Bud and Temple Abernathy

When your dad is the youngest U.S. marshal ever, you probably shouldn’t expect to be coddled. For the Abernathy boys, that was just fine. In the summer of 1909, the brothers Temple (age five) and Louis, known as Bud (age nine), saddled up their horses Geronimo and Sam Bass at the family’s Cross Roads ranch near Frederick, Oklahoma, and aimed for Santa Fe, New Mexico — by themselves. It was their father’s idea. Jack Abernathy said the boys needed to toughen up. But there were limits: They were to ride no more than fifty miles a day except in search of food or shelter, never cross a creek without seeing the bottom, never carry more than five dollars at a time, and never ride on Sunday. On those terms he turned them loose on a thirteen-hundred-mile round trip.

They came from hardy stock, the Abernathy boys. Their father, John R. “Catch ’em Alive Jack” Abernathy, was born in Bosque County, Texas, in 1876,