This was a response I was writing for a question about roughly how much time it would take someone to travel 130 miles by horse, but the OP deleted it while I was in the middle of writing it up. Needless to say I’m not letting that work go to waste. So without further delay, I present:

A Brief Primer on How Far a Horse Can Sustainably Travel Per Day

Determining the distance a horse can travel in a given length of time is one of those problems where the comprehensive answer is a very unsatisfying “it depends.” The breed of horse, the conditions of the terrain, and whether or not one is riding or driving all contribute to the length of time it takes to cover a specified distance. For instance, a well-conditioned endurance racehorse today can cover 100 miles within 24 hours; the winner of the 2018 Tevis Cup covered that distance in 14 hours and 45 minutes. However, this is an athletic performance for a horse, not a feat that can be performed on a day to day basis.

The horse -- carrying more of its weight on the forehand rather than the haunches, unable to breathe out of stride, and host to a spleen that can almost instantaneously dump extra red blood cells into circulation during flight -- is optimized for sprinting, not stamina. Human-friendly horse-powered transportation inherently disadvantages the horse. The high speed stagecoach -- pulled by five or six horses travelling at a whopping 10 to 12 miles per hour -- illustrates this disadvantage. Stagecoaches were immensely popular, with dozens of lines not only serving thousands passengers, but also shaping the geography of the antebellum Republic as infrastructure grew to support the industry. By 1826, Boston alone had 75 lines and 100 daily arrivals and departures, and by 1833 a passenger could travel from Boston to New York City in 33 hours without stopping overnight. The horse, however, was the casualty of the stiff competition for passenger and freight traffic. Drivers were frequently under orders to make time or kill the horse trying. But even without the threat of being driven into exhaustion, stagecoach work was tough on the animal. Teams needed to be switched out every 15 to 20 miles, and a hundred mile route required a minimum of 30 horses to complete.

Sustainable rates of travel for the ridden horse, however, were very clearly delineated by the military. In his 1862 book Regulations and Instructions for the Field Service of the U.S. Cavalry in Time of War, General George McClellan recommended that, In “ordinary circumstances,” that is, not while the detachment was near an enemy, a march was to average 17 miles a day at three miles per hour. Marches could be extended to 30 miles, with the smallest detachments able to cover up to 70 miles in a day during extraordinary circumstances. However, McClellan cautioned that officers should not set a hard pace for their convenience alone. Cavalrymen were further urged rest their horses frequently, stopping for 10 to 15 minutes out of every hour. Long marches demanded two breaks of an hour apiece.

The horses employed by the United States cavalry at the time were nothing special. The United States did not have a remount service to supply the cavalry with purpose-bred animals until 1908. When McClellan was writing, remounts were purchased by politically appointed buyers who were not guaranteed to have the experience necessary to properly judge an equine. Neither were there clear requirements about the type of animal fit for service. Many of the animals delivered to the Army were of dubious quality.

It follows then that McClellan’s directives remain relevant for the modern horse of average means, and indeed low average daily distances are still hallmarks of the treks of today’s long riders. Samantha Szesciorka averaged 20 miles a day during her 74 day trek in 2016 from the geographical center of Nevada to Reno. Grant Nicolle covered no more than 25 miles a day during his thousand mile journey from John O’Groats, Scotland to Land’s End, England. And Greta Lackner’s journey from Austria to Norway averaged just shy of 22 miles per day.

Sustainable rates of travel for the draft horse are simultaneously easier and harder to quantify. While the variables to consider are more complex, the increased demand for horsepower during the Industrial Revolution led to armies of men studying the horse as if it were a machine. The line between biological and mechanical blurred as the physics of horse draft were scrutinized from top to bottom. Harnessing, load weight, load distribution, road grade, road surface, and more were all taken into consideration by the engineers who attempted to distill equine work down to a handful of simple equations. One of the seminal textbooks to be produced during this era was Franklin H. King’s A Text Book of the Physics of Agriculture. His precision approach to the mechanics of the horse is evident. Horses, to King, were the best engines in the world, being both self-sustaining and energy efficient. His textbook presents the results of experiments on draft from around America and Europe, and he actually managed to distill the effort of a living being into four tables and three equations. The most important of these involves the amount of traction a horse can be expected to supply over a workday. Here, King states:

Indeed, it is commonly allowed that for steady and continuous work 10 hours per day at the rate of 2.5 miles per hour a horse should not be asked to pull more than 1/8 to 1/10 of its own weight...If the horse walks more rapidly than 2.5 miles per hour, or at a slower pace, the force which he can exert changes also and is less or greater than 100 pounds. Experience seems to indicate that at speeds between 3/4 of a mile and 4 miles per hour, and continued 10 hours per day, the traction will be given by the following equation:

