Beautiful Jim Key

by Mim E. Rivas

  Because Lauretta had become so attached to the Doc, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her at home when he was traveling and began to use her case in his medicine shows as proof of the healing properties of Keystone Liniment. Before long, he told Rogers, she showed an interest in performing and started to do some of her circus tricks to entertain the crowds. But instead of being pricked and whipped, she was rewarded with apples and sugar. Bill Key explained to Albert Rogers, “The whip makes horses stubborn and they obey through fear and they can’t be trusted. Kindness, kindness, and more kindness, that’s the way.”

  Rogers was curious. What about horses who weren’t naturally of a superior intelligence?

  The Doc said, “Give me any horse of average intelligence and I will train him.”

  Did that mean he could also teach any horse of average intelligence to read, spell, and solve mathematical problems?

  Much to Rogers’s surprise, Doc Key asserted that with patience and kindness, he could. He added, “I would rather have him four years old, providing he had not been abused. It is like teaching a blind child to read. You have got to find out where the power is and cultivate the senses.”

  Key had not advanced to teaching human academic subjects to Lauretta, but in recalling her with profound affection, he told Rogers, “She was the smartest horse I had ever seen.”

  William Key shared the view that when an Arabian mare had proven herself to have superior strength, courage, and humanlike understanding, it was in her very nature to pass on those exceptional traits to her offspring. For this reason, despite her age and her earlier injuries, he was absolutely intent on breeding her, certain that under his care she could be the dam of a true champion. And so, like any protective, doting father, he set out to find just the right match for her. Only the finest bred horse in America would do.

  “All men are equal on the turf and under it” was a saying whose meaning would not have been lost on William Key. As a metaphor that had wound its way through time and place, it described the gamut of fortunes found and lost at the racetrack, and the diversity among kings and commoners whose passions have shaped the sport of horseracing and the breeding of champion horses.

  Doc Key was also aware that in a geological fluke of equality, the actual turf of Kentucky’s inner bluegrass region—with its calcium-enriched, limestone-laden soil responsible for the blue hue of the grass eaten by grazing horses whose bones became stronger and more resilient in the process—recurred almost identically some three hundred miles south in Middle Tennessee’s central basin. These two veins of prime horse country in both states likewise shared the same gentle, rolling hills, a forgiving landscape that resulted from the millennia of limestone erosion. Breeders believed this kind of topography to be more conducive for exercising young equine athletes than rockier, steeper terrain. Some even observed that the gentle, rolling gait of horses raised in the two localities had developed naturally in response to the rise and fall of the earth beneath their hooves, much like the lilting Southern accents of the two regions, which contrasted with the roller-coaster accents of their mountain neighbors, or with the heavy, imperious tones of the deeper South.

  Bill Key’s backyard of Bedford County boasted other natural advantages for bringing up horses, claiming its own network of rivers and creeks that curled in and around the farmland, flowing down from higher rims, feeding the soil and making the pastures that much more lush. In a whim of nature’s overachievement, the earth surrounding Shelbyville was doubly blessed by not one but two varieties of limestone—the white rock variety and that of sandstone, also known as fire rock. This combination, which provided such an ideal foundation for raising horses, also gave Doc Key the natural ingredients he used in making his horse and human liniment, a formula he kept secret but whose name, Keystone, hinted at its essence—pulverized bedrock. Mixed with oil, it could be absorbed by tissues; diluted by water, it made a tonic for drinking or a tincture to be applied to wounds.

  Kentucky sires still had leading status, but rather than having to travel there to find a promising match for Lauretta, Doc Key felt he had plenty of options in his home state. From early on, after Andrew Jackson founded Nashville’s Clover Bottom racetrack and spent many fortunes importing the best breeders, trainers, and jockeys to Tennessee, the Volunteer State had been recognized for promoting superiority of equine bloodlines, a fact acknowledged in the 1830s by Kentucky breeder Lewis Sanders, who went so far as to say that Tennessee had more and better blood than his own state.

