At first glance, Matthew McDaniel is just a man on a horse, making his way across the country with his wife and five kids following close behind in the family bus.

But to those who know him better, including the countless men and women who have given him a lift back to his bus after a long day of riding, he is more akin to an activist: a passionately motivated man who was once deported from Thailand after years of opposing what he called the unfair treatment of his wife's people, the indigenous Akha. He is now raising awareness for his cause in his native United States.

After first hearing of the Akha during a visit to Thailand in the early 90s, McDaniel quickly became enamored of their cause, and later of his wife, Michu, whom he met after driving a group of Akha back to her remote village. Enraged by the Thai government's seizure of thousands of acres of Akha rice land, an act he claims to have witnessed, the native Oregonian quickly dedicated himself to becoming a thorn in the side of the Thai royal family, most recently by riding across the U.S. on his trusty horse, Hampton.

McDaniel's passion was certainly not lost on Scott Yetter, a senior policy analyst with a Silver Spring-based international developing company who struck up a conversation with the lone rider as he trekked through downtown Silver Spring last week.

"I said ‘Do you need a place to stay this week?' And he said, ‘No, but my horse does,' so I told him I had a big enough back yard and why doesn't he bring his horse up there for the night?" Yetter said of the Feb. 23 meeting.

After seeing his tired visitor to the house, Yetter brought his children home from school, eager to show them the strange guest and the horse in the back yard.

"We got home and there Matthew is, lying on his back on our leather sofa with his hands on his lap, sound asleep, and my one kid said, ‘Daddy, it's a dead cowboy!'" Yetter said with a laugh.

McDaniel and his family spent two nights with Yetter while exploring D.C. before preparing to move on. Their long journey is still far from over.

Sitting in the Starbucks in the Hillandale Shopping Center on Feb. 25, McDaniel used a pocket calendar to mark off the most recent progress log; it had been 357 days since he and his family left Salem, Ore., on their cross-country campaign to reach the United Nations, alerting as many people as possible on their way about the Akha people.

"I could ride up on my horse to a place like this and get a coffee at Starbucks and a ton of people will walk up and want to see the horse and know what we're about," he said, describing his grass-roots campaign style. "It's like going out there and burying a penny with my name and address on it and a year from now, maybe someone comes out and digs it up."

The journey has certainly been eventful for McDaniel's family; two of his oldest sons, Ah Soh, 9, and Ah Tsah, 7, chatted about their trip to the nation's capital while finishing their English and Akha lessons in their notebooks.

"It was great," said Soh, of his experience in D.C., citing the monument as a favorite attraction, while Tsah was eager to point out the fun he has had following his father across the United States.

"I've walked all over the world!" he said with a bright smile, his arms outspread to indicate the distance he's traveled since McDaniel managed to work out his wife's paperwork to transplant the family to Oregon from Thailand through Laos in 2006.

McDaniel has also been busy, meeting with his state senator, Jeffrey Merkley (D-Oregon) in D.C. last week and pressing forward to reach the 9th session of the UN's Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which will take place from April 19 to April 30 in New York. He hopes his journey will help bring attention to the problems faced by the Akha from the Thai government and shady missionary groups that he claims often set up false orphanages in the country to raise funds.

"I'm just going down the road and I'm always thinking, man, the queen of Thailand; she's going to hear from me," he said with a distant smile. "If you screw with the Akha people, like an ant I'll come up and load one tiny pebble at a time into your boat, and eventually, I'll find a way to capsize it."