“Today will be historic in Kentucky annals as the first ‘Derby Day’ of what promises to be a long series of annual turf festivities of which we confidently expect our grandchildren, a hundred years hence, to celebrate in glorious rejoicings,” the Louisville Courier-Journal boldly predicted on May 17, 1875.1 That afternoon ten thousand curious and enthusiastic spectators filled the brand-new Louisville Jockey Club and Driving Park and witnessed history under a cloudless sky. Fashionable ladies and gentlemen from all parts of America were seated in the grandstand, and the clubhouse veranda was dotted with parasols, rocking chairs, and black waiters in white coats carrying trays of frosted silver cups. Wagons and carriages of all descriptions filled with locals from all walks of life were scattered across the infield. All had come to see the first running of the Kentucky Derby. The second of four races that afternoon, the inaugural Derby did not disappoint. Entered as a “rabbit” to set a fast pace for his favored stable mate, come-from-behind specialist Chesapeake, Aristides was sent to the lead early as planned by jockey Oliver Lewis, but saved enough energy to survive a late challenge from Volcano, thus achieving a surprising two-length victory. The crowd erupted in applause for the little red colt and his game jockey, who wore the orange and green silks of winning owner H. P. McGrath as horse and rider made their way to the winner’s circle—champions of the first Kentucky Derby.
Aristides, winner of the first Kentucky Derby, ridden by jockey Oliver Lewis, and owned by H. P. McGrath. (Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
Horse racing had been popular in Louisville since the late 1700s, but the city had been without organized Thoroughbred racing since the Woodlawn race course had closed five years earlier, a testament to the fact that while commercial breeding was already an established part of the state’s agricultural economy, Kentucky was by no means the undisputed capital of the American Thoroughbred industry that it would later become. In fact, in the mid-1870s, much of Kentucky’s identity to outsiders was based on its reputation as a hotbed of lawlessness and violence. Nine months before the first Kentucky Derby, the New York Times described the Commonwealth as “a land which produces more beautiful women, unrivaled horses, fine whisky, and blue grass than any other section of the universe.” But, the Times continued, “Some classes of its inhabitants . . . think it no harm to kill a man or two yearly to keep their senses of honor keen and their weapons bright.”2
For Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., the first Derby marked the culmination of years of effort to create a world-class racecourse in Louisville. The series of events that led to the establishment of the Kentucky Derby was set in motion when the recently married twenty-six-year-old Clark (a grandson of famous American explorer William Clark and scion of one of Louisville’s oldest families) traveled with his wife to Great Britain and continental Europe in 1872, where he was introduced to many leading members of the English and French racing establishments. He toured their top racing facilities and was particularly impressed with English racing. Upon his return to Kentucky, Clark led an effort to build an upscale facility in the mold of Epsom Downs, one of England’s oldest and most famous racecourses, complete with a signature race modeled after the English Derby, a one-and-a-half-mile race for three-year-olds contested annually at Epsom. Clark convinced a group of 320 local sportsmen and business leaders to invest $100 apiece to fund the construction of a racetrack and grandstand for the Louisville Jockey Club and Driving Park Association, to be located on eighty acres of land owned by Clark’s uncles Henry and John Churchill (with whom Clark had lived for part of his childhood after the death of his mother). Within a decade the track would be known colloquially as Churchill Downs, destined to become the most famous racetrack in America.3
M. L. “Lutie” Clark, a dapper and physically imposing man with slicked-down hair and a flower habitually in his lapel, imagined the Kentucky Derby as an event on a grand scale from the beginning. He did not live to see the full fruition of his vision, but from the very first running the event received attention from national print media and racing fans across the country.4 Only twenty-nine years old when the track opened, Clark had already acquired cosmopolitan tastes for food and drink, and was known for hosting lavish parties in the clubhouse apartment that served as his residence during race meets. He hoped that the Louisville track would become a place for the city’s fashionable crowd to socialize, but he also offered free admission to the infield for all on Derby Day. Ladies were encouraged to attend the races but were segregated from the betting shed, which was considered an “inappropriate” environment for women. Clark wanted the track, the clubhouse, and the grounds to be well manicured and top class, even if that required expenditure of his personal wealth, which it often did. Clark’s Derby night parties at Louisville’s posh Pendennis Club were legendary: one year the dinner tables were arranged around an indoor pond filled with moss, ferns, a fountain, and live baby swans. Above all, Clark promoted the Kentucky Derby as a signature race and showcase for the racetrack.
