When still a child in Illinois, Larry Weirather was already approaching his dime-a-week comic book habit with the serious mind of a storyteller. If he didn’t like the plot, he said, he’d get out scissors and tape and rearrange and rewrite everything to his own literary satisfaction.
Others noted his talent and his tendency to dive into difficult projects. His high school English teacher pulled him aside and assured him he was headed for a career as an English teacher. A newspaper editor — who made him rewrite his first two-sentence obituary 14 times — predicted that he could go far in journalism, but the stress might well destroy him.
So Weirather pursued his own writing projects — nonfiction books and articles as well as stories, novels and poems — while skipping his way west to Vancouver, teaching as he went. He taught at Clark College for 20 years before retiring to pursue writing full time.
Before that, though, Weirather spent 20 years in teaching at Rocky Mountain College in Montana. That’s where he started piecing together a shaggy cowboy epic that’s so unlikely, it seems a bit like one of those rearranged comic book plots of Weirather’s youth, except that he spent 30 years researching the truth of the story, he said.
It’s the story of cowboy Fred Barton, his travels in Asia and his influence on the tense geopolitics of his day. And it’s all driven by horses.
Montana boy Barton was shipped to an East Coast military school and emerged vowing never to take orders from anyone, Weirather said. He was too much the genuine cowboy for that. Barton returned to Montana and built a reputation as a seriously skilled cowboy when he met a Russian visitor who was scouting horses for war.
“Russia has no horse ranches,” the Russian told Barton. “We have to get horses from our enemies.”
Barton accompanied the visitor back to Russia, where he was commissioned by Czar Nicholas II to create the largest horse ranch in the world. Barton set out across Siberia in search of about 1 million acres of pastureland; it was a magnificent vision, except for this teensy bit of trouble: the Russian Revolution and the execution of the Russian royal family. Barton’s mission crumbled beneath him.
Enter another intrepid world traveler, the so-called Duke of Mongolia, actually a Swede named Larson who counted among his personal pals the religious leaders and warlords of China and Mongolia. Those warlords were forever in conflict, but according to Weirather they formed a partnership to pursue that same vision: a vast horse ranch that would supply their need for military steeds. Through his new friend, the Duke, Barton was tasked with siting the ranch and populating it with a new breed he would create himself, interbreeding American, Mongol and Russian horses for maximum adaptability, strength and resistance to cold.
He surrounded a quarter-million acres in Shanxi Province with good old cedar planks plus “smooth wire,” Weirather said. “No barbed wire. He was a true Western cowboy.” Then Barton rounded up more true cowboys to help him with what was the largest horse drive in human history. Some of the horses even traversed the Pacific on a military ship.
How’d Barton manage to enlist the resources of the American military? Easy, Weirather said: Barton was also a spy. So were many other Americans and Britons who were ostensibly traveling in China to market cigarettes, he said.
There’s lots more to the saga — Barton’s marrying into major money, his love-hate relationship with Hollywood’s inaccurate mythologizing of the American cowboy — but you get the idea.
“The more I got into it, the more unbelievable it became,” Weirather said, except that the more he got into it, the more he met people who had known Barton and could help nail down the facts of his unlikely biography. They came to Weirather through everything from history magazines to the Pendleton Round-Up, he said.
“That’s one thing writers do: run into coincidences,” Weirather said.
“Fred Barton and the Warlords’ Horses of China: How an American Cowboy Brought the Old West to the Far East” is published by McFarland and Co., specializing in pop culture and history. Visit http://larry-weirather.com to learn more and to check out Weirather’s other publications, such as the forthcoming young adult novel “Good’s Run: The World’s Longest Run,” based on the true story of Frederick Good, a young African-American steamboat stowaway in 1867 who ran continuously for nine days to escape the wilderness and get back to civilization.
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