  Famous horses who bore that out were legends such as the acclaimed broodmare Madame Tonson, her son Monsieur Tonson, who became the top American stallion in 1834, Tennessee Oscar (who never lost a race and never paid a forfeit, said to have never been pushed to top speed by any competitor, having, in his second start, walked over), prolific sires Leviathan and Glencoe—whose lineages both ran to Petyona, the top money winner of the pre–Civil War era. Then there were champions being turned out with regularity at Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville, which by the 1880s had steadily acquired a position as the leading stud farm in Tennessee. The philosophy employed at Belle Meade, under the stewardship of head hostler Robert Green, also a former slave and revered horseman, was that winning bloodlines were more productive than the overuse of horses who had themselves been exhausted at the track.

  Such thinking made Belle Meade the home of Iroquois, the first American-bred stallion to win the English Derby, and brought nineteen-year-old English import Bonnie Scotland to Tennessee, where he spent the next eight years fathering formidable racehorses, none more famous than Luke Blackburn. Known as the most muscular horse ever seen on American turf, so powerful that jockeys complained they couldn’t walk after trying to hold him back, Luke Blackburn spent his season at age three by winning twenty-two of twenty-four starts.

  Luke Blackburn had recently begun his stud career at Belle Meade just at the time that Dr. Key went out to find Lauretta’s ideal mate. As a Thoroughbred, Luke Blackburn had bloodlines that couldn’t have been more ideal. Not only was he a son of Bonnie Scotland, his dam was Nevada, sired by Lexington—the horse considered the leading American sire of the century. A mating between Lauretta and Luke Blackburn would have been easy to arrange, especially because Bill Key was a friend and contemporary of “Uncle” Bob Green at Belle Meade.

  Convenient though that might have been, William Key wasn’t looking for a Thoroughbred. The Doc had turned his attention to the Standardbred turf heroes, the trotters and pacers of harness racing who had, for the time being, surpassed Thoroughbred stars in terms of popularity and prestige. Traditional running races were regarded by increasingly sophisticated crowds as too primitive or lacking the skill that the demands of trotting and pacing required. Moreover, with scandals and infighting between turf owners and lawmakers plaguing the Thoroughbred racing world, some of the more famous running racetracks had changed to become Standardbred courses.

  The Standard, a record of two minutes and thirty seconds (2:30) or better for a time trial of trotting a mile (with the proviso that “a record to wagon of 2:35 or better shall be regarded as equal to a 2:30 record”), was declared and published in 1879 as an admission to registration in the National Association of Trotting-Horse Breeders (later changed to the United States Trotters Association). The Standard for pacers required a mile to be paced in 2:25 or under.

  Elements of harness racing had been in existence for thousands of years. The trotting gait had been described as early as four centuries B.C. by the Greek military officer Xenophon, a visionary horse gentler in the mode of Dr. William Key. He described the trotting gait as distinct from the walk and the gallop in its unbroken pattern, by which the front left leg moves at the same time as the right hind leg, the two strides alternating diagonally. In pacing, also recognized by the Greeks, the elegant, faster lateral gait required the horse to move his right front leg at the same time as his right hind leg, distinguished by a gliding side-to-side motion.

  When William Key decide
d to establish Keystone Driving Park, a half-mile harness racing course on Key’s Lane, just off the heavily traveled Shelbyville and Murfreesboro Turnpike, not far from his veterinary hospital, he may have been influenced in his choice by John H. Wallace. The editor of Wallace’s Monthly—published between 1875 and 1893—Wallace wrote about a range of turf topics, promoting the prestige of Standardbred racing, and created Wallace’s Year Book, a Standardbred registry.

  Doc Key had an audacious plan up his sleeve. Instead of scouring the country for just the right pedigreed trotter or pacer to sire Lauretta’s colt or filly, he imagined that he could use Keystone Driving Park to lure some promising Standardbred blood to his neck of the woods. The line he was most interested in was the Hambletonian. At the time, the Hambletonian was a relatively new breed, later viewed as progenitor of almost 99 percent of latter-day harness racers, the very cornerstone of the Standardbred. But in 1887 when William Key opened his track, what interested him most was the Hambletonian story. It was a saga of an American original who had sprung from modest means to become practically the most fashionable horse of the day. A truly modern horse.