Early journalistic prognostications for the Derby demonstrate that the race was special from its inception. To say that it reached lofty levels of popularity and cultural significance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a starting point of complete national insignificance would be inaccurate, but the path toward the special place in American culture that the Derby eventually achieved was often bumpy and uneven. In an era when racing was conducted for the sake of sport as much as for profit, Churchill Downs struggled to survive financially in the early years, but the Derby was popular with race fans and high society, and its significance crossed state and regional boundaries. New York millionaire William B. Astor Jr. won the second Derby with a gelding named Vagrant he had purchased only weeks before. Among the ten rivals Vagrant defeated was Parole, owned by another New York millionaire, tobacco-manufacturing heir Pierre Lorillard IV (who would later become the first American owner to win the English Derby). In 1881 major New York owners Michael F. and Phillip J. Dwyer won the Derby with heavily favored Hindoo, one of the best horses of his era and part of the inaugural class of inductees at the National Racing Hall of Fame. The Dwyer brothers had been butchers in New York City before making a fortune in the meatpacking industry as suppliers of area restaurants and hotels. They would become major players in the eastern racing scene as racetrack operators and racehorse owners, though Mike Dwyer would also gain notoriety as one of the country’s heaviest and most reckless gamblers.
The following year the Dwyer brothers owned another of America’s top three-year-olds, Runnymede. Despite Lutie Clark’s efforts to recruit the colt to the Derby, the Dwyers were hesitant because they had been frustrated the previous year by their inability to find a bookmaker in Louisville to take their bets on Hindoo. The brothers told Clark that they would return to the Derby only if Clark would provide bookmakers to service their bets. When Clark told the Dwyers that none existed in the city, the parties reached a compromise: the Dwyers would be allowed to bring their own bookies. After securing their bets with the bookies at odds of 4-5, the Dwyers watched Runnymede find clear running room late in the race only to be caught deep in the stretch by a lightly regarded gelding named Apollo, who prevailed at the wire by a half length, becoming the first, and to date only, horse to win the Derby without making a start as a two-year-old. The Dwyers lost their bets with their bookies, but Louisville race fans gained a new and popular gambling option, and bookmakers would remain a fixture at the Derby for the next quarter century.
Another prominent American attracted early on to the Kentucky Derby was Berry Wall, a New York bon vivant, who was at least indirectly responsible for the creation of the important connection between the Derby and roses. Early in 1883 Wall was in Lexington, Kentucky, visiting a friend, when he met leading Thoroughbred owner and breeder Jack Chinn, who invited Wall to his farm thirty miles away in Harrodsburg the following day. At the farm, Wall was captivated by Chinn’s three-year-old colt Leonatus and asked to buy him. Chinn initially accepted, but quickly had second thoughts and cancelled the deal. Wall’s disappointment did not prevent him from betting on Leonatus to win the Derby with anyone who would take his money in New York in the weeks leading up to the race. Wall attended the Derby as a guest of Clark. After Leonatus easily bested his six rivals to win the ninth Derby, Wall refused to divulge the exact amount of his winnings but acknowledged, “I have a lot of money to spend.”5 He did just that by sponsoring a dinner at the Pendennis Club for thirty couples and a subsequent gathering later that night at the Galt House Hotel for sixty couples. The lavish decorations at the parties included American Beauty roses which, developed in France under a different name, had made their way to the United States only three years earlier. No one in Kentucky had seen this type of rose before and they earned rave reviews. Clark was particularly impressed and began presenting the Derby’s winning jockey with a bouquet of roses the following year, a tradition that would eventually evolve into the ceremonial blanket of roses worn by the winning horse today.
The Derby’s allure for the rich and fashionable, local and national, helped it to gain a reputation by 1886 as “undoubtedly the greatest annual event of the American turf,” according to the New York Times.6 On Derby Day that year the Courier-Journal evinced considerable enthusiasm: “The widespread interest in the meeting has attracted people from all over the country, and the city will be crowded today. That there will be a crowd at the races goes without saying. Everybody goes to the Derby; it is a Kentucky, almost a national, institution, and people who do not know one horse from another for the remainder of the year feel an intense interest in the colt of the year.”7 Anticipation was high, with record attendance expected.
