by Mim E. Rivas
Beautiful Jim Key
The Lost History of the World’s Smartest Horse
Mim Eichler Rivas
To the memory of my father, Eugene Eichler,
a peacemaker, who demonstrated throughout
his forty-six years of life that with kindness,
wisdom, a good joke, and a story or two
hardened minds can be opened,
and the world can be changed for the better.
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men,
the blood and the heat of blood that ran them.
All his reverence and all his fondness and all the
leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted
and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
—CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
1. Prehistory
Part One of the History
2. Inauspicious Beginnings
3. The Human Who Could Talk Horse
4. War Stories
5. Higher Calling
Part Two of the History
6. Key, Key, and Rogers
7. Service to Humanity
8. The Horse Who Could
9. All Horses Go to Heaven
10. After History
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgments
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Mim Eichler Rivas
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS IS THE TRUE STORY of an American hero who rose to international renown at the turn of the last century and who, in his short twenty-three years of life, helped spur a significant shift in human consciousness. What made this individual different from other great men and women who change the course of history is that he was neither man nor woman. Beautiful Jim Key was a horse. An educated horse. Together with his owner/teacher/best friend “Dr.” William Key—an ex-slave from Shelbyville, Tennessee, a Civil War veteran, horse whisperer, self-taught veterinarian, entrepreneur, and one of the most recognized African-Americans of his day—Jim Key helped launch a worldwide animal rights movement through an international network of humane societies. His contribution was to transform what was once considered a radical fringe element into a mainstream concern and to make kindness toward animals a cornerstone of civilized existence.
Beautiful Jim Key was to the humane movement exactly what every important cause needs. He was a star. Years before horses like Dan Patch, Man O’War, Seabiscuit, and Secretariat became revered household names, Beautiful Jim Key trailblazed his way into stardom and set the standard for animal celebrities forever after. Yet unlike his fellow equine stars, Jim was famous not because of his speed or his beauty. He was, without a doubt, a paragon of physical grace, a heartthrob, and a matinee idol. At a press party on November 30, 1897, during a private exhibition at Field’s Stables at 156 East Twenty-fifth Street in Manhattan—assembled to announce Jim’s Broadway debut—a reporter for the New York Times was smitten with his “expressive eyes” and the “suggestive tosses of his finely formed head.” Indeed, it was the press who first dubbed the mahogany bay “Beautiful.” But his good looks didn’t make him an icon.
Jim was beloved because he was smart. During nine years of continuous exhibition, he demonstrated inexplicable abilities to read, write, spell, do math, tell time, sort mail, use a cash register and a telephone, cite Bible passages, and engage in political debate. Known as the “Marvel of the Twentieth Century” and “The Greatest Crowd Drawer in America,” he was seen by an estimated ten million Americans. The rest of the public settled for second best, following his comings and goings, as well as the controversies that swirled around him, in nonstop headlines in most major newspapers. Legions of fans bought his souvenir programs and buttons, publicity photographs, and postcards. They collected specially minted Beautiful Jim Key pennies, danced the “Beautiful Jim Key” two-step, wore Jim Key gold pinbacks in their collars, and competed in Beautiful Jim Key essay contests, while one million children signed the Jim Key Pledge: “I promise always to be kind to animals.” Meanwhile, the proceeds from his performances and merchandise funded scores of local, state, and national animal protection organizations, and also made Jim and his human associates wealthy beyond their dreams.
A hundred years later, this amazing saga has seemingly vanished from the pages of history. When a 1904 vintage promotional pamphlet relating elements of this story first crossed my radar, what confronted me was a mystery. Why had I never heard of it? Yet why did it seem remotely familiar, like a flash of déjà vu or a long-lost memory asking to be remembered? Where had the history gone? Why had it resurfaced now?
Initial research very quickly turned up a wealth of documentation that provided answers. But other questions emerged, questions that plagued Beautiful Jim Key even at the height of his career. Was his act a hoax? Were ten million Americans taken for a ride? On the other hand, if Bill and Jim were faking it, what kind of an elaborate system allowed them to pull it off?
These questions will be explored on the pages ahead. In order to both validate this story and allow readers to determine what processes were or weren’t at work, I have resisted my storytelling temptation to invent scenic details and dialogue as texture to this narrative. Dialogue in quotation marks is quoted from actual sources; scenes described in detail are likewise taken from detailed documents, except in those instances where I have added connective tissue between events when certain moments have been suggested by sources but can still be considered speculative.
Readers may come to different conclusions about whether Jim’s ability to nonchalantly subtract a $1.69 purchase from two dollar bills and deliver change in correct coins to the recipient was a function of performing a well-designed trick or whether he was capable of deductive reasoning and critical thinking. Clearly, there were reasons why Jim and his entourage seemed always to be in a race for their lives to overcome hurdles of prejudice, skepticism, and competition. There are other reasons why the notion of humanlike animal intelligence touches off a powerfully resistive public nerve—now as then. Yet what is evident, in any case, is that Beautiful Jim Key definitely appeared to be able to do all that was claimed of him.
