They had ridden through towering snow drifts, forded fast-flowing rivers and sweated through deserts only to find closed doors at the trail’s end. What the riders found at the end of their 37-month trek was neither rainbows nor gold but cold, gray indifference. “There’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” “Let’s go for a ride,” Beck reportedly told the three. Far from the open range, the four men had spent their youths in sawmills and logging camps squeezed between towering forests and the shores of Puget Sound. His older brother, Charles Beck their brother-in-law, Jay Ransom, of Shelton and a kid named Raymond “Fat” Rayne signed on for the Beck-led “Overland Westerners” expedition. He had no problem roping in three companions. His life of toil in the woods would be at an end. His story would be the subject of books, maybe moving pictures. He’d shake hands with Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. He imagined himself and Pinto featured alongside the exposition’s biggest attractions - the Liberty Bell, a replica of the Grand Canyon and America’s first movie stars. He’d do it in three years, ending in San Francisco just in time for the much-ballyhooed Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair celebrating the just-completed Panama Canal and showcasing San Francisco’s recovery after a devastating earthquake.īeck marked it on a calendar: June 1, 1915, the day he’d pass through the exposition’s gilded gates a hero. At 20,352 miles, it’d be the longest ride on record. His plan: Saddle up his horse, Pinto, and ride from his home on Bainbridge Island to every state capital in the union. So Beck - a sometime shipwright, sometime carpenter, sometime logger - decided in 1912 to become a famous cowboy. He was young enough to dream big but wise enough to know that his dreams wouldn’t go far in an isolated mill town long past its prime. The Overland Westerners were, clockwise from the top, Jay Ransom, Charles Beck, Raymond “Fat” Rayne and George Beck.
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