This story, “Journey of the Outdoor Life Girl,” appeared in the July 1973 issue of Outdoor Life, when Hardy was 80 years old.
On a September morning in 1914 a pert and pretty 21-year-old girl from Spokane, Washington, put her horse into what hundreds of onlookers regarded as a somewhat hazardous climb. Gladys Hardy was tackling the ascent of 37 steps that led up to the door of the capitol building at Salem, Oregon.
At the top of the steps Oregon’s Governor Oswald West and Salem’s Mayor B. L. Steeves waited as an official welcoming delegation, decked out in their best bib and tucker, including derby hats. Motion-picture cameramen were on hand to record the climb in that day’s version of the newsreel. Because of the uncertain footing of the rain-wet steps, the horse wore rubber “boots” that had been specially made by a saddle company.
The horse went up slowly and carefully, step by step, steadied and encouraged by his rider. At the top, on the broad approach to the capitol, Gladys climbed out of the saddle and shook hands with the Governor and Mayor.
“That was fun,” she told the two officials with a smile. “Want to try a ride?” she asked the Governor.
Oregon’s chief executive lengthened the stirrups, swung into the saddle, and reined Goldie, the horse, through the door and down the length of the capitol corridor. When it was time to leave, Gladys chose not to risk descending those 37 steps. Instead, the horse was led into the passenger elevator and taken to ground level, causing Governor West to comment that so far as he knew Goldie was the first horse in the history of Oregon to ride the capitol elevator.
Gladys Hardy was midway on a horseback ride by herself from Spokane, Washington, to San Francisco, California. She was attracting a great deal of attention, partly because she was making the trip under the name of the Outdoor Life Girl.
Born at Divide, Colorado, in December 1892, Gladys remembers playing hooky from school to wander alone in the woods. Her first pet was a burro that she rode into hidden nooks and canyons at every opportunity.
Early in 1914 she was working in the Northern Pacific Railroad office at Spokane, and she had wearied of the routine. When male fellow workers dared the young woman to undertake a solitary horseback ride to San Francisco, she decided to take the dare. She had been fond of horses and riding all her life, and the idea of the long, solo ride appealed to her.
Gladys raffled off a piano to buy a horse, selling tickets that ranged in price from a penny to $2. She remembers that a 29¢ ticket won the piano. She bought Goldie, a gentle buckskin, and the men who had dared her to make the ride chipped in and gave her a saddle and the rest of the gear she would need.
Looking for income to pay her way, Gladys wrote to J. A. McGuire, the publisher of Outdoor Life in Denver. This publication was then in its lusty youth, having been founded in 1898, proclaiming itself “A Magazine of the West” and featuring articles about range riding, Wes tern fire lookouts, and such typical stories as one titled, “The Tragedy of Sitting Bull.”
Gladys Hardy asked McGuire if he would authorize her to solicit subscriptions to Outdoor Life as she rode. McGuire must have seen the promotion possibilities of the proposal, for he was quick to give it his blessing.
Gladys rode away from the office of the Spokane Chronicle on June 16, 1914. Between her and San Francisco lay more than 1,000 miles of road and lonely mountain trail. Fortunately, very little of the road was paved. Paved highways meant dangerous going for horse and rider, and her only mishap of the trip would come at Portland, when Goldie slipped on rain-slick pavement and fell on his rider and broke her leg, resulting in a delay of several weeks.
Before she left Spokane, Gladys made a wager with her fellow workers. They gave her $10, which she sealed in an envelope. Her side of the bet was that she would ride into San Francisco with that envelope unopened. The odds seemed to be against her, for she started the long ride to San Francisco with exactly 50¢ in her pocket.
But the Outdoor Life subscription business proved to be surprisingly brisk. By the time the horsewoman rode into San Francisco on a rainy evening in November, she had sold more than 1,000 subscriptions. She had augmented her income by riding in parades and rodeos and for newsreels, and when she led Goldie off the ‘Frisco ferry that final night, the envelope still rested in her pocket with its $10 bill intact.
By then Gladys Hardy had ridden through enough wild and beautiful country, had enough exciting adventures, and met enough interesting and friendly people to last any outdoor-minded young woman a lifetime.
The ride up the steps of the capitol at Salem was one of the highlights of the trip. Before she left, Gladys presented Governor West with a complimentary subscription to Outdoor Life, and she still cherishes what the Governor said when he accepted it.
“When the work of state gets oppressive and everything seems unappealing, it drives away the cares to delve into a magazine which tells of the outdoors,” he told her. “That life is the real life.” Much of Gladys’s ride was through mountains, on roads that were little more than cattle trails, or on rough corduroy used by heavy logging wagons (this was long before the day of logging trucks) with crude pole bridges. More than once Gladys had to cover holes in those bridges with lengths of pole so that her horse could cross.
But now, as an elderly woman, she still remembers those mountain woods as the most beautiful country she has ever seen. Trees, ferns, and moss grew so thick that in many places the sun rarely touched the ground. Springs broke out from beneath rock ledges, feeding crystal-clear streams.
