The Abernathy Brothers: The Wildly True Adventures of America’s Youngest Trailblazers
- Jan 25, 2025
- 8 min read
One night in the summer of 1909, somewhere between Oklahoma and Santa Fe, a nine-year-old boy lay awake in the dark firing a shotgun repeatedly into the surrounding blackness. A wolf pack had circled their camp. His five-year-old brother was asleep beside him. Their father was hundreds of miles away. Bud Abernathy kept firing until the wolves moved off, and in the morning the two boys packed up and kept riding.
This was only the first of four major unsupervised journeys that Louis "Bud" and Temple Abernathy made across America between 1909 and 1913. By the time they were done, they had crossed the continent on horseback, driven a car from New York to Oklahoma on roads that barely existed, and ridden an Indian motorcycle from Oklahoma to New York and back again. Bud was 13 on the last trip. Temple was 9. Nobody stopped them. Almost everyone who heard about them thought they were extraordinary.
Their Father
The Abernathy boys didn't arrive at this kind of confidence from nowhere. Their father, Jack "Catch-'em-Alive" Abernathy, was one of the more singular figures of the American frontier. He had earned his nickname through a genuine and improbable skill: he could catch wolves alive with his bare hands, forcing a fist into a wolf's open mouth to prevent it biting down, then wiring its muzzle shut. He had driven cattle 500 miles to market at the age of 11. Theodore Roosevelt, who met Jack on a wolf hunting trip in Oklahoma, was so taken with him that he personally appointed him as the youngest US Marshal in history for the Western District of Oklahoma.
Jack's wife died in 1907, leaving him with six children. His response was to raise them on a principle of self-reliance thorough enough that when his two eldest boys told him they wanted to ride horses to Santa Fe by themselves, he thought it over carefully, gave them each a $100 checking account, laid down some basic guidelines about route and contact, and told them to go. Bud was nine. Temple was five.
Oklahoma to Santa Fe and Back, 1909
The first trip covered roughly 1,000 miles round trip from their home in Oklahoma down to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and back. The boys had asked to go because they wanted to see the new mansion of the governor. Their father, having taught them to ride and to handle themselves in the open country of the Oklahoma territory, decided their horsemanship was up to it.
The journey was harder than anything they'd done before. They ran out of food and water between stops more than once and were kept going by the kindness of strangers along the route. At one point, a note arrived at the Abernathy home scrawled on brown paper with a lead-tipped bullet, addressed to "The Marshal of Oklahoma" and delivered by parties unknown. It was, in tone, a warning rather than a threat. Whatever its precise contents, Jack kept riding out the anxiety.
The wolf pack episode came near the end of the outward journey. Bud spent the night lying awake with a shotgun, firing into the darkness at eyes he could see reflecting the firelight, while his five-year-old brother slept through it. He didn't mention it in the telegram he sent his father the next morning. By the time they arrived in Santa Fe they had been on the road for weeks, had managed every problem that came at them, and had done it without adult help.
The New York Times covered the journey. By the time the boys rode home they were minor celebrities, and their father had a clearer sense of what kind of children he'd raised. When they told him what they wanted to do next, he listened.
Oklahoma to Manhattan on Horseback, 1910
In 1910, Bud and Temple decided they wanted to see Theodore Roosevelt in a parade celebrating his return from a trip to Africa. Roosevelt was no longer president but was still the most famous man in America, and the boys had grown up steeped in their father's stories about him. They drew a route from Oklahoma to New York City, somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 miles, convinced Jack to open a checking account for each of them, and set out on horseback.
The journey took around 62 days and generated national press coverage almost from the start. Newspapers telegraphed updates about the "wonder boys" at each stage, reporting on river crossings, storms endured, and towns charmed along the way. Even the outlaws along the Mexican border got word. Jack received a letter from a group of cattle rustlers who had every professional reason to dislike him, pledging that the boys were as safe as if they were in his own home. They weren't wrong. Bud and Temple arrived in New York, met Roosevelt, and rode in the parade.
They also appeared in a silent film produced while their fame was at its height. Abernathy Kids to the Rescue featured the brothers playing themselves and screened in theatres across the country through 1911. A newspaper listing from Oakland described it as the most lengthy and interesting bill yet presented at the city's Broadway theatre. The film sits in the same tradition of early documentary-adjacent filmmaking that captured American life and travel in ways that nothing else could at the time. For a sense of what early 20th century American adventure looked like on the road, our piece on a 1926 Death Valley road trip captured in 76 remarkable photographs covers similar territory from a slightly later era.
New York to Oklahoma by Car, 1910
During the same period, the boys completed a different kind of crossing entirely. The Brush Motor Car Company offered them a Brush Runabout, a small single-cylinder vehicle with a top speed of around 25 miles per hour on flat ground, and they drove it from New York back to Oklahoma largely unassisted. The Brush company wanted the publicity. The boys wanted another 1,500-mile trip.
