Here Comes Exterminator!: The Longshot Horse, the Great War, and the Making of an American Hero
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Here Comes Exterminator!: The Longshot Horse, the Great War, and the Making of an American Hero
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Overview
For fans of Seabiscuit and The Eighty-Dollar Champion, Eliza McGraw tells the story of how a gangling, long-shot Kentucky Derby winner named Exterminator became one of the most beloved racehorses of all time.
The father of the Kentucky Derby called him “the greatest all-around Thoroughbred in American racing history.” Sportswriter Grantland Rice simply called him “the greatest racehorse.”
Here Comes Exterminator! draws readers into the golden age of racing, with all its ups and downs, the ever-involving interplay of horses and people, and the beauty, grace, fear, and hope that are a daily part of life at the track. Caught between his hotheaded millionaire owner and his knowledgeable trainer, Exterminator captured fans’ affection with his personality, consistency, athleticism, and heart.
Exterminator’s staggering success would dramatically change the world of horse-racing. He challenged the notion that American horses would never live up to Europe’s meticulously charted bloodlines and became a patriotic icon of the country after World War I. And his longevity established him as one of the public’s most beloved athletes, paving the way for equine celebrities like Seabiscuit and showing Americans they could claim—and love—a famous racehorse as their own.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466872721 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
ELIZA MCGRAW is a contributing writer for EQUUS magazine, an American Horse Publications award winner, and author of two instructional equestrian books. Her horse-related work has appeared in The Chronicle of the Horse, The Blood-Horse, and Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred. She contributes to the New York Times' racing blog, writes a column for Raceday 360, and frequently writes for The Washington Post. She teaches writing at American University and earned degrees in English from Columbia University and Vanderbilt University.
Read an Excerpt
Here Comes Exterminator!
The Long-Shot Horse, the Great War, and the Making of an American Hero
By Eliza McGraw
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Eliza McGrawAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7272-1
CHAPTER 1
Uncle Henry
How did Exterminator and Henry McDaniel find their futures bound together on that hot day in 1924, with so much in the balance? How could so many people — in the stands, gathered around radios, scattered across America — love this one horse and care so desperately if he won or lost?
Exterminator's story — and Henry McDaniel's as well — begins just after the Civil War. Looking at McDaniel's life, you could say he was made to discover Exterminator.
* * *
McDaniel used to tell reporters that he had been born on the Secaucus racetrack. His father, David McDaniel, was a brilliant racehorse breeder and trainer. By the time Henry arrived in 1867, the elder McDaniel was one of the most famous horse trainers in America; he won the Belmont Stakes three times in a row. "From the time I could first toddle I heard race horses discussed," McDaniel wrote, "their doings applauded or condemned and their shortcomings or virtues commented on. I grew up in an atmosphere of horses."
David McDaniel competed his horses throughout the South before the Civil War. Afterward, when racing was revived up north, he moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, with his wife and children. Henry was the youngest. McDaniel did not earn as much money there, and by 1869 some horses had been seized as payments for debt. Undaunted, he pooled his talents with others' resources and formed a group of owners that became known as the McDaniel Confederacy. The group was "destined to shake the turf to its centre, and ... dominated the race-course for a longer period than any one stable of which racing chronicles have any mention," wrote a reporter for the sportsmen's weekly the Spirit of the Times. Jockeys wore blue and red silks, and called McDaniel "the Colonel."
The Confederacy's pride, a temperamental, fast stallion named Harry Bassett, was only a yearling during the debt seizure, and McDaniel bought him back by 1870. Harry Bassett, named for a Confederacy member, was one of the most successful racehorses of his generation, and his jockey, James Rowe, would grow up to be a legendary trainer. One of Henry McDaniel's earliest memories was going to Saratoga in 1872 to watch Harry Bassett win the Saratoga Cup against Longfellow; the race was one of the biggest sporting events after the Civil War. "My father thought there was no horse in the world like Harry Bassett," McDaniel said years later. "The high regard that my father had for Harry Bassett I have always entertained for Exterminator."
In those days, buoyed by Harry Bassett's accomplishments and the Colonel's skill, the Confederacy reigned over American racing. McDaniel had a special gift for getting horses to succeed. "It really seemed as if Col. McDaniel had only to buy the commonest plater in order to transpose him into a winner," wrote one reporter. "He won with horses which other trainers had given up." He did celebrity endorsements for products like Dr. Tobias' Venetian Horse Liniment and Derby Condition Powders, and the advertisements said he was the owner of the fastest-running horses in the world.