That he appeared to have an I.Q. equivalent to that of a twelve-year-old human and to have mastered academics equivalent to a sixth-grade level was essential in his ability to open and change the public mind. This, more importantly, leads to the questions at the heart of what Dr. William Key and Jim Key accomplished. How were they able, in nine short years, to bring about a transformation of thinking, forging connections that transcended age, economic background, race, and species, all across the country, at a time when few were genuinely concerned about the welfare of animals? Moreover, what were the individual and cultural crosscurrents that shaped them as crusaders for a simple message: the power of kindness—toward our fellow human beings, toward all creatures, and toward the earth itself—trumps all others?
During the late 1800s, a time that called forth for a being like Beautiful Jim Key, animal rights activists—many of the same groups who promoted such outlandish ideas as women’s suffrage, racial equality, conservation, literacy, the humane reform of labor, welfare, schools, and prisons—were generally viewed as radicals and kooks. Troublemakers. In a kind of spooky rerun, current advocates for animal and environmental protection—in fact, most progressive organizations—are once again being labeled extremists and nuisances. “Special interest groups.”
In an age of terror, war, and plagues—by no means exclusive to our times—the values of nonviolen
ce, tolerance, kindness, and the quest for peace on our fragile planet seem to have fallen into disrepute.
Maybe that’s why this story has resurfaced now. It’s possible that a horse and a man of color from Tennessee have as much to teach us today as they did at the turn of the last century. Maybe more.
1
Prehistory
Saturday, April 30, 1904.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Opening Day.
MISS ALICE ROOSEVELT parted the seas of fairgoers as she paused to smooth her skirt, making sure, as she always did, that it had just the right swing. With her gaze fixed ahead at her destination, the unusual Silver Horseshoe Building, the President’s daughter continued along the Pike, the exposition’s mile-long amusement area. Gone was her trademark expression of boredom. On her way to preside at an Opening Day performance given by the smartest horse in the world, Alice appeared to be positively delighted.
Neither Alice nor her escort, Ohio congressman Nicholas Longworth, had yet to witness the horse in action, but they had certainly read his press and heard enough claims about the Celebrated Educated Arabian-Hambletonian to understand why he was expected to be the top draw on the Pike.
This stretch of marketplaces and attractions, she could see, didn’t have the expansive grandeur of the rest of the fair. Architecturally, there was no comparison. Thus far, the Pike was an unfinished hodgepodge, while the main exhibit areas seemed to be perfectly realized visions. They radiated in avenues and plazas to provide spectacular views of the main Festival Hall—one part Louis Quatorze and three parts fairyland—along with the euphoric Cascade Gardens pumping ninety thousand gallons of water per minute into geysers and fountains that spilled over plunging falls lit by green glass steps, offsetting the futuristic fantasy of the Palace of Electricity, which turned megawattage into visual evidence that the planners had truly outdone themselves.
Earlier that day, exposition president David Francis had welcomed the first flanks of what would total 200,000 Opening Day visitors. The weather itself was miraculous. It had been cold and stormy for weeks in St. Louis, with black skies and oppressive winds almost causing Francis and fellow officials to delay the date of the opening. After they decided to take the risk and open, rain or shine, the city nervously awoke at dawn that Saturday to a pale fog. By early morning, the sun broke through, sending the temperature and humidity rising, and basking the World’s Fair in a jubilant golden mist.
Alice Roosevelt and Congressman Longworth were on hand to listen as John Philip Sousa and his band played “Louisiana” while simultaneously, back in Washington, D.C., in the East Room of the White House, Alice’s father, President Theodore Roosevelt, was joined by an assembly of ambassadors and ministers from around the globe, his cabinet, justices of the Supreme Court, president pro tem of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House. The President was then handed a golden key, which he ceremoniously turned to trigger a telegraphic transmission that moments later in St. Louis unleashed the electricity required to raise and unfurl flags of all nations, thus starting the machinery of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
“Open ye gates!” shouted David Francis, after the cries of the crowd had subsided. “Swing wide ye portals! Enter herein ye sons of men! Learn the lesson here taught and gather from it inspiration for still greater accomplishments!”
Trumpeting the fair’s themes of progress and education, Francis made no apologies for the unfinished construction of the Pike. Rather, he promoted the manner in which he and fellow planners had looked for a way to elevate the carnival atmosphere associated with amusement and midway areas by envisioning it as a “living color page of the world.” Anything foreign or different was a go: food, beverages, rides, shows, souvenirs, creatures, and humans. But ironically, as the months ahead would prove, for all its otherness, the Pike became the soul of the Exposition, the mingling and mixing pot that was becoming America. It was the meeting place of the fair, to be immortalized in song and film, where the nation responded to the call to “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
The mile-long Pike was so called in tribute to its trek across time and space that reached at its zenith the stratosphere of the North Pole (but only took twenty minutes to climb), echoed by the dominating snowcapped Alpine peaks at the avenue’s eastern border. As an unmistakable precursor to Disneyland’s Matterhorn, the Alpine heights were complete with medieval castles, peasants singing Tyrolean folk songs, a mammoth cyclorama enclosed within the mountains’ caves, and a heart-racing tram ride up the slopes, on which the Piker (any visitor to the Pike) could observe the lay of the land.