“I think my horse dabbled in every creek we came to on that trip,” she says today.
Often the Outdoor Life Girl became enchanted by the cool dampness and beauty of this rain forest, and she dismounted and walked so that she could better savor the solitude and silence of the place. She and Goldie came to understand one another so well that if he loped ahead as she walked, he would come back at her call.
Gladys rode in horse races at a roundup along the way and also spent two days in Seattle taking in the Golden Potlatch, a celebration that she says originated when the first boatloads of gold were brought in from Alaska.
Some days Gladys rode 60 miles. Between Tacoma and Centralia, Washington, she was retracing her way after she’d taken a wrong road. The horsewoman was riding in thick woods just before midnight and was about ready to camp for the night when she heard a team and wagon coming.
At first, the driver thought the flashlight-carrying figure was a holdup man, and he whipped up his team. But when he saw he was dealing with a lone girl, he pulled up, and Gladys was invited to a nearby ranch for the night. This kind of experience was fairly common on the journey. Time and again the Outdoor Life Girl was entertained in the homes of ranch families. She finished the trip with high praise for the friendliness and hospitality of the people she had met.
There were nights, however, when things did not work out so well. Once she slept in a dirty small-town hotel that had no locks on the doors. She camped with forest rangers and stayed with sheepherders in their camps. At one point she overtook a group of transients who were hiking from place to place looking for work. Many of them were carrying bedrolls on their backs. Gladys loaded as many of the bedrolls onto Goldie as she could, and then walked with the men.
She traveled with this group for several days, sharing the food she had in her saddlebags, eating beans, and drinking coffee out of tin cans.
“They treated me like a sister,” Gladys says.
On a lonely trail near the top of Saddle Mountain she came across a grave that had a wooden headboard with an inscription revealing that the man buried there had been killed by a bear in 1892.
One morning, near the town of Shasta in northern California, she stopped at a small country school and was invited to give a talk to the youngsters. In the midst of it the children suddenly jumped to their feet, and one of them shouted, “Look! The mountain is blowing its top!”
The announcement proved true — the youngster must have meant Lassen Peak, which some months earlier had begun a period of volcanic unrest that would last until 1921. Gladys has never forgotten the spectacle.
Near Winters, California, she was shown what was reputed to be the largest rose bush in the world. Its trunk was 42 inches around, and the top measured 44 by 56 feet. In Portland the Outdoor Life Girl was the guest of the Portland and Oakland baseball teams. Gladys rode her horse onto the diamond and sold every member of both teams subscriptions to Outdoor Life.
At Willows, California, she was entertained at a local duck club and invited to go along on a duck shoot. She enjoyed the hunt immensely but admits that she killed no ducks.
Gladys had better luck with deer. She had never done any deer hunting but had always thought that it sounded exciting, and the urge grew after she met a pair of prospectors in the town of Canyonville, Oregon. The men had come in for supplies and were packing their mules and making ready to leave when Gladys encountered them. Since the prospectors were going her way, the three left town together, with the men on foot, leading the mules. Gladys could have traveled faster alone, but her companions invited her to stay with them until noon and join them for a venison dinner.
They found a good spot for the noon fire, and the young woman unsaddled Goldie and then brought water from a nearby stream while one prospector unpacked cooking gear and the other cut dry wood and. got a fire going. The Outdoor Life Girl recalls that dinner as an outstanding meal, and the hunting stories the two men told around the fire further whetted her appetite for deer hunting.
Gladys was to get the chance much sooner than she expected. In the early afternoon she pushed on and left the two prospectors behind. Ten miles short of her scheduled stop she heard a horse coming behind her at a fast clip, and she pulled up.
The rider was a young woman about Gladys’s age who introduced herself as Mamie Clements. Miss Clements had just completed a ride of 235 miles by herself from Eureka, California, to her home, and now she was returning from a deer hunt on her father’s homestead at the head of Cow Creek, about 25 miles away, where she had killed a good buck.
The two girls struck up a friendship on the spot, and when Gladys expressed keen interest in deer hunting, Mamie invited her on a hunt. Three days later, on a cool October morning, Gladys was part of a hunting party that was headed for the Cow Creek country. Mamie’s father Jess Clements, her brother Blake, and a hunting partner of theirs named Miller drove the grub wagon with food and outfit as the two girls followed on horseback.
The hunt was a lively one. The first day they saw a number of does and fawns, and two or three bucks that were out of range. The second morning they tied their horses and started up a steep mountain on foot. Almost at once the hunters jumped four bucks within easy shooting distance.
The others waited for Gladys to shoot first, but she missed her chance. In a sudden seizure of buck fever she dropped her gun and stood shouting, “Look at ’em go! Look at ’em go!”
The next day, however, Gladys redeemed herself by dropping a two-point buck. She and Mamie rode back to Mamie’s home by themselves, but before they got there a black bear challenged them in the road. It was too dark for accurate shooting, but Gladys fired a couple of shots from her .38 handgun in the bear’s direction, and it cleared out.
