by Mim E. Rivas
Rogers finally commented about it. Was he imagining things, or was Jim following the conversation?
Bill Key almost laughed. “Of course, Jim understands what one is saying.”
Astonishing, Rogers said, then turned to Jim Key and told him how magnificent and brilliant he was. Unmistakably, Jim Key nodded in agreement and preened for his admirer.
“You see,” said Dr. Key, “when he is praised his head goes up so as to say, ‘What horse is as smart as I?’”
Rogers had a twinge of suspicion. Maybe this was all part of their act, a trick.
Dr. Key sensed the skepticism and spoke to it, matter-of-factly, explaining that he and Jim had established their connection as a powerful open channel of communication. “I believe he knows every word I say to him, and sometimes it seems to me that all I’ve got to do is to think a thing and he knows it.”
Was it, then, some strange symbiosis or hypnosis? Rogers had to ask, knowing that reporters at the press party would be watching Jim and Dr. Key closely, looking for familiar tricks and signals, anything that hinted at fraud, including mind control.
“Some say it’s hypnotism and that kind of thing—but I don’t know anything about that.” The Doc was diffident, adding as an afterthought, “But I do know Jim knows and does what I ask him to do.”
This was also how Jim Key so easily mastered bits for the medicine show. Initially, the Doc hadn’t planned on putting him to work. But since the two were inseparable, it had been only natural that the year-and-a-half-old Arabian-Hambletonian had wanted to get in on the act. Not unlike his dam.
By the 1890s, with the patent medicine era thundering toward its peak and a crowded marketplace creating increasingly tougher competition, the marketing challenge for every medicine vendor was how to provide innovative, spectacular crowd-drawing entertainment. The medicine man of the 1890s, unlike the pitchman of old, needed to be a theatrical producer. For quack and genuine healer alike, what was needed was a gimmick.
Doc Key paid attention to what others were doing, learning from those he met on the road, and those he heard about. He heard about a New York street merchant down on Wall Street who had a poker-playing pig that stood with his hooves propped up on a card table, ready to take all comers. One well-known dark-cloaked vendor gathered a crowd by calling out, “You are dying, Sir! And you, Madam!” mesmerizing his audience with scare tactics until he finally had them, proclaiming, “You are all dying, and you think there is no way to avoid it! But there is, and that is why I am here!” Then he would introduce his lifesaving wares and sell them in splendid quantities.
One highly successful medicine man had perfected the trick of setting out a length of rope, a skull, and a Bible, and spending as much as an hour arranging and rearranging the objects. The moment he was satisfied with the density of the crowd surrounding him, he would turn and smile and pitch his products, never once referring to the rope, skull, or Bible. Others promised drawings for free merchandise at the end of the presentation or gave bonus gifts with purchases. Some vendors set up tents for visits with “doctors” who pulled teeth and diagnosed symptoms for fees, in addition to prescribing and selling their own remedies.
One of the most effective forms of patent medicine promotion was live testimonials by previously satisfied customers. And who better to illustrate the wonders of Keystone Liniment than Jim Key? The Keystone show combined crowd-drawing methods, starting with Doc Key cordoning off a sizable area and then stringing up the hundreds of rabbit feet he had collected, many from Civil War battlefields. As a small handful of the curious gathered, the Keystone minstrel players used their upbeat tunes to pull a larger audience, moving next into rolling rhythms and pleasing harmonies to set the stage for the kindly, confident Dr. Key to begin his lecture. But just as he began to introduce the marvels of Keystone Liniment, Jim interrupted, scampering up to him, doglike, a stick in his mouth.
The bit had the Doc apologizing to the crowd, turning to the gangly, growing young horse to reprimand him, but ever so kindly.
Dr. Key: “I’m talkin’ to the folks now, Jim. Be patient ’til I’m done and I’ll be mighty glad to play fetch with you later.”
Jim Key: (To irrepressible audience laughter and applause.) Shaking his head, he puts the stick in the Doc’s hand, gets him to throw it, fetches it, then obediently sits, lies down, and rolls over on command.
