Night Riders

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Riding a horse at night sounds dangerous—and it can be—but it's not necessarily risky, if riders take precautions.

During cattle drives, cowboys often rode at night, as, on occasions, did posses hot on the trail of suspected outlaws.

In the days of the Wild West, there were no superhighways, streetlamps, or other modern inventions to worry about (night traffic can startle horses, and bright lights can temporarily blind them, neither of which situations is good for the safety of the horse or the rider).

Still, riding at night had distinct disadvantages on the frontier. Despite their good night vision, horses couldn't see every obstacle on the trail. Low branches could knock a rider from his or her mount. The resulting fall could break an arm or a leg (or a neck). Depending on where one rode, there could be close encounters of the worst kind, too, with bears, cougars, or other nighttime predators. In the event that a horse encounters an animal that might be a predator, it is apt to bolt, rather than to stand its ground while it attempts to discern whether the other animal is a threat. For horses, discretion is the better part of valor.

Most often, night riders rode in the company of others, whether fellow cowboys, other members of a posse, comrades in arms, or other members of their outlaw gangs. They'd avoid any gait other than a walk, unless they were sure the path ahead was level and free of obstacles.

Not all night riders were men, and not all of them rode horses by night on the frontier. Women also rode horses at night. One, a sixteen-year-old Connecticut girl, Sybil Ludington, rode forty miles, through the night in April 1777, “to warn her father's troops about a British attack on Danbury,” earning the praise of General George Washington. Thereafter, she became known as “the female Paul Revere.”

As Virginia C. Johnson makes clear in Virginia by Stagecoach, “Old Moll” Tate may not have ridden a horse after sunset, but she drove “the night stage from Abington to Blountville,” Virginia, “for several years” as a means of earning a living for herself and one of her children after losing the rest of her family, including her husband, to a plague (137). She had excellent night vision, which allowed her to avoid a tree that had fallen into the road (137). After mail she was carrying had been stolen, “Old Moll” Tate carried a “dummy” mail bag to “foist on any would-be robbers” (137). An extraordinary woman, she had fourteen given names, having been named after “each of the women who attended her birth and one for each of her aunts”: Mary Malzeeda Susan Elizabeth Cynthia Parnintha Sarah Adeline Rosey Daisy Laura Lucretia Louisa Jane (137).

According to Pinkerton detective Charles (“Charlie”) Siringo's A Cowboy Detective, Butch Cassidy escaped riding bareback one night and, to avoid lawmen, continued to ride at night, sleeping during the day. A posse led by William Beeler, on the trail of outlaw Kid Curry and his gang, “waylaid” Cassidy and his fellow traveler, outlaw “Red” Weaver. The lawmen continued to hunt Curry, as he and his gang “committed bloody crimes” as they rode north, but Cassidy escaped the posse's custody and lived on “nothing . . . but crackers.” It was only after Cassidy received news at one of the gang's “blind post offices,” that he learned the men from whom he was hiding during the day weren't members of Beeler's posse, after all, but his own “friends” (368).

Siringo himself was no stranger to night riding. Advised that a party of three-hundred men planned to “take over” Murray, Idaho, in order to kidnap him, Siringo writes, “I would pretend to retire to my room for the night; . . . then, I would slip down the back stairs and [ride] up the mountainside.” He would remain awake . . . on the mountainside overlooking the town,” his Winchester “ready for action,” until morning, when he “would return to the hotel . . . and slip into [his] room” (184). After providing testimony to a grand jury, Siringo thwarted “Dallas and his gang,” who intended to ambush him, by riding a rented horse twenty miles to Wallace instead of taking the stagecoach, the route of which went through “a dense growth of timber and underbrush,” which would have made ambushing the stage an easy matter (184).

In Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman, Leon Claire Metz recounts a night ride undertaken by Garrett and his posse. Charlie Thompson, Bill Gatlin (aka Dan Bogan), and Wade Woods were wanted for cattle rustling, and Garrett had obtained warrants for their arrests. The suspects were believed to alter the brands of the cattle they stole using “a versatile brand called the Tabletop.” So effective was the technique in changing marks that the difference was undetectable “unless the animal was killed and skinned and the hide turned inside out so that the old and new brands could be compared” (143).

Learning that the wanted men were hiding out in “a rock house at red River Springs near the Canadian River,” Garrett and his posse, joined by Sheriff James East, rode forth at night, during a fierce snowstorm, which, Garrett believed, was the most effective occasion “to hunt a badman” (143). The posse rode throughout the night, “pausing stiff and nearly frozen at two o'clock in the morning to feed their horses and bolt down a warm meal.”

Bill Gatlin (aka Dan Bogan)

Despite approaching the hideout from a direction that prevented the outlaws from seeing their approach, Garrett and his posse were spotted by Bob Basset, a member of the gang who was collecting firewood. Running back toward the house, Basset warned the other wanted men of the arrival of Garrett and his posse (143). To avoid a shootout, nine of the men inside the house left the domicile, including two of the suspects, Charlie Thompson and Wade Wood, who surrendered, but Garrett made the mistake of allowing Thompson to return to the house to fetch his coat, and Thompson then refused to return, saying he would fight and die beside Gatlin, who remained in the house. However, assuring Thompson of a fair trial, East was able to talk him into surrendering, and the arrests were made, after East entered the house and convinced Gatlin, with whom he had once herded cattle, to also surrender 143).