The 1886 Derby proved to be a high point from which its national significance would fall for close to a quarter century. One of many threats to the Derby’s stature stemmed from hostilities between gold-rush millionaire James Ben Ali Haggin and Churchill Downs officials that year. Haggin was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in 1822, the grandson of an early Kentucky settler. He practiced law in Shelbyville before heading west in 1849, where he made a fortune in mining. His sizeable land-holdings included part of the Anaconda copper mine in Montana, which he owned as a member of a partnership that included George Hearst, father of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. At one time, Haggin’s mine holdings were unsurpassed by any in the world. In 1880 he began a Thoroughbred operation in California that would soon become one of the largest and most successful in the country.
On Derby Day, 1886, Haggin became incensed at his inability to find a bookmaker to take a bet on his colt, Ben Ali, the favorite for that afternoon’s big race. Track officials had locked out the bookmakers over a contract dispute. After watching Ben Ali take the Derby by a half length, Haggin announced that if the bookmakers were not welcomed back to the track, he would leave Churchill Downs and never return. This was no small threat, as Haggin was ridiculously wealthy and one of the world’s leading owners of Thoroughbreds. The crisis seemed to have been averted when the bookies and track officials reached an agreement allowing for their return to business the following day. However, after harsh words were exchanged between the winning owner and a track official, Haggin left Louisville, vowing never to return to Churchill Downs and promising to see to it that his wealthy friends likewise boycotted the races.8 Haggin purchased Elmendorf Farm outside Lexington in 1897, which served as home base for his world-class breeding operation, but true to his threat, he would never again start a horse in the Derby.
Though the fracas between Haggin and Churchill officials certainly did not enhance the Derby’s reputation, the precise amount of damage it caused is difficult to measure, as major eastern owners were more concerned with the increasingly lucrative and prestigious racing scene in and around New York by that time anyway. Although major New York owners largely stayed away, the Derby nevertheless attracted horses from across the country for the remainder of the decade. In 1887 Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin, founder of the original Santa Anita Park racetrack on his Southern California ranch and nicknamed for his uncanny success in various nineteenth-century mining ventures, sent his colt Pendennis from California to start in the Derby. Though the horse finished last, the presence of Pendennis at the Derby in 1887 shows that Haggin’s boycott of the Derby did not keep all the top national owners away from Louisville. In fact, the winners of the four Derbies immediately after Haggin’s departure were won by non-Kentuckians. In 1888 Macbeth II won the Derby for owner George V. Hankins, the “King of Chicago Gamblers.” The following year a colt named Spokane, bred and trained in Montana, narrowly nipped heavily favored Proctor Knott at the finish line and was declared the winner after a long deliberation by the placing judges (a decision that reportedly netted notorious outlaw Frank James a sizeable payoff on a bet placed on the winner). In 1890 “Big” Ed Corrigan, a Kansas City industrialist and Chicago racetrack operator, won the Derby with Riley, a horse he owned and trained.
Ben Ali, Spirit of the Times cover art, 1886. Ben Ali won the Derby in 1886, but his owner, James Ben Ali Haggin, had a greater long-term impact on the race. Following a dispute over access to bookmakers, Haggin told Churchill Downs brass that he would no longer race at the track and that he would see to it that his fellow top eastern owners did likewise. (Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
The appeal of the Kentucky Derby had never been based solely upon its significance in the world of horse racing; thus, the dearth of wealthy eastern owners would not necessarily have caused a noticeable downturn in the popularity of the race. But their absence, combined with the increasing popularity of new races for three-year-olds like Chicago’s American Derby and the proliferation of racing in and around New York City, indicated tough times ahead for the Kentucky Derby.
First run in 1884, the American Derby carried a much larger purse than the Kentucky Derby and attracted higher-quality competitors. The Kentucky Derby was soon eclipsed by its Chicago rival in terms of significance and attention. By 1893, the American Derby was worth $50,000 to the winner, while the winner of the Kentucky Derby that year received less than $4,000. The American Derby’s elevated purse that year was likely related to local enthusiasm over the enormous Columbian Exposition taking place in Chicago, but Chicago’s Derby was regularly attracting better horses and offering higher purses.
