The Leatherman

From 1857 to 1889 a silent man in a sixty-pound suit of stitched leather walked the same 365-mile clockwise loop through western Connecticut and eastern New York, roughly every thirty-four days, sleeping in a chain of rock shelters that still bear his name. He took food at the same doors on the same schedule and almost never spoke; his real identity was never learned. The caves are real and marked; the man remains a mystery.