Two Oklahoma boys shocked the nation with their unaccompanied trip across the U.S.

Two young boys just a few years older than their home state of Oklahoma trudged across dirt paths and the barely tamed wilderness of the American heartland in a remarkable journey.

It was 1910, three years after President Teddy Roosevelt signed the paperwork that turned Oklahoma from a U.S. territory into a bona fide state. Temple, 6, and 10-year-old Louis "Bud" Abernathy rode horseback alone from their home in Frederick, Oklahoma, to New York City where they hoped to meet Roosevelt.

By this time the boys already had proven their talent for adventure. A year earlier, they had convinced their widowed father to let them ride alone from Guthrie to Santa Fe and back. The trip to New York wasn't their last, either. Buoyed by the immense celebrity that followed them northeast, Temple and Bud would make four other trips across the country.

They launched their journeys at the inflection point of a new century, caught between the legacy of America's wild Western frontier and the modern comforts that soon would define a growing nation.

An adventure East

Temple and Bud were the sons of Jack Abernathy, a U.S. marshal who had been appointed by Roosevelt to keep the peace in Oklahoma Territory. Years earlier, Jack had made a name for himself as a wolf hunter and amazed the president on a hunting trip by catching them with his bare hands.

The boys' mother died in 1907, the year Oklahoma became a state. Within two years, the Abernathy boys would step out on their first adventure.

On their travels, they met cattle rustlers and Indigenous tribes, visited the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Factory, and rode along with firefighters on a horse-drawn, steam-powered fire engine in Cincinnati before marching in a parade with Roosevelt in New York City.

The adventures continued. Before the younger brother Temple turned 10, the boys would purchase and drive their own car from New York to Oklahoma, ride horseback from New York to San Francisco and take another trip to the Big Apple, this time on an Indian motorcycle.

In a memoir published in 1992 with the help of his wife, Alta, Temple described in vivid detail those trips and the experience of taking such a journey at a young age.

"Although we were just little boys, we eagerly ventured forth with eyes wide open and minds ready to examine and absorb anything and everything around us," he wrote.

Witness to a fading American frontier

The early 20th century was a momentous time for the United States. About a decade before the boys took their first trip, the Chicago World's Fair showcased the modernization and technical prowess of the nation. At the expo, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a seminal essay on the state of the American frontier.

Turner argued there was no longer a clear line of settlement in the Western United States, which meant the frontier as it had been described in countless articles and fabulous stories was essentially finished. While Turner's paper ignored the impact of westward expansion on Indigenous peoples, he warned Americans that "never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves."

"He delivers his paper saying the frontier made Americans more individualistic, self-reliant, more democratic," said David Wrobel, a historian of the American West and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. "And also, he said it was a source of American nationalism. If you're there on the frontier, you're sort of doing the work of the nation."

Maybe that explains one reason why the boys became famous along their journey. Yes, they came out of the newly recognized state of Oklahoma that had only recently been settled by white people during the Land Run. And yes, they rode horseback for over 2,000 miles in a time when that same trip could be made by rail, experiencing a version of the hardship felt by earlier explorers.

But Wrobel said others had already made cross-country journeys out of the West, and by now it wasn't that much of a novelty.

"What's most remarkable is not that they're going on horseback, it's just that they're that young," said Wrobel.

Mark Twain's fictional boyhood adventurers Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were already on the cusp of being teenagers. It wasn't uncommon for boys that age to be laborers on farms or in factories. Yet seeing two boys, ages 6 and 10, riding alone must have been a shock.

"These are clearly kids who grew up a lot quicker than most parents would be comfortable having their kids grow up," Wrobel said.

A traveling pair

Jack Abernathy was an intrepid man himself. Along with hunting wolves, he hunted criminals across the territory and later the state of Oklahoma. Whenever he returned home, he would read cowboy and adventure novels that sparked the boys' curiosity.

"One day Bud and I decided we had to go see these things for ourselves," Temple wrote in his memoir. "With our dad as a role model, we thought it only natural that we look for adventure — in fact, being his only sons, we decided it was our duty!"

It was settled ― their first adventure would be westward into New Mexico. By the light of a kerosene lamp, the boys spent nights plotting on a map their route to Santa Fe and back across the Great Plains. It took some convincing, but Jack relented and helped prepare the boys for their journey.

The trip was harsh and taught the boys about solving problems on their own. They didn't do everything alone, though. On the open range, Temple recalled meeting some men who said they worked in the cattle business. The cowboys fed and followed the boys for a bit on the return leg of that first journey. Once home, a letter turned up addressed to "The Marshal of Oklahoma."

"I don't like one hair on your head, but I do like the stuff that is in these kids," the letter read. "We shadowed them through the worst part of New Mexico to see that they were not harmed by sheepherders, mean men or animals."

At that point it became clear. The cattlemen they met were rustlers, and the letter's author, a man called Arizona, had been in a shootout with their dad just a few months earlier.

In 1910, the boys wanted to meet their dad's friend and former President Teddy Roosevelt in New York City as he returned from an overseas safari. Jack already had planned to meet Roosevelt at the docks, and the boys somehow convinced their father to let them leave early — and alone. Their solo trip across the Southwest apparently proved their ability, and he relented.

Temple and Bud left their family farm near Frederick, dressed in new boots and hats. They had new leather saddles and blankets ordered all the way from Kansas City. At each city along their path, the boys would stop for a few nights, meet the locals and inevitably speak to reporters.

Word of their trip lit up telegraph lines all across the East, and eventually the Abernathy boys were famous everywhere they went. Once reaching New York, they rode their mares behind Roosevelt in a parade celebrating his cavalry regiment known as the Rough Riders.

After a few more adventures, the Abernathy boys decided it was time to be normal kids. In his memoir published in 1992, Temple laments that Bud started liking girls around that time, while he became fixated on cars and airplanes. Their dad left law enforcement to become a wildcatter in Texas, where the family remained as the boys grew into adults.

"Our eyes were always on the future. We didn't think then about the things we'd learned on our cross-country adventures. But from a perspective of 80 years, it's clear that there were many lasting lessons on those bumpy rides," Temple wrote.

"Some of the people who had the least to give were the ones who gave us the most along the road — food, shelter and friendship. And when we looked for some good in everyone, we usually found it, even in the bandits we met in New Mexico."