FastWalker

In the mid-1960's I read a fascinating article in Boys' Life magazine about an American Indian named "Fast Walker". The piece described how Fast Walker had outdistanced a horse and rider during a multi-day competition, and included some incredible --- to me, at that time --- claims of distances covered on foot.

Alas, now that I'm belatedly ready to believe in ultrapedestrianism, there seems to be no information about Fast Walker on the 'Net. Boys' Life is apparently not available in searchable digital form, at least in part for copyright reasons. The only reference I've found online is in Part I, Chapter 6, of Two Men called Adam, a 1983 book about religion, creation, and evolution by Arthur C. Custance http://custance.org/Library/2MEN/Part_I/chapter6.html, which in footnote 56 says:

See story of "Fast Walker," a Sioux Indian who "out walked a horse" in 1862, The Rivermen in Old West Series, New York, Time-Life Books, 1975, p.144.

(The above occurs in a discussion of ecology and interspecies competition, specifically during an aside in praise of eating more meat. Ugh! But I digress ...) Can anyone recommend a source from which I could learn more about Fast Walker? He seems to have been a predecessor to the "Pedestrianism" fad of the late 19th century, wherein people covered hundreds of miles, typically during festive six-day events. On the seventh day, they rested ...

(see also PublicDomain (13 Feb 2003), AntientCommons (3 Nov 2003), RespectTheDistance (26 Nov 2003), AndThenTheVultureEatsYou (9 Dec 2004), RunningThroughTheWall (23 Jan 2005), ...)

TopicLiterature - TopicRunning - TopicPersonalHistory - Datetag20050403

Comment 7 Apr 2005^ at 21:00Z

Perhaps the predecessor of all these walkers is Alden Partridge of Norwich VT. In 1785 he was the commandant of West Point (presumably before it was the USMA) and left to start his own academy in VT, at which he coined the phrase 'physical education,' which consisted of leading his students on 35 and 40 mile hikes. He himself once hiked 110 miles in 4 days, over mountains and woods, following no trail at all, because there weren't any. That alone might qualify him as a fast walker, but he apparently did these long hikes all over New England, visiting nearly every mountain worth visiting, and probably some not worth the visit.

(correlates: DisBelief, AlteredStates, MuddlingThrough, ...)