Almost at the end of her long ride Gladys encountered unexpected difficulties. Near Sacramento a bridge was out, and she put her horse into the stream to ford it. Goldie was quickly trapped in quicksand. But just then two young men came along on motorcycles. They got a loop of her reins around the saddlehorn, and with the horse floundering and the two bikers pulling, Goldie was hauled free.
On the rainy night of November the Outdoor Life Girl rode her horse ashore at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. She had ridden more than 1,000 miles in five months, with mny lengthy stopovers. She had made good on the dare she had taken at Spokane back in the spring, and she had also won a $10 bet. Outdoor Life subscription money and the other money she had earned along the way had paid the costs of the trip.
After the many weeks in the solitude of woods and mountains, Goldie showed a strong dislike for the crowds and traffic noises of San Francisco. And the ferry ride had done nothing to calm him down. Gladys recalls that danced his way entirely around the Ferry Building.
To complicate things, Gladys had acquired two big dogs along the way — an Alaskan Husky and a Russian wolfhound. She hired the first expressmen she saw to put the dogs into his wagon and then Gladys started up Mark Street on her way to the San Francisco Chronicle office, riding in the wagon with the horse tied at the tailgate. She was afraid to try riding the animal in the traffic and on pavement made slippery by the rain, for he had no rubber shoes now.
Gladys had gone only a few blocks when Goldie reared back, broke loose, and bolted. Mounted policemen gave chase and caught the horse six blocks away. The officers led Goldie back, and Gladys climbed into the saddle and rode the rest of the way, with the spooky horse walking on his hind legs much of the time.
By now the Outdoor Life Girl’s plans had grown more ambitious. She decided to ride on to Los Angeles, and from there head east across the continent to New York City and New England. She had begun the trip in Washington, at the extreme northwest corner of the country. She would end it in Maine, at the far northeast corner.
She made the ride to Los Angeles uneventfully, but then a totally unforeseen obstacle arose: a severe outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease swept California, and a strict quarantine was clamped down that banned taking any animal out of the state. The quarantine included Goldie, and at that point Gladys Hardy’s ride came to an end. She waited several months in Los Angeles. During the ride she had met some movie people who had invited her to look them up at Universal Stu-dios. She went there and was put to work riding in Westerns.
Abandoning her cross-country plans at last, in the fall of 1915, Gladys sold Goldie to the producers of the famous silent film, “Birth of a Nation,” gave her Husky dog to a movie cameraman, and booked passage by ship for Seattle. She was finally going home.
The trip included a change of ships at San Francisco because the one on which she was traveling was condemned as unseaworthy. The Outdoor Life Girl transferred to a lumber schooner, which ran into a storm at sea, and for two days she and her wolfhound shared a bunk that was padded with pillows to keep them from being thrown out as the schooner pitched and rolled and wallowed in huge seas.
Eight days later the ship limped into port at Aberdeen, Washington, with half the deck cargo of lumber having washed overboard.
By that time the Outdoor Life Girl had seen too much adventure to return to a routine desk job.
In July of 1919, Gladys says, “the lure of silent places” drew her into a summer job as a fire-tower lookout in the mountains of the Colville Forest in western Washington. Forest rangers built her a comfortable cabin, complete with a fireplace, at an elevation of 7,000 feet. A packer took her in with a five-horse packtrain that carried her outfit.
The rangers replenished her woodpile as often as necessary that summer, sheepmen kept her in mutton, and she packed her drinking water on horseback from a spring that lay half a mile down a very steep trail. Gladys manned a tower throughout the fire season, by herself, on duty from sunrise until after sunset, day after day. It was a bad fire year, and during July and August she reported more than 50 blazes. Before she went out in the fall she joined a party of rangers on a deer hunt and killed a good buck.
Two years later, in 1921, the love of adventure called Gladys to Arizona, where she spent most of a year on a cattle ranch at the head of Camp and Cave creeks, 50 miles northwest of Phoenix.
She rode with the ranch hands, roped calves, did her share of branding at roundup time, hunted, and — most of all — reveled in what she calls “the freedom of riding alone.”
Today the Outdoor Life Girl, now Mrs. Gladys Thompson, an 80-year-old widow, lives by herself in a small cottage at Beaumont, California, with four dogs for company. A nurse and a housekeeper come in every few days, and friends make frequent calls. Her son Dick Murray was a flier in World War II and is now an airline jet pilot. He has three children and lives in San Antonio, Texas, but Gladys says she can’t take the weather there for reasons of health.
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Plagued by eyesight failure so severe that she can type a letter only with great difficulty, Gladys recently wrote Outdoor Life a letter that contained a brief account of her long ride in 1914, along with some photographs. Gladys expressed the hope that we might want to retell her story for the benefit of today’s readers. We have told it here.
“The best memories of my life are of the people I met on that ride and of the unspoiled, beautiful country I saw,” she told us.
Read the full article here