Ches McCartney

He claimed to have covered more than 100,000 miles and visited all states except Hawaii: His goats couldn't swim that far, he said, and if they could, "they'd just end up eating the grass skirts off the hula dancers anyway".

[2] Born around the turn of the twentieth century (the exact year is unknown), McCartney ran away from his family's Iowa farm home at age 14.

[3] In New York he met and married a Spanish knife thrower ten years his senior and became part of her act, serving as near-miss target.

He was initially thought to have died in the accident,[6] but he awakened on a mortician's table as the undertaker inserted an embalming needle in his arm.

McCartney's iron-wheeled wagon was large, rickety, and garishly decorated with a clutter of objects he found and collected along the road.

It contained a bed, a potbellied stove, lanterns, and lots of trash, and was pulled by a team of around nine goats, with a few trailing behind to occasionally push and serve as brakes on downhill stretches of road.

The goats were surprisingly sturdy and effective draft animals and McCartney managed to make five to ten miles a day, even pushing up Tennessee's Monteagle Mountain during a winter storm that stalled all other vehicle traffic.

The Goat Man usually kept his herd and rig to the sides of the roads he traveled, so while he may have slowed vehicle traffic, he rarely stopped it.

McCartney's diet consisted mainly of goat milk, supplemented by food given to him or bought with money he made selling scrap metal he collected, postcards of himself, or from posing for pictures.