By the early to mid-1890s, the size and quality of Derby fields had deteriorated to the point that the event had become a subject of ridicule by local and national journalists alike. The Louisville Commercial opined that the Kentucky Derby had degenerated into “a contest of dogs.”9 The New York Times reported that the Kentucky Derby had “lost all pretensions to greatness.”10 The absence of top national owners was obviously a main reason, but operational mismanagement, deteriorating facilities, and competition from races like the American Derby also contributed to the Derby’s embarrassingly small fields, uncompetitive purses, and diminishing national prestige in the late 1880s and 1890s. The emergence of a mysterious disease that caused stillbirths in horses and decimated Bluegrass breeders’ 1890 and 1891 foal crops only added to the dismal situation.11 The Derby’s decline was snowballing, and the nation’s top three-year-olds—along with their rich, fashionable, and influential owners—were staying away.
Despite the decline in national prestige within racing circles, the Derby retained some of its cultural relevance, and still attracted large crowds by the standard of the day. National conventions were regularly held in Louisville at Derby time. In 1891, a year in which a Lexington newspaper called the four-horse race “a bum Derby,” and the New York Times called it “farcical,” a number of national conventions planned to convene in Louisville at Derby time.12 The Scottish-American Convention, the National Convention of Elks, and the Kentucky Democratic State Convention all adjourned their meetings so that delegates could attend the Derby. Two years later a convention of the Republican League of Clubs, which drew representatives from across the country, held an abbreviated session on Derby Day so that the delegates could go to the races.
The following year, 1894, one important Derby competitor ceased operation. That fall, Chicago racing leaders reached a decision to discontinue racing at Washington Park, home of the American Derby, because of “the popular clamor against poolselling and the degeneration of racing from a harmless and high-class sport into a species of gambling.”13 Presumably betting in some form has been a part of horse racing since the animal was first domesticated, but in late-Victorian America there was a growing concern over the professionalization of gambling. Much of the “popular clamor” came from reform-minded adherents to the Social Gospel movement who sought to combat what they saw as the ill effects of the rise of urban-industrial society (including political corruption, saloons, gambling, and prostitution), which they believed threatened public morals and the Protestant work ethic. These reformers tended to be from the middle classes and sought social stability and regeneration through the eradication of vice.14 Horse racing (especially the gambling element) represented a threat to social stability because it offered an opportunity for socioeconomic advance achieved without adhering to the traditional American notions of hard work and frugality. As is the case today, the top end of horse racing was dominated by the rich, but there was a measure of truth to the ancient racing adage that “all are equal on the turf and under it.” Regardless of one’s background or social status, anyone with the right horse (or a bit of money to bet on it) could defeat the wealthiest blueblood at the racetrack. A successful handicapper could, in theory, become quite wealthy without hard work or frugality. This offended the sensibilities of many reformers, including those who worked to rid their communities of horse racing in late-Victorian America.
The American Derby returned in 1897 after a three-year hiatus, but it would be contested and interrupted intermittently thereafter. It was held only once between 1905 and 1925. By the end of that period the Kentucky Derby, run every year on the same track, had become the most popular and most celebrated horse race in the nation. Whether the Kentucky Derby would have reached its lofty levels of popularity in the twentieth century without the demise of the American Derby is legitimately debatable, but the latter’s disappearance unquestionably facilitated the Kentucky Derby’s cultural ascension.
In August 1894 the debt-ridden Louisville Jockey Club was sold to a group of gamblers, bookies, and businessmen that called itself the New Louisville Jockey Club, led by “pool room” operators W. E. Applegate and William F. Schulte. The term pool room referred to halls where horse races were wagered upon in the form of “auction pools,” in which the wagering rights to each horse in a given race were auctioned off, creating a pool of money that would be distributed to the bidder whose horse won the race after the “house” took its cut. (Pool rooms often included billiards tables, giving rise to the colloquial name of “pool” for games played on billiards tables.) M. L. Clark, the president and largest shareholder of the old Louisville Jockey Club, had not been paid his salary for more than two years. From the proceeds of the sale, the old group was able to pay all its creditors except for Clark, who declared, “I could wish nothing worse for my worst enemy than that he should become my successor and contend with all that I have contended with.”15 Clark and the old group had been criticized for the declining quality of racing in Louisville and the declining status of the racetrack among American horsemen. It seems that the old organization had been more interested in sport-for-sport’s-sake than in turning a profit. This approach contributed significantly to the early success of the Derby but was not conducive to long-term viability for the racetrack or its signature event.