With the crowd continuing to grow, Dr. Key followed this up by explaining that Jim was still somewhat confused, ever since he was born an ugly duckling horse too crippled to stand but who had been saved by the very liniment that the lucky folks were about to have a chance to buy. Taking out a bottle, he demonstrated its uses and gave Jim a rapid rubdown. Suddenly, the hound imitator transformed into a regal, young equine prince trotting elegantly in a circle for all to see, eliciting cheers of delight.
Jim Key was a born actor. Dr. Key recalled to Rogers that as Jim embellished upon his performing role, his willingness to learn new bits led them to adapt the act. “After a while I taught him to give symptoms of bots and colic,” said the Doc, describing how through rewards Jim learned to evoke the subtly different ailments. Colic came in two forms, spasmodic or flatulent, and was known, when left untreated, to become a potentially fatal inflammation of the bowels. Jim soon mastered the ability, by mimicking Dr. Key, to suddenly appear to be seized with pain, moving about in a restless, uneasy manner until, out of apparent frustration, he began to strike his belly with his hind foot. As the veterinary surgeon diagnosed his disorder to the crowd, Jim became increasingly distressed, perspiring heavily, and finally he heaved himself onto the ground, rolled onto his back while madly striking his hooves in the air. Just when it looked as if the horse was beyond hope, Dr. Key would give him a drink of his tonic, and Jim would miraculously recover from his symptoms.
Bots, the larva of the gadfly, also caused intestinal irritation when lodged in the stomach, as well as causing sore throats or nasal congestion when deposited in those mucus membranes. Jim learned to pretend to have the strange array of symptoms associated with bots—everything from turning up his upper lip, to pawing and pacing, from craning to look at his side, to giving the appearance of becoming instantly weak and fatigued. Here too, just as the otherwise handsome, tall bay stallion began to stagger to the ground, Dr. Key would bring out both his tonic and his liniment, recommending a course of treatment that used both. No Shakespearean actor in a death scene coming back to life for his curtain call could have outdone Jim Key’s onstage transformation. Needless to say, the Keystone products often sold out before the troupe could make it back to Shelbyville for more stock.
After that, Key said, “Jim learned to make believe he was lame and act as though he were suffering with other kinds of troubles, the general symptoms of which he would reproduce.”
Since Jim had been such a quick study as a performer in the medicine show, Rogers assumed that learning to read and spell came to him rapidly as well.
Not at all, Dr. Key admitted. At first, the process was slow and unpromising. “The hardest thing I had to teach him was to learn how to eat sugar.”
Really? Rogers looked surprised. Jim Key, listening, gave a small neigh of amusement.
“Yes, sir,” recalled the Doc, “I tried every way, and had it tied to the bridle, but Jim would always spit it out. One day I saw him eating apples in the orchard and I got the idea that if I put a piece of sugar in the apple he would eat it. I fixed an apple and then watched Jim. When he picked it up and munched it, I thought he would go crazy with satisfaction and delight.”
Doc Key tried again to feed Jim the sugar by itself. No success. For the next six months, the Doc experimented with different techniques. “If I covered the apple with sugar, he would eat both with great relish,” he remembered. “So I gradually reduced the quantity of apple over the sugar, and then he would have a piece of apple laid over the piece of sugar in my hand, and when he would reach for the apple he would get the sugar. In this way he learned that sugar
was sugar and apple was apple.” By that time, Jim loved both rewards equally.
Albert Rogers had to ask, “Why were you so intent on having him learn to like sugar?”
William Key probably milked this moment and gave Rogers a sideways glance, as if to suggest that the answer was obvious. After all, how else was he going to teach Jim the alphabet?
This was the story Rogers had been waiting for. How had that come about?
Dr. Key had no story to tell. He simply had gotten it into his head that his eager, able performing equine could be trained to recognize and select the letter A from a grouping of other letters. “When I began I had in my mind only to teach Jim to pick out the letter A. I got some cards with the letter A on them, and put sugar on those cards.”
Albert now understood. “You had to teach him to eat the sugar first and this was after Jim had grown to have a passion for sugar?”