But in 1876, Harry Bassett declined, winning only three of his final twelve starts. Some said the former champion deteriorated because he had been raced too hard. If that was true, it may have taught Henry a formative lesson: the ability to prolong a racehorse's health and career would become one of his trademarks. Also, the Confederacy had overextended itself, with too many horses in training who could not earn their keep. Then, Henry's mother died. The Colonel, training horses at Saratoga, learned about her death from a telegram.
By 1878, the Confederacy was over. The New York Times sent a reporter to cover McDaniel's dispersal sale. He saw four Hoboken policemen trying in vain to force back the crowd arriving by trains from the North and South. "These visitors were clearly of the kind that travel about with great fat wallets choking in the throats with legal tenders and checks signed in good bold hands," he wrote. Although the stallion wasn't for sale, many of his sons and daughters were, and Harry Bassett was on display to remind people that every horse was related to the famous champion. The liquidation could not rescue the Colonel, who endured a series of setbacks and then died in 1885, at seventy-three.
Henry's father had been a complex figure. "Col. McDaniel may have had enemies," read a Spirit of the Times article, "as men of strong individuality are bound to have, but none will deny that as a trainer he had few equals. He was a stern disciplinarian, and as such produced a disagreeable impression, but among his friends no man could be more cordial nor instructive in his discourse. His life was devoted to the turf: he had tasted the bitter and the sweet of the turfman's career."
* * *
More than a million horses and mules died in the Civil War, and in its aftermath many new horses were bred to work in an increasingly industrial and urbanized country — pulling taxicabs and delivery wagons, carrying freight — and to race. There were about seven million horses in America in 1860, and twenty-five million by 1900. Training for either work or racing was a rough business, because many people believed that breaking a horse's spirit made him ready to ride. Professional horsebreakers would simply ride a bucking colt until, shaking with exhaustion, the horse gave up. Westerners called this "bronco busting," but the general idea was that forcing a horse to obey was the same as training him. "If the animal sulks," wrote one horsebreaker, "or exhibits deliberate impatience of control, he should be conquered, then and there."
An Ohioan named John Rarey had wanted to change that. Before the war, he performed horse tamings in front of crowds in America and Europe, seeking out vicious horses — and in one case, a zebra — as subjects. Rarey allowed horses to become used to him before jumping on, and he designed special harnesses to encourage obedience. Stilling the horse to gain trust, he wrote, worked beyond whippings and bronco busting. "Any horse may be taught to do anything that a horse can do," he wrote, "if taught in a systematic and proper manner." Rarey published versions of his book The Complete Horse-Tamer through the 1860s and '70s. "Old theories have been exploded," wrote one veterinarian. "To those cheering indications of a better day for the horse." Some claimed Rarey overstated his own abilities, but he had inspired a new conversation and focus on the idea of humane training.
This turning away from harsh treatment and toward what we might now call natural horsemanship was a big leap, and it relied on the idea that people and animals were not very different. The ASPCA was founded in 1866, the year before McDaniel was born. As Susan Pearson writes in The Rights of the Defenseless, her study of children's and animal rights in Gilded Age America, "Positing both as essentially innocent and good, reformers argued that the character of beasts and babes was alike ruined through cruelty and redeemed through kindness. If animals or children behaved badly, owners and handlers, or parents and teachers, need look no further than themselves for the cause." There was a moralist tinge to all of this; the seal of the ASPCA showed a wagon driver about to beat a horse, while an angel intervened.
Horsemen of an earlier generation may not have seen things that way. But for Henry McDaniel, gentleness with horses was a way of life and of work.
* * *
Henry had galloped Confederacy horses at the Broad Rock track near Richmond, Virginia, and ridden in at least one race at Latonia, finishing second on a horse named Wellington. He saddled his first winner, Forest, on September 8, 1885, less than a year after his father died. He was seventeen.
Several other trainers had failed with four-year-old Forest, so his owners paid McDaniel $12.50 a month (about $290 today) to figure out why the horse couldn't win. Forest was odd-looking; a previous trainer had believed he suffered from rheumatism of the shoulder muscles, and had him blistered — a process involving repeated application of a caustic ointment — until the hair was entirely gone. McDaniel watched the horse move and realized the trouble was not in Forest's shoulders at all. The problem was blind splints, an inflammation of the ligament between two lower leg bones. He treated the gelding with rest, care, and gentle workouts. Afterward, Forest won five straight races.