The outlaws were jailed in Tascosa, but Gatlin and Thompson escaped, using a file “someone [had] slipped them” to cut through their handcuffs (145). For their efforts, Garrett, East, and the rest of the posse retained in custody only two of the four fugitives they'd brought to justice.

Bob Switzer

Plenty of others rode horses at night (or drove stagecoaches after sunset), but none of them were equipped with the supplies recommended by today's experts—largely because most of these supplies didn't exist in the days of the American Wild West. For example, Equisearch: For People Who Love Horses recommends that night riders “carry a flashlight in case of emergencies,” being careful not to spook the horse in using the instrument. For greater visibility, the wearing of “reflective clothing” is also recommended (“Riding Your Horse at Night”). Battery-powered flashlights weren't patented until about 1899, and Bob Switzer didn't invent reflective clothing until the 1930s (he tested his new Day-Glo paint on his wife's wedding dress!), and such attire didn't become popular until World War II, when aircraft carrier crews began to wear it.

Another website, The Spruce Pets, recommends night riders carry not only flashlights and wear reflective clothing, but also equip themselves with headlamps, and wearable LED lights (“Safety Tips for Horseback Trail Riding at Night”). Headlamps did exist in the early 1880s, but they weren't the type of lights riders would want to use. They burned acetylene or oil, and, although the flames produced by such fuels were wind- and rain-resistant, it seems safe to bet they'd frighten horses.

British researcher H. J. Round invented the first light-emitting solid-state diode (LED) in 1907, but the public couldn't buy an LED light until dim red LED lights became “commercially available” during the 1960s, well past the era of the Wild West.

Horse & Rider is even more particular in regard to recommendations for safe night riding. A host of “special gear” is needed, the website's “Trail Riding at Night” article suggests, including “a handheld flashlight” as well as “a first-aid kit, a multipurpose tool, an EasyBoot,” glow sticks, and duct tape.

1888 Johnson & Johnson first-aid kit

We've already addressed the origin of flashlights. Commercially available first-aid kits appeared in 1888 (although riders could certainly assemble their own kits before then, if the thought occurred to them).

Sheffield contrivance

Such multi-purpose tools as the Modell [sic] 1890 “Sheffield contrivances,” as Herman Melville identifies them in chapter 107 of Moby Dick, consisted of pocket knives containing, all in one, “blades of various sizes, . . . screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, [and] countersinkers,” and the Swiss army pocket knife debuted in 1890, featuring a spear point blade, a reamer, a can-opener, a screwdriver, and water-repellent grips” (The Swiss Army Knife Owner's Manual, September 7, 2011). For Wild West night riders who rode after 1890, these multi-purpose tools could have been carried in the saddlebags.

The EasyBoot was first sold in 1970, and could “be applied to the barefoot hoof. . . and used as a spare or . . . when a barefoot horse needs additional hoof protection,” so, of course, this item was unavailable to the night riders of the Old West.

When Edwin A. Chandross of Brooklyn, New York, in experimenting with luminol in the 1970s, mixed hydrogen peroxide with oxalyl chloride and dye, the mixture “emitted a [feeble] visible light,” but glow sticks were not invented until 1976, when, after a variety of materials and devices were patented, “the first . . . device to resemble glow sticks as we know them today,” the Chemiluminescent Signal Device, was patented by Vincent J. Esposito, Steven M. Little, and John H. Lyons. Clearly the night riders of the latter half of the nineteenth century would not have had access to glow sticks.

Duct tape was invented in 1943, after Vesta Stoudt, a worker at the Green River ordnance Plant in Illinois, wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, asking him to pursue her idea of replacing the thin tape that sealed packages of cartridges used to launch rifle grenades with a stronger “cloth-based waterproof tape” that would not tear away when soldiers opened the ammunition packages, leaving them “frantically scrambling to claw the boxes open while under enemy fire.” She'd proposed the idea to her superiors at work, but it seemed to have gone nowhere. Roosevelt forwarded her letter to the War Production Board, which contracted the task of producing the tape to Johnson & Johnson. Although duct tape might be highly recommended for night riders' use, those who rode horses at night prior to World War II wouldn't have been able to adopt the suggestion (“The Woman Who Invented Duct Tape”).

Of the modern recommendations for items to carry on night rides, the horsemen and horsewomen of the Old West would have been able to take with them headlamps (although they probably wouldn't have wanted to do so, as the flames would have startled their horses), self-assembled first-aid kits, and multi-purpose tools of the type that Melville describes or the earliest Swiss army knife alternative. Mostly, though the night riders of the Old West (and of eras before then) would have had to trust their horses' excellent night vision, the animals' instinct, and their own experience as riders. Examples such as those of Ludington, Tate, Siringo, Garrett, and others suggest that the night riders' trust in their horses' night vision and instinct was well placed.