Even though construction hadn’t been completed by Opening Day, Alice and her escort and most of the 200,000 fairgoers who poured onto the Pike at noon, could see the magical domain shaping up. Due west of the Alpine Heights was the Irish Village with the Blarney Stone Theatre, Irish dancing maidens, and the Great Dublin Army Band playing Celtic music, while an adjacent concession, Under and Over the Sea, used lights and scenery to evoke the Jules Verne–inspired experience of a submarine ride to Paris with a return by airship. This was still considered futuristic, even though five months earlier at Kitty Hawk the Wright Brothers had taken their machine-powered Flyer on her maiden voyage.
Below France, the Streets of Seville were so painstakingly re-created by Mrs. Hattie McCall Travis, the only female concessionaire on the Pike, that the massive undertaking was reported to have killed her before completion. Next came the Hagenback Animal Paradise with a glamorous assortment of animals to rival any of P. T. Barnum’s menageries, displayed not behind bars but simply with mosquito netting to separate spectators and animals. From there, the Piker could travel toward Mysterious Asia, past the wares and snake charmers in the Taj Mahal marketplace, under the carved and gilded gateway to the Japanese gardens, through the Chinese Village, into the Moorish Palace with its wax museum display of anthropological history, to Cairo and Constantinople, amid roaming elephants, monkeys, camels, and donkeys.
Competing for attention were such attractions as the very popular Filipino Village with its cast of hundreds, the Palais du Costume exhibit at the Paris Pavilion, the assembly of authentic representatives of fifty-one different Native American tribes, the Abbey Battle Cyclorama with scenic representations and live reenactments of America’s famous battles, a ride through the Galveston Flood, the New York Fire Station theatre extravaganza with illusions that made a building burst into flame, and an indoor boat tour through the Six Days of Creation—from “Let there be light!” to a finale in Eden. There were the scientific concessions not to be missed, such as the hospital wing that exhibited newly invented incubators (with real preemie infants, live nurses and doctors), the Magic Whirlpool ride, which took passengers across an enchanted lake and over plunging waterfalls, and the novel Scenic Railway Pavilion, where trains could be boarded for other destinations at the fair.
The Pike was to stir some of the biggest newsmaking events that took place over the course of the exposition. One such event occurred later in the summer when an enterprising concessionaire—facing low sales of hot tea at his café—came up with the madcap idea of pouring the tea over glasses of ice. Before long, iced tea was the beverage of choice across much of a sweltering and not yet air-conditioned nation. The heat provoked a second innovation, for which at least three of the fifty ice cream vendors on the Pike claimed credit. When the demand for ice cream dishes and spoons exceeded the supply, one, two, or all three of these concessionaires concocted a method of baking waffle cookies in conical shapes. By the end of the summer, ice cream cones were an American institution. The portable cornucopias cut down on utensils and allowed fairgoers to continue spending money and visiting other attractions while they walked and licked their ice cream. Using the tongue with such abandon was still a rather risqué public act, even with waning Victorian values, but it was made respectable by the liberating atmosphere of the Pike.
But the event that truly became the gossip of the season was an encounter on Opening Day during
an American Humane Education Society benefit performance given in the Pike’s quirky Silver Horseshoe Building, a pseudowestern-styled piece of architecture with a four-story facade rising up in the shape of a gigantic horseshoe around which tiled letters declared it the home of THE MOST WONDERFUL HORSE IN THE WORLD. The encounter, of course, was between Beautiful Jim Key and his guest of honor, Miss Alice Roosevelt, who seldom did anything that went unnoticed.
Almost from the moment, three years earlier, when her father ascended suddenly from the vice presidency to become president, following McKinley’s assassination, the seventeen-year-old became known as Princess Alice. She was royalty, on her way to becoming what many consider the first female American celebrity of the twentieth century. Strikingly pretty, brunette and bright-eyed, with a high-bred, turned-up nose and full pouting lips, she managed to stir up so much public frenzy that she was lampooned in a Chicago Tribune political cartoon that showed crowds in the stands at a horse race, looking not at the track but in every other direction, with a caption reading “Alice, where art thou?”
Every public sighting drew reams of ink. Her face was described as artfully animated. The gossip pages of the San Francisco Call dubbed her petite nose “saucy,” her chin as firm and round, her body as a “slender, supple, lissome figure expressing youth and life in every line,” and her fashion genius was attested to by her ability to attain the right fit of her bodice, the perfect tilt to her hat. Her life story—she was an independent heiress to the fortune left to her by her mother, Alice Lee (Teddy Roosevelt’s first wife), who had died just days after giving birth—made Princess Alice that much more compelling.