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As early as 1140, the first of a long line of
kings named Henry tried to improve Hobby horses--pony-sized
Irish horses--by importing Arab stallions to give them more
speed and stronger power. Throughout the Crusades, from 1096 to
1270, Turkish cavalry horses dominated the larger English
warhorses, leading the Crusaders to buy, capture or steal their
share of the stallions. After the War of the Roses, which
decimated England's horse population, King Henry aimed to
rebuild his cavalry. Both the king and his son, Henry VIII,
imported horses from Italy, Spain and North Africa, and
maintained their own racing stable. Henry's Hobbys, as they were
called, raced against horses owned by other nobility, leading
the word "hobby" to mean a "costly pastime indulged in by the
idle rich." It also lends credibility to horse racing being
labeled as the Sport of Kings, although this phrase's
origination comes later, as found in Part II.
Henry used tax revenues to maintain his stables,
claiming that by breeding winners with winners he could improve
the quality of the cavalry. While certainly a landmark
philosophy in horse racing, Henry was unable to apply its
practice; his Master of the Horse, the title of Henry's racing
stable director, was not a professional horseman and recklessly
crossbred the entire stable. The stable consisted of a variety
of international horses with an even wider mix of genes, so well
mixed they earned the moniker "cocktails," our current word for
a mixed drink. It is not known for sure, but this may be the
oldest piece of evidence linking horse racing with drinking!
Anyway, Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I,
drastically improved her father's stable during her fifty-year
reign, dispensing of horses not qualified for racing or the
cavalry and moving the best horses to new barns at Tutbury near
Staffordshire. Elizabeth kept a close watch on matings and
systematically recorded pedigrees. On the advice of her Master
of the Stable the Queen added more Arabian horses to the stable,
breeding Arab stallions to Hobby and Galloway (Scottish) mares.
When Elizabeth I died, James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen
of Scots, and his son, Charles--who became king in
1625--expanded both the palace and royal racing stables at the
track of Newmarket. In 1647 Oliver Cromwell's army defeated
Charles' Cavaliers, forcing Charles back to Scotland and
allowing Cromwell to capture the royal stables at Tutbury and
take inventory; he swiftly sold most of the Royal Mares, keeping
fewer than 100 to breed stronger, lighter horses to replace the
slower, heavier ones no longer suited for warfare due to the
development of gunpowder.
Cromwell's focus was on the cavalry, not
racing. He even passed several laws prohibiting racing and went
so far as to confiscate horses and cause pedigree records to be
ruined. Royalists and Cavaliers were either forced out of
England or in retreat to their country estates where they could
do two things: maintain their records of horses bred for stag
hunting and racing, and wait for the end of Cromwell's
repressive religious throne. When Cromwell died and Charles II
became king, the wait was over.
After the Revolutionary War more and more
immigrants poured into Kentucky and horse racing became more and
more of a Kentucky institution. At the 1775 Transylvania
Convention Daniel Boone introduced the first bill "to improve
the breed of horses in the Kentucky territory." Many Kentucky
settlements--with the notable exception of Louisville which
already had a race track--featured a Race Street, a straight
stretch located just off the main thoroughfare and named after
what went on there. In 1797 Kentucky's first Jockey Club was
founded at a formal race meet, then was reorganized as the
Lexington Jockey Club in 1809. (Kentucky statesman Henry Clay
was a founding member.)
Helping Kentucky establish its foothold on
horse racing was Virginia's struggle to maintain racing under
the burden of religious censure and bad business practices. The
Revolution had damaged their stock, which was then replaced by
low quality horses from dishonest British horse merchants.
Diomed, who never performed up to par after his 1780 Epsom Darby
win, was them sent to stud, although his sires floundered in
England. He was then considered useless and thereby suitable for
trade to America and shipped to Virginia in 1800. For some
reason his luck changed in Virginia; each year his crop of sire
champions grew, even to the point of joining the line of
Aristides, who won the first
Kentucky
Derby in 1875.
The War of 1812 took a heavy toll on horses.
Afterwards, racing was slow to recover in the South and
reformers shut it down entirely in the North and East.
Lexington, however, always had a track where owners competed
their best homebreds; horsemen quickly realized there was no
equal to the Bluegrass when it came to nurturing pedigreed
stock. Bluegrass, for those who have always wondered, is a
deep-rooting, thin bladed hardy perennial (a plant that lives
for an indefinite number of years), native to the steppes of the
Black Sea. Some credit Quaker leader William Penn with its
importation, but the seed probably came to America in the
pockets of Mennonites ousted from Russia, for whom Pennsylvania
was a safe haven before they headed west. Settlers quickly
cleared land, maximizing the pasture available for grazing not
just for horses but for hogs, sheep and cattle as well.
In 1826, 60 prominent Bluegrass businessmen
organized the Kentucky Association for the Improvements of
Breeds of Stock. Thoroughbred breeding records were too jumbled
at that point in time, however, and a centralized breed registry
comparable to Weatherby's General Stud Book (see Part I) until
Lexington native Col. Sanders D. Bruce compiled the American
Stud Book in 1868. Nevertheless, the first Kentucky Association
races took place at the mile-log, circular Old William Track in
Lee's Wood, before a course was laid out nearer to downtown
Lexington; it was later remodeled in 1832, becoming America's
second mile-long, fenced, dirt track. By 1850 landlocked
Lexington lacked only one thing: a railroad system with direct
access to Ohio River trade. The lack of cheap transportation
greatly handicapped farmers, whose incomes were linked to their
ability to ship their wares around the country. As trade became
pivotal to economic survival, Lexington became reliant on the
Louisville & Nashville Railroad, Louisville's "iron horse."
By contrast, Louisville was a swampy,
riverfront settlement named for France's King Louis XVI, and had
developed from Portland, where the treacherous Falls of the Ohio
frequently forced hapless travelers ashore. From the beginning,
Louisville was a brawling river town, home to successive waves
of German and Irish immigrants making their way up river from
New Orleans. They became hardworking citizens but had no desire
or money to buy and race thoroughbreds. Townspeople with English
roots, however, organized the Louisville Jockey Club and
arranged matches down by the river. Another track was built on
the east side of the county, and both tracks flourished and gave
rise to the notion of the "Louisville races."
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