claire, who works in a hospital emergency room, and I were renting a house on a small horse property outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. I owned two horses but neither was suited to a 2,000-mile journey. One was too young, the other too lazy. Coaxing a lazy horse across the West would be too much work, and a young horse might not hold up to the work. I needed horses with a lot of natural forward momentum. Just like humans, some horses are inclined toward idleness, while others are inclined to move, and I wanted horses that wanted to move. So I set about scanning horses-for-sale websites and rattling my network of horse people.
The first horse I bought was a mustang named Rio. He was small enough to be called a pony but pretty enough to have just trotted off the set of "Dances With Wolves." His previous owner, a woman who used him mostly for trail rides, adopted him from the New Mexico Livestock Board when he was 3. I bought him when he was 9.
The first time I rode Rio after I brought him home, he shied at a crow sitting on a fence as we approached it. I was looking right at it, and so was Rio. When we were about 40 feet
