It started as a search for heroes. It became a hunt for the most
elusive equestrian charlatan of all time. If Frank Hopkins is to be
believed, he led one of the most exciting, challenging and colorful
(albeit unrecorded) lives in the late nineteenth century. No one
rode more miles, eluded more danger, or befriended more famous
people than he did. During the 1930s and 40s the self-proclaimed
legend told a na ve American public that he had won nearly five
hundred endurance races, including an imaginary race across Arabia
on a mythical mustang named Hidalgo. Hopkins remarkable career
supposedly began when he became a dispatch rider for the US
government on his twelfth birthday in 1877. According to his
mythology, this Renaissance Man of the Old West went on to work as
a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, African explorer, endurance
racer, trick rider, bounty hunter, Rough Rider, big game guide,
secret agent, Pinkerton detective and star of the Wild West show.
Experts beg to differ. This book contains an unprecedented study,
undertaken by more than seventy experts in five countries, ranging
from the Curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum to the former Sultan of
Yemen. These academics investigated the historical improbability of
Hopkins claims and weighed him on his merit, not his myth. The
resulting exhaustive study revealed that Hopkins had maintained a
spirited disregard for the truth, plagiarized material from famous
authors, slandered genuine American heroes and perpetrated a
massive fraud for nearly one hundred years. Far from being the star
of Buffalo Bill Cody s Wild West show for 32 years, for example,
the counterfeit cowboy was discovered working as a subway tunnel
digger in Philadelphia and a horse-handler for Ringling Brothers
Circus. It is his endurance racing pretensions, however, that have
brought Hopkins his greatest notoriety and made him the hero of a
Hollywood movie. Yet there is not even a documented photograph of
Frank Hopkins in the saddle Here then are all the known writings of
Frank T. Hopkins, published in their entirety for the first time in
history.
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