The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  “Why,” I had asked Madden, “do we bury some horses?” Implicit, I think, in the response of this elder horseman was his certainty that I had never owned a great horse myself, for if I had, I would have known and understood the need to honor that horse. For Madden, my question was a foolish one, impolite at best. But I was curious about the horse cemetery marked on my map of Fayette County and environs, and my hope was that Preston Madden would know something about it. I had picked up the map in the state tourist office on a hot, steamy day in July 2004.

  It was a day of stark and swirling opposites, of slicing rain beyond the sweep of my car’s frantic wipers, and, coincidentally, sun so bright that I had donned sunglasses. When had I ever worn shades in the rain? The water lay gleaming on the highway, bright as liquid silver, and the suffused light in the sky seemed divinely inspired, as if heralding some important tidings from above. I remember remarking, as I crossed into Kentucky from West Virginia, on the boldness of the Bluegrass State—where sun and rain, fire and water, seem to coexist happily. I remember a slight giddiness at arriving in the state that claims to offer horse heaven, or, at least, heaven for horse lovers. As I drove west on Interstate 64, past limestone cliffs of layered rock—gray over white, black under beige—and got closer to Lexington, I saw what I expected to see: Greek Revival mansions with tall white pillars straight out of Gone With the Wind, rolling fields boxed and divided by plank horse fences, elegant horse barns topped by horsey weather vanes, bronzed horse heads on proud stone gates. But no horses. And the thought came, maybe horses here are too expensive to be left out in the rain.

  I had already circled on the map of Lexington the places I wanted to visit—the Keeneland Race Course for its track and magnificent library; Kentucky Horse Park, where Man o’War is buried; the Fasig Tipton sales facilities, where the yearlings would be showcased a few days on; Claiborne Farm in Bourbon County, where Secretariat stood at stud and is buried.

  Horse farms were marked on the map of Lexington as red horseshoes, open end up, as always, lest the luck run out. My map was well stamped with red horseshoes, close to a hundred of them, some of the farms’ names legendary in the world of Thoroughbred horse racing—like Three Chimneys, where the great Seattle Slew was king of the stud, and Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm, where he is buried. There, on Versailles Road (Ver-sails, as I would hear locals pronounce it) was the storied and oft-troubled Calumet Farm with its elaborate fire engine red iron gates. Claiborne Farm lay to the northeast, just by Paris, Kentucky.

  I made one more circle on the map. Just south of Winchester Road, and just east of the New Circle Road, was marked in red the words Horse Cemetery. And, over the next several days, I tried hard to find it amid the car washes and strip malls and new houses on Liberty Road in the ever-burgeoning city of Lexington. No one I asked knew of the horse cemetery’s existence and they seemed surprised to see it listed on my map.

  I put my pursuit aside. Only later, back at home, did it occur to me that perhaps someone at Hamburg Place farm, just south of the cemetery, could tell me something. I called them and got through to Preston Madden.

  He let it be known that he was busy and had little time for questions. He told me to be quick. I offered to call back later, when he had more time. Now or maybe never, I took him to mean. Later, I wondered if Madden was not so much lacking in southern hospitality as trying to protect himself. Perhaps he simply had no stomach for discussing on the phone with a stranger the details of presiding over the burial of beloved horses.

  It turned out, and this Preston Madden did allow, that the horse cemetery was his and had been part of the family farm for a hundred years. He described it as an acre and a half in size, well concealed, and now closed to the public. The nearby highway was being widened, and one thousand acres of Hamburg Place farm were gradually going the way of many horse farms in Kentucky. Some horse fences, some neatly carved paddocks, some graceful arcing meadows would give way to bulldozers, surveyors’ red stakes, new houses with double-car garages. (Another one thousand acres, though, would remain a horse farm.)

  “The point is,” Madden told me, “some horses deserve a burial.”

  Among the fourteen horses buried in the cemetery are several illustrious runners from the Standardbred and Thoroughbred ranks. I now know this, and in precise detail, in part because Dr. Deirdre Durkis, an anesthesiologist and, in 1998, an archives volunteer at the Kentucky Derby Museum in Louisville, has painstakingly recorded all the horse cemeteries in the area and privately produced a book on the subject. Where They Sleep: Burial Sites of Thoroughbreds in the Bluegrass Country of Kentucky describes the cemetery near Hamburg Place farm as “an oasis of tranquility” amid the traffic sounds of Lexington.