  Rogers, a marketing man, knew only that the Hambletonian was an elite name, but he had to be reminded by Dr. Key that the story centered on the faith and foresight of an elderly stable hand named William Rysdyk up in Sugar Loaf, New York, who tended to the birth of an unpromising foal born to the aging, injured dam known as the Charles Kent Mare (of Norfolk Trotter descent) after she had been bred to a questionable stallion named Abdallah.

  Reputed to be ugly and mean, Abdallah was redeemed by the fact that he was the grandson of Messenger, one of the most illustrious horses in breeding history. An imported English Thoroughbred, Messenger had sprung from the bloodline of the Darley Arabian, a stallion brought to the British Isles in the early 1700s that went on to be seen as one of the most influential progenitors of English Thoroughbreds. In an uncanny similarity to William Key’s account of the theft of Lauretta from Arabia, the history of the Darley Arabian had it that Thomas Darley may have stolen the impressive stallion from a Bedouin sheik in Syria. Through the importation of Messenger in 1788, the Darley Arabian’s blood came to the American shores, where, instead of furthering the English Thoroughbred line, a new breed emerged. After the spring of 1801, during which Messenger stood at service in the stables of Anthony Dobbin’s Stagecoach Inn of Goshen, New York, a batch of foals began to exhibit a similarly distinctive gait, described as a slinging walk that when sped up produced a masterly trotting gait. After a few more generations were foaled, Messenger and his progeny had brought renown to Goshen as the Cradle of the Trotter. The Standardbred line had been born.

  Even with Abdallah’s pedigree, when the Charles Kent Mare gave birth to her foal in 1849, his owner didn’t see enough to like about him and accepted old Rysdyk’s offer to purchase the dam and her colt for $125. Registered as Hambletonian (10)—registries like Wallace’s typically assigned numbers to resolve confusion over names being reused for often unrelated horses—the ugly duckling of a colt began to transform under the care given him at Rysdyk’s stable in Chester, New York, near Goshen. With a muscular behind pitched higher than his shoulders (later dubbed a “trotting pitch”), the dashing mahogany bay had the ideal anatomy for racing under harness. At age two, before he had even proven himself on the turf, Hambletonian began his stud career, covering four mares. When he went on to win decisively in a series of blistering match races and time trials, Rysdyk’s Hambletonian, as he was also known, trotted his way into celebrity status. He more than lived up to his reputation as a sire of speed, raising his stud fee to as high as $500 and repaying his devoted owner’s investment many times over. By the time of Hambletonian’s death at age twenty-seven in 1876, he had sired a trotting dynasty that began with an astounding 1,331 foals. Among his immediate offspring, four sons in particular—George Wilkes, Dictator, Happy Medium, and Electioneer—furthered the Hambletonian lineage to such an extent that it came to obscure other trotting bloodlines in future Standardbred stock.

  Was it audacious in 1887 for William Key to believe that his own aging, injured Arabian mare could be bred to a blue-blooded Hambletonian, perhaps for his own crossbred foal to launch a new equine dynasty? To many it was the height of audacity. But from what Albert Rogers was learning about Key early on, that wasn’t going to stop him.

  The morning of Saturday, June 18, 1887, had dawned in Shelbyville like most Middle Tennessee mornings that follow the weeks of spring rains—humid, sunny, and abrasively hot in the season’s run-up to summer. These were the kind of weekend days when everyone tended to slow down and take life a little easier, to tend, when possible, to avoid the everyday annoyances and excitements. But weather notwithstanding, an unavoidable atmosphere of excitement percolated throughout the homes of many leading citizens of Shelbyville, Bell Buckle, Wartrace, Flat Creek, and other satellite villages of the area.

  The day promised to be one in an ongoing series of Saturday-morning races at Keystone Driving Park out on Key’s Lane, open to the public, with a specially invited cadre of Bedford County officials and business leaders. Having served as grand marshal for the livestock divisions for various county fairs, Dr. William Key had set out to create the same festive atmosphere at his own racetrack, hoping to attract owners of well-bred horses from around the county.