“Which he has never lost,” the Doc echoed. “I held the card up and would say, ‘A, A, A.’ And while I was doing this I would let nobody in the stable, and I would keep him away from other horses. I said A a good many times, and Jim used up many cards, as he would lick the cards so much.”
Realizing he had sent Jim the wrong message—that letters of the alphabet were edible—Dr. Key adapted his methodology. Instead of paper cards, he used pieces of tin with the letter A painted on them, sprinkled with sugar, and mixed in with pieces of tin that had other letters painted on them without sugar. “It took months and months, a half year, before I was satisfied that he would know the letter A when he would see it. Then, I thought that if Jim could only be made to bring the card to me I would have just what I wanted. I at once began to train him for this end.” For this process, the Doc put a piece of an apple in a handkerchief and taught Jim to bring it in his mouth to him, giving the handkerchief to Dr. Key and receiving the apple as his reward. “I soon had him tugging at the card with the A on it and then bringing it to me.”
Further questions led Albert Rogers to see that the lessons for learning the letter A occupied hours of the day, requiring extraordinary patience. What, then, had possessed Key to continue with other letters? Why wasn’t he satisfied?
“Of course, I thought I had my fortune made when one day I happened to think if the horse knew A when he saw it he could be taught the entire alphabet, and in this I was right.”
From the answers to these questions, Rogers put to rest his concern that skeptics would be suspicious of a man and a horse whose act grew out of a medicine show background. In his way of thinking, having two seasoned salesmen would be an asset for the humane movement, not a deterrent. The plan was simple: Bill and Jim would draw the crowds and then, instead of selling a product, sell an idea, albeit the socially challenging idea that all cruelty toward animals was abhorrent and unacceptable.
Rogers also felt that the story of how Jim learned the alphabet was simple and logical enough and would sway at least some cynics. But there was one other thorny area of questioning that had to do with how Northerners might feel about a slave who had chosen to align himself not with the Yankees but with the Confederate States of America. The answers that followed were not simple and had nothing to do with logic.
On June 12, 1861, Young Doc Key, age twenty-eight, made haste to Camp Trousdale in Sumner County, three counties north of Bedford, with the intention of preventing twenty-year-old Merit and eighteen-year-old Alexander from enlisting to fight for the Southern cause. Too late. On June 11, the two sons of John W. Key had been mustered into service with the Eighteenth Tennessee Infantry Regiment, Company F, under Captain Benjamin F. Webb. Dubbed the Festerville Guards, the unit was made up of men from Bedford and Rutherford counties organized earlier in the week in Bell Buckle and in Murfreesboro under General Palmer.
How had it happened? What speech in which town square or which neighbor had goaded the two boys, peace-loving scholars that they were, to take up arms against the Union?
Madness. For six months the divided house of Tennessee had refrained from secession. “When the War clouds began to gather,” Key recalled, the signs were mixed, boding both that the impossible could never happen and that it was inevitable. Lincoln—vowing not to end slavery where it existed, but only to arrest its spread—had instantly become the mortal enemy of every slave state. The first to secede was South Carolina, in December 1860, then within a month Mississippi seceded, followed by Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.
Would Tennessee become the seventh state to secede? The question was put to a vote on February 9, 1861. Predictably, the majority of East Tennesseans voted emphatically against secession, while most West Tennesseans voted to leave the Union. The decision came down to Middle Tennessee, and the winning margin was helped in Bedford County where the count was 1,656 to 828, two to one against secession.
But despite the “no” vote in February, with Tennessee’s strategic importance, too much was at stake to too many forces to allow her to be left on the sidelines. Pressure mounted from within and without.
Texas seceded in March, and then, on April 12, the president of the fledgling Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, ordered a preemptive strike on Fort Sumter, which gave the South an almost bloodless victory. The sole casualty was a horse, whose death unceremoniously marked the first of an estimated one and a half million horses and mules that would be killed or wounded in battle and the resultant marauding, or would die from starvation and disease over the course of the next four years.
With the slaying of a single horse in its opening battle, so began the bloodiest war in American history.