2.5 miles X 100 = n miles X Traction

Where King’s textbook offered guidelines for the farmer or driver, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provided firm instructions about the work that could be expected of an animal per day:

The capacity of an animal to exert a tractive effort decreases as speed and time increase. As a basis, it may be assumed that an average draft mule can pull on a level 80 lbs at 2 1/2 miles an hour for 10 hours every day, or in other words, can pull 80 lbs over 25 miles of average level roads every day. If a pull of 160 lbs is required, it can be made over 12 1/2 miles a day only….For the standard army wagon and on a level average dirt road in good condition, the load corresponding to 80 lbs standard pull may be taken at 1,000 lbs per animal. Of this, 300 lbs will be wagon, leaving 700 lbs net freight.

Taking the military recommendations as guidelines, one can therefore assume that, under ideal conditions, sustainably covering 100 miles of ground in the saddle will take about six days, and covering 100 miles while hauling 1,000 pounds would take about four. Not a glamorous pace, but one suitable for every horse. Feats of athleticism seen during 100 mile endurance races, or even 50 mile races, should be looked at as one-offs. Covering distance on horseback without harming the animal is instead a slow, methodical progression.

Sources

Greene, Ann Norton. Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America

King, Franklin Hiram. A Text Book of the Physics of Agriculture

Lackner, Greta. “Bento’s Long Ride: Austria to Norway.” Long Rider Routes. http://www.thelongridersguild.com/routes/lackner.htm

Livingston, Phil, and Ed Roberts. War Horse: Mounting the Cavalry with America’s Finest Horses

Mackenzie, A. Engineer Field Manual, Parts I-VI

McClellan, George. Regulations and Instructions for the Field Service of the U.S. Cavalry in Time of War

Nicolle, Grant. “Marv’s Long Ride - John O’Groats, Scotland to Land’s End, England.” Long Rider Routes. http://www.thelongridersguild.com/routes/LR-routes.htm

Szesciorka, Samantha. “The 2016 Ride.” Nevada Discovery Ride. https://www.nevadadiscoveryride.com/2016ride.html

Western States Trail Foundation. “Tevis Cup Winners.” http://www.teviscup.org/results/tevis-cup-winners

Week 99

 

Today we conclude our examination of how the program of the Fasci di Combattimento - the famous “program of San Sepolcro”, even if it took about ten weeks after the assembly for it to be haphazardly put together - came to be. And especially of the elements which filtrated into it from the outside political space (in good part through the “discourse” Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia was partaking in, but not really by Mussolini's direct influence, that the future leader of Fascism was mostly providing coverage to the movement's baby steps), as well as of the most prominent influences (after the initial impact of Futurism in shaping certain radical tones of the “program”, which we highlighted in last week) coming from the syndicalist field, especially the most coherent and “intentional” one: that of Alceste De Ambris, who appeared to look at the Fasci as an experiment of political organization compatible and accessory to his own Unione Italiana del Lavoro, and therefore attempted to fill their ideological void with something.

The political baggage entering the “program” more or less by itself – in addition to the general ideas which had already begun to substantiate the action of the Popolo d'Italia during the last months of the war, that is a vibrant rejection of “official socialism” identified with Bolshevism, a special attention for the combatants as the leading class of Italy to be (an “aristocracy of the trenches”), a broad productivism paired with the traditional rejection of the “old establishment”, and critical of all “establishment-things” - was in direct relation with the public debate around the proposed summoning of a “constituent assembly” of the democratic forces, to discuss and qualify the characters of a proposed substantial reform of the state's institutions (beyond and encompassing the various partial reforms, of the electoral system, of the taxation system, of the parliament, of the land, etc.) needed to address the many yet unsolved pre-war problems and new post-war problems. This entire debate, which spanned a few months from the armistice (the republicans had actually opened it a few weeks earlier, but without finding much echo) to around the time of the fall of V.E. Orlando's Ministry, was, as often happens with political debates, of apparently great significance at the time, but ultimately of very little consequence.

