NOW SEPIA, THE PHOTO IS an impossibly wide panorama of dads and little boys, all of them wearing cowboy hats, ready to take off for the 1965 Cross Country Trail Ride in Eminence, Missouri. A friend texted it to me when I said I was heading to Eminence. He never forgot that week: the sawdust, the great food, how they rode bareback through town afterward. He even memorized the advice he overheard a grizzled old Texas horseman give: “Don't worry about the small stuff; just keep loadin’ the wagon.”
In those years, the ride was truly cross country; camp was set up at a new place each night. A couple hundred people came, and there were three rides a year. Today, CCTR runs eight multiday, jaw-droppingly scenic trail rides a year, complete with three squares a day, music, dancing, clinics, demonstrations, a tack store, and church on Sunday. Some of the events are six days long, while others are three days. Visitors camp, drive RVs, or stay in nearby motels. Owner Jim Smith is pretty sure it's the largest operation of its kind anywhere in the world, which is impossible to fact-check but entirely plausible. In 2004, for CCTR's 50th anniversary, 3,500 people jammed the campground (a record only possible because campers were smaller back then).
“We've had people from every state and 10 foreign countries,” Jim brags. He's not sure which countries, only that they were “jabberin'.” It made no difference; on horseback, there's only one language. Today's rides draw between 300 (when weather's unpredictable) and 1,500 people.
“They've been calling this whole week trying to make a reservation,” Jim mutters when I show up. He's busy repairing broken water pipes after a freeze. “I said it's too late for that—just c'mon.”
CCTR IS LIKE AN OLD-FASHIONED summer camp—playful, wholesome, and full of danger. People can get lost on these trails or knocked off their horse. Horses can injure themselves. There are wild critters to beware of. The morning I meet Jim's eldest daughter, Mary Kay Higgins, she has already killed a copperhead with a rock. On the flip side, he's still chuckling about the woman who “came out of an outhouse with her britches down around her ankles” because a (harmless) black snake slid up just as she sat down.
These woods have not been sanitized, purged of litigious dangers, rendered as safe as suburbs. What is here instead is care. When people are in trouble, other trail riders rush to their side. If somebody's trailer gets stalled or stuck, Jim goes and gets them. For horses with muscle pain, he includes a demo of MagnaWave therapy; he also invites a veterinary chiropractor, and he's building a roofed shelter for his new vet, Mike Jones.
The day before the ride's official start, Jones is with the early arrivals, coaxing PeeWee to trot so he can find the cause of his limp. His rider felt him hesitating and turned around: “Not gonna hurt my granddaughter's horse!” Another patient, a mule named Bootie, has cancer in one eye, and Jones