McDaniel kept a scrapbook of his early clippings, a composition book in which he cut and pasted each article, aligned with the paper's lines. His handwriting was the horseman's careful half script, efficient for writing long lists of names, times, and pedigrees. These early articles about him invariably mentioned his father. "Henry McDaniel, youngest son of the once famous trainer, is now training for R. J. Lucas, and deserves a good deal of credit," wrote one reporter. McDaniel did not seem poised to challenge his father's outsized reputation, but he was already a gifted, insightful horseman in his own right. He trained with gentle consistency, forging a reputation very different from the Colonel's, although one reporter noted that McDaniel "had his sterling character molded by the uncompromising requirements of the old Colonel's characteristics." McDaniel's contemporary, the trainer Sam Hildreth, was also a trainer's son. He noted that "the craving I've always had for race-horses, I reckon my father passed along to me in his blood. It was horse, horse, horse, with him all day long, year in and year out." The same seemed true of the McDaniels, father and son. It was horse, horse, horse, for both, all day long.
Henry McDaniel was preternaturally talented, with an uncanny gift for communication. Over the years, various animals — a white German shepherd, a goat — trailed him around the barn. He trained a hen to jump onto his lap and carried a terrier in his overcoat pocket. McDaniel was patient, calm, and a scholar of thoroughbred bloodlines, a representative of a contemporary breed of evolved American horseman, and part of a shift in horsemanship in which working with horses became less a show of dominance and more a mixture of wisdom, care, and knowledge.
Horsemen responded to McDaniel as well as their horses did. "You are the most competent, capable, and honest man that I have come in contact with, in the thoroughbred business," wrote one of his owners to him. Reporters called him "unassuming," "modest," "reticent," "painstaking and capable," and a "thorough gentleman."
* * *
Horse tamer John Rarey's work had inspired that of other horsemen, including Oscar Gleason, who called himself the "King of Horse-Tamers" and wrote a practical treatise on breaking wild horses. In 1894, Gleason filled Madison Square Garden for an exhibition as Rarey had, claiming, "The better the horse, the better the master." Another trainer wrote about the importance of patting, praising, and blanketing the family horse: "If he is tired and worn out, it is astonishing how these little attentions will encourage and cheer him up." Understanding horses as friends and helpmeets, these trainers railed against common cruel practices, like whipping tied-up horses, lighting fires under balky ones, and "bishoping" — overfiling — teeth to make horses appear younger.
Even horses' food became less mundane. Grooms stirred a little molasses and salt into oats cooked with linseed oil. They brewed "hay tea" by pouring boiling water over a bucket of clean hay, and pampered tired horses with gruel made from cornmeal, flour, and some sound ale. There were all kinds of horse items for sale: not just saddles and halters but also straw hats for horses who pulled wagons in the sun and heavy blankets for cab horses. Horse-training ideas melded with industry, which meant that streetcar operators were asked to brush and curry the horses they drove. If they understood, and even liked, each other, the horses and drivers would be safer and more effective, using that crucial postbellum idea of kinship with animals. "Intelligence is so clear as to almost startle us by the feeling behind the full, liquid eye of the horse ... there is a mind kindred to our own," wrote Gleason. "That [training] may require patience and self-control on the part of the instructor cannot be denied; but so does the instruction of a child."
"If any year could be said to make the apogee of the horse world, the year 1890 would be an appropriate choice," writes Anne Norton Greene in her study of urban horses. That year, the president of the Humane Association likened the British book Black Beauty to Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin.
* * *
Around that same time, McDaniel married a young St. Louis woman, a dark-haired beauty named Leonora Mollencott and nicknamed Lonie. Their wedding announcement went in his scrapbook. Underneath, McDaniel pasted a sentimental verse: "Sweetheart of mine, remember this / Thro' all the years to be: / True love that never, never dies / Lives in my heart for thee!" A portrait shows Leonora peering out from underneath an enormous hat, a drooping feather echoing the slope of her cheek. She evidently shared McDaniel's affection for animals; Leonora poses with her own dog, a mournful-faced black spaniel whose downcast expression echoes the feather and whose wide, dark eyes look like his mistress's.