The roads, for most of that route, were barely roads. Early automobile travel in America involved unpaved tracks, farm lanes pressed into service, and long stretches of open country where the driver navigated by compass and local knowledge rather than any marked route. The boys had neither a map that was reliably accurate nor a mechanic on call. They managed breakdowns, navigation problems, and bad weather the same way they managed everything else: by working it out as they went.
The Brush Motor Car Company went out of business in 1912, the same year the car adventures ended. Their brief moment as a sponsor of the most improbable road trip in America did nothing to save them from the competitive pressures of the early automobile market.
New York to San Francisco on Horseback, 1911
A year after the Manhattan ride, aged 11 and 7, the brothers accepted a challenge that made everything they'd done before look straightforward. A promoter offered $10,000 if they could ride horses from New York to San Francisco in 60 days or less, with one additional condition: they were not permitted to sleep or eat indoors at any point during the crossing. The entire journey had to be made in the open, regardless of weather.
They almost made it. The crossing took 62 days, two over the limit, which cost them the prize. What lost them those two days was an episode in the Great Salt Lake Desert where their horses wandered off and the boys spent three days searching for them in brutal heat, coming close to dying of dehydration before the horses were eventually found. They pushed on regardless. They arrived in San Francisco with a flask of Atlantic seawater that Bud tipped into the Pacific at the ocean's edge, completing a private ritual that no promoter had asked for and no newspaper had suggested.
They didn't collect the $10,000, but they set an equestrian record for the crossing that was still reportedly standing decades later. They had done it without sleeping under a roof for the entire two months. They were 11 and 7.
Oklahoma to New York by Motorcycle, 1913
The final recorded adventure came in 1913. The Hendee Manufacturing Company, which made Indian motorcycles, proposed giving the boys a custom-built machine to ride from Oklahoma to New York as a promotional stunt. By this point Jack had remarried, and Bud and Temple brought their new stepbrother Anton along. Bud was 13. Temple was 9.
The Indian motorcycle was a more serious machine than the Brush Runabout had been, and the boys handled it on roads that were, by 1913, slightly better marked than they'd been in 1910 but still largely unpaved outside of cities. They completed the journey, turned around, and came home. It was their fourth major crossing in four years, and by any reasonable measure their most technically demanding.
After the motorcycle trip, the adventures stopped. Jack moved the family to Wichita Falls, Texas, during the oil boom, school reasserted its claim on the boys' time, and the era of unsupervised transcontinental travel quietly ended.
What Happened to Them
Bud Abernathy studied law at the University of Oklahoma and went on to practice in Wichita Falls, eventually serving as district attorney and county judge. Temple followed his father into the oil and gas business, working as a driller in fields across Texas. Jack, who had spent his post-marshalship years as a wildcatter and, briefly, as a secret agent for Mexico, died in 1941 aged 65.
Bud died in 1979. Temple died in 1986. In Frederick, Oklahoma, there is a life-size bronze statue of the brothers as they looked in 1910, standing near the entrance to the Pioneer Townsite Museum on the Tillman County Courthouse Square. Every year on the first Saturday in June, the town holds an Abernathy Day celebration.
Temple, late in his life, reflected on what the journeys had meant: "We'd been royally entertained by some folks, and coldly turned away by others, and we'd always faced the question of whether it was worthwhile." He seems to have decided it was
What Made It Possible
The obvious question about the Abernathy boys is why it was allowed, and the answer is partly Jack's unusual parenting philosophy and partly the specific conditions of early 20th century America. In 1909, the frontier was only just closing. The Oklahoma territory had become a state two years earlier. The culture that Jack Abernathy represented, self-reliance, physical competence, the expectation that children could manage themselves in the open country, was still the dominant culture of the region. It hadn't yet been replaced by the supervised, urban childhood that was becoming the norm in the cities the boys rode through.
The press coverage mattered too. Once Bud and Temple became nationally known after the 1909 trip, they rode with a kind of protective fame around them. Strangers recognised them. Newspapers followed their progress. Outlaws wrote polite letters to their father. That wouldn't have worked without the underlying culture that made ordinary people along the route willing to help two children travelling alone, but it amplified and formalised the protection that culture provided. In a different era or a different country, none of it would have worked the same way.
There's something in the Abernathy story that sits alongside other accounts of ordinary Americans caught in extraordinary moments of American history. Our piece on Juan Romero, the teenage busboy who cradled Robert F. Kennedy as he lay dying in 1968, is a very different kind of story but touches on a similar quality: the way that American history keeps producing individuals whose encounters with larger events reveal something true about the country they happened in. The Abernathy boys were products of a particular American moment, the closing frontier, the opening road, the still-living memory of what it meant to be genuinely self-sufficient, and that moment passed quickly enough that their story already felt like history by the time they were adults.
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