  By midmorning a large, eager crowd, including a young reporter from the Shelbyville Gazette, had gathered in time for the exercises to be opened with a dramatic pacing race, in which even Shelbyville mayor W. G. Hight had entered one of his best pacers but lost to a plucky bay owned by businessman Sam Thompson of Flat Creek. The friendly competition didn’t raise blood pressure too badly, but the next few races did, especially the highlight of the morning, a harness race between Mr. T. C. Buchanan’s trotter, Muggins, and Keystone, the favorite, a handsome trotter belonging to Mrs. Sally Whiteside, whom she apparently named for Dr. Key. The two contenders, “both fine ones and fast steppers,” noted the Gazette article, got off to an explosive start. The crowd immediately went silent, everyone holding their breath as they watched each trotter maintain an impressively fast pace, holding neck and neck for the first half mile. On the second half mile, the spectators exhaled collectively as Muggins faltered down the stretch, and amid chaotic applause, the spirited contest was won by Keystone.

  Doc Key didn’t spot the Hambletonian he was looking for that Saturday, but he was encouraged by the democratic scene of his own making. It was an uncommon mix of class and race, a grouping of former slave owners and former slaves, former Confederate soldiers and former Union soldiers, and just as complicated an assortment of current political opposites. But the old and deep wounds that remained were not in evidence that Saturday, and no one seemed to think it surprising that an ex-slave was the owner of so impressive a driving park and so comfortable a house cloistered under the trees beyond the track. There was no mention of color in the Gazette’s lengthy coverage of the event, although it was clear that the reporter was awestruck when Dr. Key invited him up to his house, where “a bountiful repast of substantials had been prepared under the shade of the trees and proceeded at once to refresh the inner man.”

  By midday, the sun’s rays had become oppressive, and the crowd, visibly pleased with the morning’s entertainment, quickly dispersed. Among the last to leave was the reporter, who profusely hailed Dr. Key as extremely courteous and attentive to the wants of all his guests.

  When the article ran five days later, it ended with an added note from the paper’s editors, acknowledging William Key: “The doctor is doing everything he can to bring the stock of our county to the front and we are glad to learn that he is meeting with much success. We are glad to chronicle these friendly meetings as they all tend towards the development and improvement of Bedford County’s horse flesh.”

  In later years when the history of the origin of the Tennessee Walking Horse would be tied to Bedford County and to this particular time period toward the end o
f the nineteenth century, Dr. William Key’s early contribution, which the Gazette had then described, would have been forgotten.

  But what he did get for his efforts was exactly what he was looking for: the perfect match for Lauretta. The stallion, auspiciously named Tennessee Volunteer, was a great-grandson of Rysdyk’s Hambletonian. In the spring of 1888, Doc Key took Lauretta Queen of Horses the ten miles to the Bell Buckle livery stable—where Tennessee Volunteer was said to be standing at stud for the season—so she could have a look at her prospective beau.

  Though Tennessee Volunteer’s track record didn’t show up in Wallace’s registry, Bill Key assured Albert Rogers he had seen the Hambletonian race.

  How fast was he? Rogers wanted to know.

  “Well,” said Key, putting it simply, “he couldn’t be beat.”

  But it was Tennessee Volunteer’s pedigree that really interested Key. Early in the prolific career of Hambletonian (10), he had sired the excellent trotter Volunteer (55)—who held a pre-Standard record of 2:37 while hitched to a wagon. In turn Volunteer sired Kentucky Volunteer (2784), foaled in 1874 and bred by a John S. Briggs of Cincinnati, Ohio. Kentucky Volunteer went on to sire Tennessee Volunteer, ownership unknown.

  Even though Albert Rogers grew up in Cincinnati and may have been acquainted with the Briggs family, upon hearing this history he became fixated on the idea that Jim Key was “bred in Old Kentucky.” Not so. The confusion about the Ohio-bred Kentucky Volunteer was that he took his name partly from his dam, Kentucky Girl. She too was not necessarily Kentucky bred, although, along with her sire, Blue Bull, she did come from a winning bloodline noted for fast pacers and may have won races there.