  I was sorry I had missed it. I thought of Père Lachaise cemetery in that other Paris. The vast and ornate graveyard is, I am guessing, the quietest spot in the city, and apartments overlooking the stone bunkers of the dead have what most Parisians lack—a place to hear themselves think. Buried there, among other artists, are the writers Apollinaire, Balzac, Proust, Molière, and Wilde, the actor Sarah Bernhardt and the singer Edith Piaf, the composer Chopin, the painters David and Ingres, Delacroix, and Géricault.

  The one site that gathers more crowds than any other is that of rock star Jim Morrison, late of the Doors. His tomb became so defaced by fans leaving worshipful messages that the tomb is now guarded round the clock, and the stone-slab top has been replaced by a kind of sandbox. On the day I was there several years ago, the sand was home to candles, Métro tickets, single cigarettes, handwritten messages, flowers, cards, a scarf, and a jar of homemade jelly with a green gingham frill on top.

  Horse graves, I would learn, draw their own red-eyed pilgrims bearing flowers and gifts for cherished runners. But before there can be a monument, some horse owner must choose a spot, dig the grave, bury the body, compose wording for the marker—the horse’s years, sire and dam, championships won, something about the horse’s character and place in the human heart.

  The cemetery by Hamburg Place farm, according to Where They Sleep, contains the remains of some fourteen horses in the Madden family who were buried between 1906 and 1995. Here lies, among others, Bel Sheba, a daughter of War Admiral and dam of Alysheba, the latter the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner in 1987. Also here are Lady Sterling and Star Shoot, dam and sire, respectively, of Sir Barton, the Canadian-owned, Kentucky-bred Triple Crown winner in 1919 who raced against, and lost (like every other horse but one, named Upset) to, the great Man o’War. Star Shoot, ranked among the greatest sires of the early 1900s, had been blind for several years when he died of pneumonia. T V. Lark, champion grass winner of 1961, died of a massive hemorrhage after an allergic reaction, possibly to an insect bite.

  The listings seem cool and detached, and they only hint at the emotion and grief that must have darkened these burial ceremonies. One marker, for example, remembers Springtime, a Madden family member’s “gallant polo pony who died during a match.”

  I took note of the who in that phrase, not the more usual that. I have written or coauthored eight books about horses, riders, and trainers, and invariably this question arises during editing: Is it “the horse who” or “the horse that”? Is a horse a he/she or an it? I have always been on the who and he/she side of this debate.

  Reading Durkis’s book (one of two, by the way, on horse cemeteries in Kentucky; the other is Etched in Stone: Thoroughbred Memorials, by Louisville’s Lucy Zeh), I was also struck by how some of these horses died, details that must have underscored the sense of loss at the time of the horse’s death. Sir Martin (1906–1930) was leading and about to win the English Derby “when he fell.” The horse, though, must have recovered, for he died “as a pensioner, provided for in John Madden’s will.” Bel Sheba, meanwhile, was “buried in a small, private ceremony at the Hamburg Place Cemetery, presided over by Mr. Preston Madden.”

  I tried to imagine that scene in 1995. Did a mournful rain fall? Did Preston Madden weep? Were words spoke
n? Were certain mementos or favorite foods tossed into the grave before the ground was covered over? Maybe silence is the right thing when a great horse is laid to rest.

  Had I been better versed in Thoroughbred racing history, I would have known the name Madden. Only later would I learn that John Madden, Preston’s grandfather, rose from modest beginnings to become the top Thoroughbred trainer in the United States for eleven consecutive years in the early part of the twentieth century. To breed a stakes winner is one way of measuring a horseman’s success: John Madden bred 182 of them. His first champion was a horse called Hamburg—bought for $1,200 and sold for $40,001 (thus enabling Madden to make the claim that he got “more than $40,000”). At one time, Hamburg Place farm encompassed two thousand acres, all just a gallop away from downtown Lexington. Six Kentucky Derby winners were foaled at this farm: Old Rosebud, 1914 winner; Sir Barton, 1919 winner; Paul Jones, 1920 winner; Zev, 1923 winner; Flying Ebony, 1925 winner; Alysheba, 1987 winner.

