The Minneapolis fair has been for some months advertising a race of
twenty miles between a California and a Minnesota girl, on horseback,
and on Wednesday it occurred. The girls were splendid horsewomen, but
they had to change horses each mile, and the horses were strangers to
the girls, and excited, and the crowd of 30,000 was excited, and the
girls were kicked, trampled on and jammed into saddles by main strength,
and away the horses would go, the crowd howling, the horses flying and
the poor girls sighing and holding on with their teeth and toe nails,
expecting every moment to be thrown off and galloped over by the horses
and the crowd.
The pandemonium was kept up until the seventh round, when the saddle
of Miss Jewett, the Minnesota girl, slipped, and she was thrown to the
ground on the back stretch, and the crowd clamored for the master of
ceremonies to send her another horse, while the California girl whooped
it up around the track. They had to send a stretcher for the girl, and
she was brought to the judge's stand as near a cold corpse as could be,
her pale face showing through the dirt, and her limber form telling its
own story.
Then people that had been enjoying the “fun” looked at each other as
much as to say, “We are the biggest fools outside of congress, to enjoy
coldblooded murder, and call it fun.” The girl will live, though some
of her bones are warped. This whole subject of lady horseback riding is
wrong. The same foolish side saddles are used that were used before
the flood, with no improvement since Eve used to ride to town after the
doctor when Adam had the rheumatiz.
Women can ride as well as men, if they are given a show, but to place
them on a horse with both legs on one side of the animal, so they have
to allow for the same weight of other portions of the body on the other
side to balance them, is awkward and dangerous, and it is a wonder that
more do not fall off and squash themselves, A well built woman is as
able to ride as a man. Her legs are strong enough to keep her on a
horse--we say legs understandingly, because that is the right name for
them--if she can have one on each side, but to shut one leg up like
a jack-knife and hang it up on a pommel, and get a check for it, and
forget that she has got a leg, and to let the other one hang down
listlessly beside the horse, the heel of the foot pounding him in the
sixth rib, is all nonsense, and those two legs, that ought to be the
main support of the rider, are of no more use than two base ball clubs
would be hung to the saddle. For all the good legs do on a side saddle
they might as well be taken off and left at home.
Of course they are handy to have along if a lady wants to dismount, out
in the woods, and pick flowers, or climb a tree after a squirrel, but
the minute she gets in the saddle her legs are not worth the powder to
blow them up. And talk about exercise and developing muscle, walking a
mile is better than riding all summer.
In walking, the legs and all the muscles of the body are brought into
action, and the blood courses through the veins, and a girl looks like a
thoroughbred, but in horseback riding the legs lay dormant, get to sleep
and have to be waked up when the owner dismounts, and all the exercise
is got by portions of the human frame that never has seemed to us as
though there was absolute need of greater development.
It is true that horseback riding makes the cheeks-red. Well, blood that
wouldn't rush to the head after being churned that way wouldn't be worth
having. It has to go somewhere. It can't go to the legs, because
they are paralyzed, being curled up like a tailor, mending trousers.
Horseback exercise for ladies, on a side saddle, is a delusion and a
snare, and does not amount to a row of pins, and it never will be worth
a cent until women can ride like men. Then the lower limbs--now it is
_limbs_--will be developed and health will be the result, and there will
be no danger of a saddle turning and a helpless woman being dragged to
her death.
There is nothing indelicate about riding on both sides of a horse,
if they once get used to it. But they have got to get over this
superstition that to ride on horseback a woman must put her limbs up in
curl papers.