For many wavering Northerners, the assault on Fort Sumter was cause enough to put aside ideological differences over slavery and states’ rights, and to take up arms. But for many Southerners, Lincoln’s subsequent call for 75,000 troops from each state in the Union had a similarly galvanizing effect, setting into motion like dominos a string of three more secessions: Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina.
In Shelbyville, Young Doc Key could feel the pendulum swing of local sentiments shift as mercurially as a wave of bad weather. Again, on June 8, the question was put to the Tennessee voters. For weeks the matter had been pushed back to the polls by the slave-holding class and the politicians. Bill Key knew that not many of those who wanted the war would actually serve. It was going to be mostly the poor and middle-class soldiers—few of them slave holders—who were going to fight and die in the widening conflict.
That was one point made by Parson William G. Brownlow, the fiery antisecessionist from East Tennessee, who raced across the state to bring his message to the Shelbyville public square, where he boomed it from the steps of the courthouse. A favorite of the ladies for his passionate oratory, Brownlow preached loyalty to God and nation, begging the end of slavery’s abomination. Heckled by a man who accused him of abetting the Yankee devil to defile Southern women, he thundered back, “I am an unconditional Union man and advocate the preservation of the Union at the expense of all other considerations!” as the women waved their handkerchiefs in support.
Young Doc Key’s friend, lawyer, and state legislator William H. Wisener also took to the steps of the courthouse to beg business owners to think about how their stores and wares would be co-opted by the demands of the Confederate government. Likewise taking a stand against secession was the prosperous Lewis Tillman. Though he was a slave holder, Tillman believed the city had too much to lose and little to gain from leaving the Union. But for many area farmers, Brownlow, Wisener, and Tillman were unconvincing. These Bedford countians were much more moved by the stirring military airs played by the staunch “secesh” advocates. In contrast to the gloomy Unionists, many Southerners were practically giddy with the “glorious future” promised by Jefferson Davis, as if to remain with the Union would be to miss out on the festivities. To them, the reality of bloodshed was remote, especially if the noble Volunteer State was willing to take the battle north to the enemy where Southern fire in the belly would vanquish foes of the South in
short shrift. In ninety days, the maximum amount of time most reasonable Southern strategists believed the war would take to win, life would return to normal, the better for all not to live under the yoke of Lincoln.
From the back of the gathering, Young Doc Key heard all this through the loud hum of the crowd, like a mill wheel powered by Southern bravado, churning its grist into fear and loathing. Mothers recounted their children’s nightmares of being stolen from their beds by invading Yankees, of their husbands and sons murdered; fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers readied themselves to do their duty. Those who disagreed began to hold their tongues.
Hardly mentioned was either the right to own slaves or the wrong of owning slaves, in part because slavery was not the main fuel that drove Tennessee’s economic engine, and partly because Lincoln himself, still almost two years away from declaring an end to slavery, denied that it was the central issue of the dispute. And yet it was a blaring subtext, the only one, igniting throughout the political and regional strata the tinderbox it had always been.
Around the periphery of Shelbyville’s town square, standing in the back of the crowds—tending to horses and buggies or other tasks, ignored as though invisible—were representatives of Bedford County’s nearly seven thousand Negroes, fifty-two of whom were free. Blacks were a full third of the total population of the county, but no one spoke for them. Without words, William Key knew many of them shared the same fears and hopes. In a war, life could only be harder for black people. But, despite Lincoln’s haltering steps to be the deliverer whom history demanded he be, freedom was coming, war or not.
The Tennessee ballot on June 8, 1861, asked voters two questions, to vote for or against “separation” (whether or not to secede) and to vote for or against “representation” (whether or not to join with the Confederacy). In most counties where the vote was against secession, it was also against joining the rebellion; most who voted for secession also voted to join the Rebels. But in Bedford County a strange thing happened. In a reversal of the numbers from February, the count was 1,544 for secession and 727 against. But on the question of representation, 1,544 voted against joining the Confederacy, and 737 voted in favor. What the net result of the vote really showed was that residents of Bedford County had a profound desire for neutrality. For this, the Middle Tennessee haven would be alternately rewarded and punished, almost continually occupied by all manner of invading armies.