  An article on John Madden in a 1929 edition of the Thoroughbred Record described “a real vein of sentiment beneath his burly exterior.” The article pointed to “his kindness to employees and attachés, his devotion to the fame and memory of many a great horse or horseman.” His celebrated equine graveyard at Hamburg Place was said to contain the graves of “horses he kept enshrined in his ‘heart of hearts’ forever, it being unendurable to him that they should pass into oblivion when their race was run.”

  It seems a fair bet that John Madden was unusual in his desire to honor the equine dead (and maybe his grandson shares his grandfather’s sentiment). This much is true: The cemetery at Hamburg Place farm is the oldest recognized horse burial ground in the Lexington area, and maybe the prettiest. One photograph I have seen of it shows a serene-looking field behind a low limestone wall and a tall line of trees. The centerpiece grave, behind a wrought-iron fence, is that of the Standardbred mare Nancy Hanks, with a horseshoe-shaped series of stone markers all around it, as if the horses buried below are all paying homage to a great mare. (The cemetery at Hamburg Place farm has since been relocated to a new spot on the farm. Preston Madden calls the cemetery “a sacred trust” and he says he intends to replicate the original quite precisely.)

  Lucy Zeh’s book describes grave markers for close to five hundred horses in the bluegrass region of central Kentucky. The monuments range from simple headstones to the massive bronze statue of Man o’War, which stands almost 25 percent larger than did the actual horse. In their varying sizes and shapes—from flat stone markers set into the ground to towering obelisks, from modern granite memorials with bas-relief images carved on the granite’s face to the older, simpler style with gently arcing tops—the stones mimic what you would find in human cemeteries.

  The odd marker makes it abundantly clear that a horse, not a human, lies below. The eccentric champion Nashua (1952–1982) was a son of Nasrullah (Secretariat’s grandsire), and was once described as “a playboy who found distraction in everything.” He would rear in the walking ring and toss his handler about like a tail on the end of a kite; he would eye fans in the stands, shy from cameras, was “fractious at the post.” Still, he was Horse of the Year in 1955 and the first horse to fetch a selling price of more than a million dollars. Nashua’s memorial is a bronze statue showing the horse being led by his groom of twenty-five years, a black man named Clem Brooks. Much in the manner of Will Harbut with Man o’War, Brooks would entertain visitors to Spendthrift Farm with stories about the proud and cantankerous Nashua.

  Sometimes an owner has had etched into the stone marker a phrase or sentence to capture that horse’s spirit. The grave of Forego (1970–1997) features a flat stone marker that simply lists his name and dates and this accolade: “A towering champion, he had the speed to win at seven furlongs, the staying power to win at two miles, the strength to carry greater weight than all rivals and triumph with brilliance.” The gravestone of Count Fleet (1940–1973) is even wordier, but one phrase leaps out: “Never out of the money.”

  The names of some runners in these graves would be familiar even to the casual racing fan. To the ardent follower, the names have the ring of psalm: Alydar, Bold Ruler, Citation, Hail to Reason, Hoist the Flag, Mr. Prospector, Nasrullah, Nijinsky II, Raise a Native, War Admiral, and, of course, Secretariat.

  Since 1973, when Secretariat made his spectacular runs, some one million Thoroughbreds alone have entered the stud books. That represents just one breed, and only its registered horses at that. The American Horse Council puts the number of horses in the United States at just under seven million. Since Secretariat, millions of horses in North America have come and gone, and they did not all die in the loving embrace of their handlers. A small scandal erupted a few years ago when it was learned that Ferdinand—the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner and Horse of the Year in 1987—almost certainly ended his days in a Japanese abattoir. He had been a disappointment at stud and passed from one owner to another until that last ignominious day. Many were aghast to read that story, but they should not have been.

  Remember the advice that Black Beauty’s mother gave him when he was a colt? “I hope you will fall into good hands,” the mare tells him; “but a horse never knows who may buy him, or who may drive him; it is all a chance …” Anna Sewell wrote these words in 1877.

