Why "Far Rider"

(Far Rider, Trooper and Stryker on the trail in west central New Mexico Territory)

I chose the name Far Rider for this journal because it describes what I most like to do - far rides on my horses roaming about the American West. The name also has a mystical history with me in the tradition of the northern Cheyenne. Additionally, I wanted to be sure I was not trespassing on those that are designated as Long Riders through the Long Riders Guild :

http://www.thelongridersguild.com/LRG

The technical difference is that my rides vary from just a few miles to several hundred, but have never reached 1000 miles in a single ride as required by the Guild.

An interesting incident involving the name Far Rider occurred recently.

In 1975, shortly after leaving active duty with the United States Army Special Forces (citizens refer to us as "Green Berets", though we never referred to ourselves that way) I spent the next few years travelling around the western United States working as a cowboy and starting young horses for various outfits from Texas to Washington and Idaho. My ex-wife (every Special Forces trooper seems to have at least one or two) managed to track me down where I was working on a very remote outfit that had been featured in National Geographic Magazine located in the Sunlight Basin north of Cody, Wyoming. My tenure there was short - stuff of another post another time. After being fired from the outfit, I made my way back to Sonora, California where I had served as a Sheriff's deputy and where I had met the lovely creature that had had the bad judgment to marry one of those men that mothers warn their daughters about.

We had both had our share of experience and hopefully had grown up a bit during our separation, so we thought to give it another go, at least that was her approach. Me, well, I sure won't ever go to hell for lack of trying and I had been in cow camps for the past year where feminine companionship was as rare as a smart democrat. She was a stunningly beautiful girl and looked like the model Cheryl Tieg. I had learned early on that the warmth of a beautiful woman is truly a gift from God.

In those days many of the old traditions were still respected in cow country, one of those being that women were never allowed overnight in a cow camp. The same tradition applied to the old sailing ships and it was based on common sense. Having a bunch of testosterone driven males snortin' and pawing the ground with not enough female company to go around is a recipe for trouble. Men were still men in those days and were not all sensitive like the lap dogs the marxist-feminist-deconstuctionist movement has turned a good many of them into.

I found myself a room that was actually an attic over a bar in the historic mining town of Twain-Harte and started training horses to pay my bills. It was in this way that I met an extraordinary woman of Native American background who was a Shaman or Holy Woman. She was a teacher in the local high school and had raised a wonderful family there on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We became great friends and I admire her deeply to this day.

I would work her horses and then we would spend hours on her front porch in the heat of the afternoon drinking iced tea and chatting about literature, art, horses and history. She also began to teach me about Native American ways particularly of the Northern Cheyenne. She renamed me as an honorary Cheyenne Dog Soldier in the native tongue which, as is their custom, I was never allowed to tell anyone. She prepared me for my first vigil and gave me the necessary sacred items to conduct it. My medicine bag is still a prized possession.

I wondered off into Utah in what is now the Grand Staircase National Monument north of Kanab and conducted my first vigil accompanied by my dog Chance. We came off of the bluff three days after we had started. We were both hungry, and I was nursing a massive food deprivation headache, was sun burnt to a crisp but with a deepened awareness of the link between nature and man in the tradition of the aboriginal Americans. In later years as I undertook status as an Aspirant for the Priesthood in the Orthodox Anglican Church, I appreciated why Christianity has such appeal to so many Native Americans on the reservations, and why CS Lewis, the greatest theologian and apologist for Christianity in the 20th Century, appreciated the link of traditional religions to Christianity.

Shan and I lost contact over the years as I cowboyed in the remote stretches of the West and later pursued careers in law enforcement and academe. We reestablished contact within the past year. She is quite aged now, has lost her husband and is nearly blind, but her mind and spirit are as sharp as they were over 30 years ago. After several communications and without any alluding to it on my part, she, out of the blue, informed me that I would henceforth be known as Far Rider. Spooky to say the least. The translation of my original Cheyenne name, "Walks Many Trails," was very appropriate to me at the time it was given, but my mature name of Far Rider was what I had used as a horseman for many years. It reconfirmed to me that there are forces at work in this world about which modern man knows little or nothing, and, some things are just best left alone, should not be analyzed and "deconstructed", but simply be allowed to take their own course.

PS: Things did not work out with the blond. I valued the liberty of a cow camp more than a white picket fence so I headed back to Wyoming to start young horses on the plains west of the Wind River Mountains.


Far Rider
See to your weapons and stand to your horses