Early in their marriage, the McDaniels lost a baby, and as the years went on, Leonora struggled with mental illness. She grew obsessed with the idea that she was going blind, although she wasn't. At times, she stayed in the private, small sanitariums, or with friends while McDaniel worked. They never had other children.
McDaniel worked relentlessly, moving around the country in rattling train cars, from Saratoga to Hot Springs to Chicago. By 1894, he was training horses for Elias Jackson "Lucky" Baldwin, who founded the Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles. Locals gave Baldwin his nickname when he earned millions through mining investments. Baldwin was "the kind you never forget once you laid eyes on him," Sam Hildreth wrote, "with his Prince Albert coat and large fedora hat and a look about him that only comes to the fellow who has been a pioneer on the other side of the Rockies."
The partnership between the flamboyant investor and the young trainer profited both when Baldwin's Rey el Santa Anita, a head-tossing, mistrustful stallion, won the 1894 American Derby at Chicago's Arlington Park. McDaniel discussed the race with emerging confidence. He called the famously up-and-down Baldwin "possibly the richest and the poorest man on the turf. He has never got a cent in cash but is possibly worth millions." When Rey el Santa Anita won the American Derby, Baldwin wired McDaniel from California to send his part of the prize right away. Asked if Rey el Santa Anita showed any signs of lameness, McDaniel said with pride that "he came out of the race perfectly sound." Later, McDaniel wrote that the American Derby "was the first really big race in which I had trained the winner. Things looked very good to me that day. I felt that I was riding on top of the world."
He praised the jockey, too. "I had watched his work and made up my mind that he was a good, intelligent rider ... He is a quiet, trustworthy little fellow, and you might be around the stable here with him for a week without hearing him say a word."
McDaniel seemed to approve of hard work, calm, and reliability — qualities others praised in him. Already, he showed the reticence and concern for horses that was becoming his trademark. He told a reporter that even though Rey el Santa Anita was eligible for a long race called the Realization, he was not sure he would send him, because it might not be the right thing to do. "From the way he won yesterday it would seem that he could go on and on and do still better in a longer race," McDaniel said, "but this business is a mighty uncertain one."
McDaniel was a handsome young man, light eyed and even featured, with a full mustache that was current but not foppish. In a photograph taken at the time, he wears a white shirt and striped tie. He looks like the consummate horseman: less sober than a banker but more conservative than a gambler.
* * *
Lucky Baldwin's up-and-down ways seemed to wear on McDaniel, so he left to train for the more staid Memphis-based stable of George C. Bennett in 1899. He was continuing to climb, but with aching slowness. McDaniel needed a horse he could train for the prestigious eastern courses in New York and Maryland if he was going to ascend, but Bennett's string bound him to smaller-time venues like Memphis and Little Rock. He seemed self-assured during interviews, though: "I have often been asked why with my success in picking winners I have never been more of a plunger [habitual bettor], for I seldom bet more than a ten-dollar note," McDaniel told a reporter around 1900. "It's a great secret, but I will tell you the reason. It's because the life of a trainer is longer than that of a plunger. That's why I'm a trainer."
At first, the Bennett horses won for McDaniel. By 1902, McDaniel trained his two hundredth winner for Bennett in a little over two years. His willingness to travel the country, finding meets in which his horses could succeed, probably kept his numbers up. But a later season went less well. (A horse named Henry McDaniel had better luck; Sam Hildreth had apparently named the colt for his friend, and he won at New Orleans in the winter of 1902. Naming horses after people was a common custom at the time. There were horses named Sewell Combs, James T. Clark, Jim Heffering, and Alice Forman.) McDaniel acted unruffled about his losses: "Well, we cannot win all the time," he told a reporter.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Here Comes Exterminator! by Eliza McGraw. Copyright © 2016 Eliza McGraw. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Preface,
Prologue,
1. Uncle Henry,
2. "One of Those Larger-Than-Life Figures",
3. All-American Thoroughbred,
4. The 1918 Kentucky Derby,
5. "One of the Greatest Three-Year-Olds of the Season",
6. Remarkable Gameness,
7. "The Color of the 1920s",
8. Iron Horse,
9. Paper Record,
10. "I Could Stand Against the World",
11. "A Finer, Truer Horse Never Lived",
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Works Consulted,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,