  The young girls who flock to some summer equestrian camps might wonder why the horses change from year to year. The answer is plain: It is simpler, and cheaper, to load the ponies and horses onto slaughterhouse trucks at summer’s end than to keep them in hay and lodging all winter long. Next spring, the camp will buy a new bunch, who will go the way of the old bunch. Not every camp does this, but some do. Grim economies often govern the births, and deaths, of horses.

  I once asked a man who runs a small riding academy near my home in southeastern Ontario about the fates of aging horses who have been used to give lessons at the academy. He is a kind man, an astute horseman, but he is horse-poor and cannot afford sentimentality—or vets to euthanize horses. The special horses, he told me, the ones who have rendered noble service to the farm, are shot in the head. Death is quick and painless and the horse is spared the ignominy and hardship of an awful trip on the dreaded truck. I have always admired this man for his good cheer and I thought more, not less of him, when he told me that he undertakes this terrible duty himself.

  Recently, I spoke at length with a friend whose horse had just died. I knew the horse; he and my horse were stablemates and paddock mates for years, so I keenly felt her loss. There I was, transfixed by my friend’s grief as she poured out the details of her horse’s tragic death—caused by a hunter’s stray bullet and an ensuing infection in the bone. I was, I hope, sympathetic and attentive, and I commiserated with her. I gave her my best advice: write a eulogy for your horse (which she did). The writing, I told her, will do you good and will keep alive his memory, his kindness, his quirks, and his glee.

  But another part of me, the writer part, recognized the value of the moment, its essential truth and power. And even as I listened on the phone to my friend’s grief, I was thinking how her testimony might warrant a place in these pages and shed light on the connection between Eddie Sweat and Secretariat.

  You see, there occurred this ceremony, if we can call it that, in the barn before my friend’s horse boarded the van that would take him to the equine hospital in Guelph, Ontario. A certain mare in the barn, who any other time would have nipped this timid old gelding, this time greeted the gray warmly. She bussed him on the cheek, took in the smell of him, got as close to a hug as a horse can get. One pony licked the gray as he passed. Another horse grabbed hold of his halter and would not let go. And though all the horses in the barn had been fed and had no cause to nicker, they were all nickering. My friend said she had never heard the barn so loud, and to her it was clear: The horses were all saying good-bye. They knew the big gray was not coming back.

  Is this horse-centred mysticism? Horse owners do and say wacky things, and I am an old repor
ter hard-wired against such silliness. At the same time, I wonder, Is there a whole world of animal-to-animal communication we know nothing about? Do some of us wish we were Dr. Doolittle, that fabled man who could talk to the animals? This I do know: A study done several years ago at the University of Pennsylvania found that 98 percent of pet owners talk to their animals, as if to a sympathetic friend. But I wonder how many listen to their animals, in the way, say, that Eddie Sweat listened to Secretariat—listened with his ears, his heart, listened in his bones.

  I have often pondered what will become of my own horse should I outlive him. (He is a vigorous twelve, and I am a healthy fifty-seven as I write this, so maybe we will both peter out at about the same time.) I could not bear to see him loaded on a meat truck, and I am not the rifle sort. In answer to Preston Madden, I would say that I have owned a great horse. My horse deserves, and will get, an honorable and painless farewell.

  I cannot imagine the scene, but I suppose I must. The strange thing is that I have already thought through the burial of my dog—the ash box I will bury her in, even the spot where I will bury her—by the cabin, in the high grass in which she loves to roll on her back. It is partly the size of horses that confounds our plans for burial, because the logistics of burying a horse go far beyond a weeping human with a shovel in hand. A horse’s grave requires a backhoe to make the hole, a winch to place the horse in his grave, or a meat truck to haul the carcass away if the soil is too thin. You see why I draw the curtain on such images.

  Perhaps I will, should I outlive him, bury Saroma Dark Fox Dali in a small private ceremony, maybe in the north field under the white pines I planted myself ten years ago. As I age, as my time with my first and only horse enters its eighth year, as I look back on all that we have been through and all that I have read and written about horses, what grows ever more real to me are the powerful feelings that can arise between human and horse.