To all who
have been following the Hidalgo strain, I wanted to give you an update in my
research which many of you have been kind enough to help me with:
I
have read “The Blood of the Arab” and two of the chapters in that book are
about Hopkins. However that
book was SELF PUBLISHED by a FRIEND of Hopkins who printed Hopkins letters
of a FIRST HAND account of the race. So basically Hopkins said he did
it..and there are no secondary sources to back up his story.
In
the book Hopkins stated that he was riding for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Show and spoke of Cody as though he knew him personally. He also said that
Cody’s Congress of Rough Riders paid for his trip to Arabia. But I have
been working with both the currators of the Buffalo Bill Museum and the
archive librarian of the Buffalo Bill library and there has been no record
found of a Frank Hopkins riding in the West Show OR legal or monetary
documentation of the Congress funding Hopkins…and if a company would have
funded such an expense it surly would have been recorded. The only thing
that was found was another manuscript written BY HOPKINS HIMSELF AGAIN
stating that he raced in Arabia. So far I have found 3 first hand accounts
of the race from Hopkins and no accounts from secondary sources.
The
race was not called the “Ocean of Fire” Hopkins said the translation in
English amounts to something like “The Thanksgiving Race” which probably
is in connection with an Islamic Holiday. And even though Disney
advertises the race as being famous, I have spoken with historians from
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Yemen, and The United Arab Emirates, and none of
them have ever heard of such a race…certainly not an annual one.
This
was emailed to me from the Buffalo Bill curator:
Hello again.
Just this morning I had a message
from the curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum.She stated that the Frank T. Hopkins story is considered to
be a complete hoax, even though the movie producers are touting it as a true
story.I can tell you that the ms
we have was originally sent to Buffalo Bill’s biographer, Don Russell, with the
question, Is this guy for real?Russell never mentions Hopkins in his books about the wild west, so it
may be that he too had doubts about the connection.
