The Most Famous Horse Ride in History

No, Not The One You're Thinking

Do you know this man? You should!

And so today, April 18, 2025, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the most important horse ride in American history!

It was on this day that it became clear to Sons of Liberty official Dr. Joseph Warren that a British column was going to march into the countryside. Warren knew that John Hancock and Sam Adams had to be warned of their potential arrest.

He needed a man who was familiar with the Boston outskirts, and unafraid to make the long journey on horseback through British check points. He had the perfect man for the job!

William Dawes set off on a slow horse at about 9pm, the first rider out of the gate. Boston at the time was nearly an island, and Dawes had to pass through a British checkpoint at Boston Neck. He made it through easily and there’s a variety of accounts about how he did it. Some say he attached himself to another party. Other accounts recall him pretending to be a bumbling drunken farmer.

The easiest explanation and the reason Warren selected him was that his common work as a tanner took him outside of Boston often and he was familiar with the guards.

Whatever the case, he made it, galloping through Roxbury, Brookline, Brighton and Cambridge, arriving at the Hancock-Clarke House around 12:30am.

The first part of the mission accomplished, he and two other riders who had joined him at the house, headed toward Concord. The three riders encountered a British patrol around 1:30am. One of them, a fellow named Paul Revere, was captured. The other, a rider named Sam Prescott, jumped a stone wall and made it to Concord.

Dawes, however, knowing his horse was too slow to outrun the two British riders, staged a ruse. He rode up to a vacant house and shouted to it as if there were patriots inside. The British turned tail and galloped off.

Unfortunately, Dawes reared his horse too quickly, was thrown off and forced to walk home.

An 1861 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow highlighted one of the other riders and ignored Dawes completely.

After the ride, Dawes went into the provisions business and even became a commissary in the Continental Army.

Today, the only memorial remembrance of Dawes's ride is commemorated on a traffic island in Cambridge, at the intersection of Garden Street and Mass. Ave. in Harvard Square. The inscription gives his name and the date, inaccurately stated as April 19, 1775. Even his memorials get his info wrong.

Dawes died on May 19, 1794.

Fun history footnote: Dawes’ great-great-grandson, Charles Dawes, served as Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge.

William Dawes, a common man with a slow horse, who did his duty, warned the patriots, twisted his ankle falling off his horse and limped home into obscurity.