On one hand, the various forces of democratic interventionism – those which appeared more committed to the initiative – were unable to solve the matter of the various “prejudicials”, concerning the republican character of the proposed “constituent” or its opening to the “national” field, as well as to gain the adhesion of the larger socialist forces, the Socialist Party being at the time under the leadership of the maximalist fraction and therefore aiming for the “maximum program” of proletarian revolution. On the other, Mussolini's own attempts to immediately relaunch the initiative putting his own interventionist spin on it, summoning a “Constituent of Interventionism”, open to all interventionist forces “without prejudicials” failed to gain much approval from both sides, and – given the state of pronounced division of the interventionist field – appear to have been either the result of a significant lapse in judgment or a largely instrumental effort to maintain Mussolini's and the Popolo d'Italia's relevance in the changing landscape of Italian politics.

Whether one or the other, on November 19^th 1918, Mussolini could announce (atop a short summary detailing the Croat violence in Fiume, where Italian troops had recently landed - “A cry of alarm and anguish! - Fiume.”) that

The first “Constituent” of the “great Italian people” will be!

And continued below, commenting on the enthusiastic reception of his initiative:

The proposal of assembling in a Constituent all those who wanted the war and who now want the peace of the peoples […] has gained a vibrant success. On my table, day after day, notes, opinion pieces, statements of approval pile up, illustrating and debating the postulates of our peace, which must be an Italian “peace” in the highest and noblest meaning of the word.

It is our intent to submit to the Constituent the solution of all the fundamental problems of national life, and we mean to create the anti-party which will push them to the public opinion, impose them to the establishment, or enact them outside of and above them. […]

As for the “truce” which had been advocated for by A. Lanzillo in a previous intervention, Mussolini was certainly open to it, since a truce, “between all those elements which, from the onset of the war, had chosen to set themselves on the national ground” (that is, outside of the “anti-national” Official Socialism, and – in second order – outside of the neutralists) had been a constant of the war experience and could therefore continue after the war. It was – continued Mussolini, citing Leon Jouhaux, the Head of the French CGdT (whose position, and in general that of the French labor organizations, was a central reference in Mussolini's polemics against the subordination of the Italian CGdL to the Direction of the Socialist Party, and became a commonplace argument to appeal to in the context of Mussolini's own national productivism) the time to “push away from us all the things which set us apart, and to hold onto all the things which unite us”.

Except, of course, for the intervention itself.

It was Lanzillo who examined the perspective of the initiative from a more concrete angle – starting, on one side, from Mussolini's announcement, on the other, from the telegram addressed by Edmondo Rossoni (current Secretary of the UIL) to the Italian Prime Minister, concerning the “solemn promises” made during the war and demanding among other things, the “eight hours workday, minimum salary, insurance and social assistance, distributive justice […], absolute political equality, etc. and to make those transformations concrete in the reconstitution of the national representation”. Furthermore Rossoni had reminded the Italian government of how “American and British labor organizations have already received guarantees from their governments that representatives of labor will be part to the elaboration of a peace of justice and freedom”.

Two acts which, while coming from two very different sources, both at the same time express a most urgent need of our life in present times.

It is necessary for all those who had called for, who had wanted and who had done the war, to know that their job isn't done […] The first major duty of the interventionists is to make sure that the peace treaty is such as is demanded by the conscience of the combatants and by the mission Italy is called to accomplish.

From the council of powers a peace must be born, safeguarding the rights of the Italian nation, but at the same time following the Mazzinian principles of our political tradition. […]

Furthermore Lanzillo – while he (generously) assumed that “the resolution of territorial terms may appear already set on its way by preexisting agreements” - cautioned on the risks of walking into the Peace Conference with the Italian position, with the Italian nation, “weakened by internal struggles”, since the economical agreements were also “of supreme importance for our future”.

It was a (slightly more “democratic”) declension of a characteristical ambiguity of the Italian interventionist field, where Mazzini's principles were invoked, where Wilson's ideas won general applause in so far as – after and (in part at least) because the definition of the Italian territorial gains was assumed to be, as a matter of fact, practically (if not perfectly) reconcilable with those principles and ideas – they didn't comport a substantial diminution of the Italian aspirations and therefore required no preliminary examination of their material and abstract value, nor their elaboration in an actual political program of peace. On the same note, the appeals to national unity – to interventionist unity in fact – were somewhat undermined by the observation that the interventionist field was, by their own admission, an “elite” of the nation, rather than the nation as a whole, and that the appeal to Italy's democratic programs and values, paired with an intransigent observance of Italy's rights, while it managed to appeal to the radical-national environment centered around the Popolo d'Italia during the following months (and to a lesser degree represented wider national groups and portions of the public), were destined to prevent a genuine reconciliation with those groups of democratic sentiment which either fell short in regards to the full interventionist experience, or refused to commit to a true, long term intransigent position on the Italian aspirations.