The Man Who Walked Around the World

How many pairs of shoes does it take to walk around the world? According to Dave Kunst, the first verified man to do so, the answer is 21.

Over the course of four years, three months, and sixteen days, Kunst travelled across thirteen countries by foot, including the U.S., Portugal, India, Afghanistan, and Australia. But he didn’t walk the 14,450 miles alone. During different segments of his journey, he had the help of his two brothers, John and Pete, two dogs, four mules, and an Australian schoolteacher named Jenni Samuel who he later married. While Kunst joined a small list of pedestrian circumnavigators before him who claimed to walk around the land mass of the world, his walk is the first with proof on record.

Who was the man who accomplished this monumental human feat? A globetrotting spectacle that made headlines throughout its course, marked by his boundless determination, outspokenness, and tragically, the killing of one of his brothers. How did he change through those four years, and who would he become?

On June 20, 1970, Dave and John began their adventure along with a mule called Willie-Make-It to help set them apart from hitchhikers–an idea they received from a woman in Minneapolis. The three of them set out east from Waseca, Minnesota, bringing with them a letter of endorsement from U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a scroll for the mayors of each town they passed through to stamp, a stack of UNICEF cards, $1,000, and just the right amount of naïveté.

The inspiration for the walk came from a conversation Kunst had with one of his coworkers at the local movie theater. He mused about driving down to South America, but his coworker said that had already been done. What hadn’t been done, though, was walking all the way across the world.

“Well, I never thought about walking around the world myself,” says Kunst, now 80 years old. “But I always wanted to get in the Guinness Book of World Records.”

The brothers had a lot of motivations for why they wanted to travel around the world. While being in the Guinness Book of World Records and having an adventure together was the catalyst, in their short amount of time of planning, they found more and more reasons to set out. One was making their mother proud.

“My mother didn't do anything adventurous, but she had an adventurous spirit,” Kunst says. “She said, ‘David, I want you to look at everything twice. Once for yourself, and once for me.’”

New York to Portugal

Together Dave and John traveled across the U.S., touched the Atlantic Ocean in New York, and flew to Europe and touched the Atlantic Ocean on the other side. While they had to give up Willie-Make-It for adoption in the States, when they arrived in Portugal, they were given a donkey, which drastically slowed down their walking pace. But soon after they made it to Lisbon, and after a few weeks of rest, they were gifted a Portuguese army mule by the country’s tourist bureau, which they named Willie-Make-It II.

While they originally planned to work whenever they needed more money, the brothers were given hospitality and food from everyone from families in small cities, to members of the press, to dignitaries in other countries.

When they arrived in countries where they didn’t speak the language, the brothers would show a picture of them with Humphrey, who most officials recognized, as well as their scroll. Most people asked how they could help. “Always the first thing we would say–‘Please take care of our mule,’” Kunst says. “[They’d say] ‘Well, that solves that, now what about you guys?’ And they always put us up for the night.”

The two brothers continued this way through the rest of their trip across the continent, including Spain, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and into Iran. During the European leg of their tour, they met notable figures like Princess Grace of Monaco and the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl.  They also received a dog, Drifter, who was in an accident in Turkey. A family who heard about Drifter’s demise gifted them another dog. Sticking with the naming theme of Willie-Make-It II, they named their new pup Drifter II.

With Drifter II being carried by Willie-Make-It II, and Dave and John walking beside them, they entered Afghanistan.

Death and Robbery

When the two brothers first began planning their expedition, John wanted to do something to help people while they were out walking, and suggested signing people up as donors for UNICEF.

“He was a little bit more compassionate than me,” Kunst says. “‘He said, ‘Maybe we should do something for somebody else when we're doing something for ourselves.’”

Dave agreed as long as they didn’t collect the money themselves, worrying that it’d make them a target for robberies, and so they collected pledges instead. However, his fears proved to be premonitory.

For about the first two weeks of traveling through Afghanistan, the brothers had a police escort. After believing that they had passed through the most dangerous part of the country, the police left them, but gave them some advice. If they happened to come across bandits in the area, they should shout at them to go away, and if that didn’t work, to shoot a bullet into the air. If they did that, it showed that they were willing to fight and would hopefully be left alone.

One night, after setting up camp, the two brothers heard Drifter II barking. Six bandits were approaching their camp. After telling them over and over again to go away, and eventually firing a warning shot into the air, they left.

“I thought it was over,” Kunst later said. “I even looked at my brother and said, ‘I guess the police captain was right.’”

But the bandits returned soon after, surrounding their camp. They didn’t wait to start shooting. Dave was shot in the lung, and John in the heart. Dave told John to play dead as the bandits came to rob them, but he had died instantly.

A newspaper article was the reason the bandits came after the Kunst brothers. They had recently done an interview with someone who didn’t speak English, and due to an error in translation, it said that the brothers were collecting money for UNICEF themselves. Upon finding the brothers, and their cart emblazoned with the letters ‘UNICEF’ across it, the bandits thought they were one robbery away from becoming rich.

After the bandits left, Dave dragged himself to the closest road and waited for help. As he waited, he recalled a conversation that he and John had earlier on in their walk.

“Dave, I love walking around the world,” Kunst recalls John saying. “It’s a great adventure, and I love it. If I die walking around the world, you tell mom and dad I died happy.”

The next day, soldiers found Dave alone on the side of the road, in pain and covered in blood. After partially healing up, he flew home alone to recover.

The Third Kunst Brother

After resting back in Minnesota for about four months, Kunst was fortunately able to make a full recovery. He already had plans to finish his walk, alongside his third brother, Pete.

Dave remembers the moment that Pete decided to join him. “My brother Pete said, ‘Two Kunst brothers started the walk, and two Kunst brothers are going to finish the walk.’”

Pete had been living and working in California and had been unable to get the time off to join his two younger brothers. Their family mourned for John, and Dave didn’t want his brother’s death to be in vain.

“I was more determined to finish then than ever before because I decided we walked halfway around the world, we’re going to do the rest,” Dave says. “And especially when my brother Pete decided he was going to come and help me.”

Dave began planning the remainder of the walk, and how he and Pete would have to return to Afghanistan and start in the exact same spot that John had been killed.

Meanwhile, their community started rallying behind them. “The same person who gave us the idea for the mule, she decided that we should have money because we didn’t have any money we could use,” Kunst says. She put together the Friends of the Kunst Brothers, which consisted of five people who each gave the brothers $500 to help get them to Afghanistan.

Following Dave’s recovery, he and Pete flew overseas and restarted the trip. Even though Pete had leg problems, the two of them were able to walk across the border to Pakistan and continue through India. It was reported that they were the first non-Asians to walk through the Khyber Pass since Alexander the Great. They found homes for Drifter II and Willie-Make-It II and flew to Australia.

The Teacher and Coming Home

After adopting their third mule, Will-Willie-Make-It II, Dave and Pete were ready to start their journey through Australia. The three of them made it about halfway when Pete needed to return to work. Dave had made it through the hardest part of the trip and told him he’d be okay.

Over the course of his walk, Kunst would spend time in cities and get to know the locals. In Perth, Australia, he met Jenni Samuel, a schoolteacher at a party, and they soon fell in love. But he needed to finish his walk.

“I told her, I said, ‘I’m coming back,’” Kunst says. “She told me later in our lives that she really didn’t believe me.”

In addition to being in the midst of a four-year walk around the world, Kunst was also already married and had children waiting in Minnesota. He would later receive public backlash after saying that he wanted to leave his wife in an article published in the Minneapolis Tribune.

Kunst would see Samuel sooner than he had anticipated. A few days after leaving her behind in Perth, Will-Willie-Make-It II died from a heart attack. Kunst contacted Samuel, and she said if he could make it back, she would let him use her car to carry his belongings. For about half the length of Australia, Kunst walked along the road as Samuel drove her car in low-gear for a thousand miles next to him.

He flew to California and began the final segment of his journey. His last mule, Will-Willie-Make-It II, gave up part way through, specifically, in the middle of a busy California intersection. A policeman tried to slowly drive his car and push the mule forward, but the angered mule kicked the police car’s headlights in.

Throughout his return journey to Waseca, Kunst continued to do interviews with newspapers. A reporter from the Minneapolis Tribune joined him on his walk for a couple of days in Iowa for another article, seeing how Kunst was living and recording his thoughts on his journey. Despite identifying himself as a reporter, Kunst didn’t realize that he’d been reporting the whole time. The article included remarks he made about the amount of “ignorant people” he encountered in countries on the walk, disparaging their educational systems. He also made further comments about leaving his wife, his thoughts on marriage and organized religion, and critique of his hometown. His words elicited enough controversy that caused the cancellation of welcomings in towns along the way to Waseca, where Kunst was just days away from returning. 

"I'm doing this for myself mainly. I was tired of Waseca, tired of my job, tired of a lot of little people who don't want to think, and tired of my wife," Kunst had stated in the interview at the time. "The walk was a perfect way to change all that: I just walked out of town."

The Waseca Chamber of Commerce ended up voting to “honor the completion of the walk, but not Dave Kunst’s ideals" after the urging of their president. The mayor refused to join in the homecoming celebration. Harold Greenwood, the president of the Midwest Federal Saving and Loan Association and president of UNICEF in Minneapolis at the time, who helped fund Kunst's trip, publicly disavowed him and withdrew his support.

“He got our whole town of Waseca against us just by that damn article,” Kunst says now. However, on October 5, 1974, he was still greeted in celebration by a large crowd of about 200 upon his return, and traffic was reportedly backed up for a quarter mile into town to witness the event. “I really didn’t care. I knew I was going to make it, and I knew as soon as I made it, I was on my way back to Australia for Jenni.”

There are a few skeptics who don’t believe that Kunst completed the whole journey on foot, how he may have hitched a ride in Samuel's car through parts of Australia, for instance, and that the only verifiable proof remains the stamps that he received from the mayor of each town he visited, but it doesn’t bother him. The Guinness Book of World Records mentions two unverified people before him who claimed to walk around the Earth in the 1920s.

In the years since, Kunst found a co-author to help write a book about his travels, The Man Who Walked Around the World, published in 1979 and out of print today. In 2013, HBO announced a film adaptation of his walk, but with only a script written, the project was eventually shelved.

Now fifty years later, Kunst is married to Jenni Samuel, who he ended up with after the walk, and living in California. On top of the memories, the experience, and the adventure of walking around the world, he says the one lesson he took away from the journey was the power of the human mind.

 “I think I've proven how if you decide you want to do something in your life, and you make up your mind, you got to do it,” Kunst says.

In 2004, the Kunst brothers were honored with a sign that still remains in Caledonia, Minnesota, where they were born–just a few hours from Waseca. It reads, “Caledonia: Birthplace of the Earthwalkers David, Peter and John Kunst.”