Despite his suggestions that he would be moving on to greener pastures, Clark was convinced by the new ownership group to remain a part of the Derby and of Churchill Downs as presiding judge, a significant post in the days before photo-finish cameras. Clark had an untarnished reputation for integrity and was known across the world of racing for his refusal to tolerate any semblance of dishonest race riding by jockeys, gambling-related conspiracy, or other racetrack chicanery. Clark’s enthusiasm for enforcing rules did get him into trouble at times, however, and sometimes even led to gunplay: in one instance he was shot in the shoulder by a disgruntled horse owner named Thomas G. Moore, who claimed that he had been insulted by Clark when Clark refused to allow him to run horses at the Louisville Jockey Club track because Moore was in debt to the racetrack. Moore confronted Clark after the races at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville and demanded an apology. Clark refused, and both men drew pistols. Moore shot Clark in the shoulder, but Clark soon recovered. Moore was subsequently banned from the racetrack for one year for “his language and conduct on the track during the meeting.” Descriptions and explanations of the events surrounding the altercation between Moore and Clark vary wildly. But Clark’s reputation as a racing official who would not stand for underhandedness or even the appearance of it on the racetrack was solid.16
“I do not like a bone in Clark’s body,” one horseman proclaimed, “but he is the straightest turfman in the world, and is recognized as such all over the world. If I have to race for my life I would rather have Clark tap the drum and get in the judge’s stand than any other man I know of.”17 Clark’s firm stance against racetrack misbehavior helped to keep opponents of racing in Louisville at bay and had enabled Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby to survive their infancy. In an era when racetracks were perennial targets of various reform movements, Clark’s reputation would have been invaluable to an ownership group that was heavily tied to professional gambling, the element of horse racing that its opponents most feared and detested.
The new ownership did its best to quiet the growing numbers of “progressive” reform-minded groups in Louisville that were opposed to horse racing, gambling, and drinking. In an attempt to assuage the fears of racing opponents, the New Louisville Jockey Club included the phrase “No improper characters admitted” in its spring 1896 print ads.18 This phrase could be construed as either a warning or a marketing ploy, but regardless, it was a sign that the new ownership group was well aware of growing suspicion of the appropriateness of racing and gambling in America.
The new owners also made some much-needed upgrades to the grounds at Churchill Downs. They immediately embarked on a campaign of improvement to the racetrack’s facilities that included the construction of a new grandstand on the opposite side of the track from the original structure, which had fallen into disrepair. The new location meant that patrons were no longer forced to look into the afternoon sun to view the races. Like the old building, it included a separate ladies’ section situated so that women could enjoy the racing from comfortable seats that were a safe distance from the “unseemly” betting shed. The new grandstand, adorned with the now-iconic twin spires, was ready for Derby Day 1895, earning plaudits from press and patrons alike.19
Conspicuously absent from the new facility was a clubhouse. The old clubhouse was still standing, but it was now inaccessible from the grandstand on the opposite side of the track. Unlike the original Louisville Jockey Club organizers, the new group was not socially prominent in Louisville’s exclusive circles. The New Louisville Jockey Club’s background was in gambling. Schulte, Applegate, and the other investors were more concerned with providing easy access (for men) to the betting shed than they were with providing society types with a separate seating area.
The new ownership did listen to the long-standing complaints of horsemen, however, and as part of the track renovation, new world-class stable facilities were constructed. Additionally, the new group addressed the grumblings, heard from horsemen and journalists for years, about the Kentucky Derby’s excessive distance. For the 1896 Derby, track officials shortened the race to its present distance of a mile and one-fourth from its original one-and-a-half-mile length, a decision that paid immediate dividends. That year New York racetrack owner and notoriously heavy gambler Michael F. Dwyer (who along with his brother Phillip had owned 1881 winner Hindoo) again reached the Derby winner’s circle when Ben Brush defeated seven rivals in a competitive race reminiscent of the Derby’s early years. Ben Brush’s victory ended a long string of unremarkable races and squelched much of the journalistic criticism of the event. After the race, a collar of roses was placed on Ben Brush, the first documented instance of that honor.
The famous Churchill Downs twin spires, ca. 1903. Construction on the new grandstand began in 1894; it was ready for the 1895 spring meet. The colonnaded clubhouse to the left was added in 1903. (Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
Things were looking up for the track and for its signature event, but less than three years later the Derby lost its founder and chief proponent. On April 22, 1899, Meriwether Lewis Clark was found dead at the age of fifty-three from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Memphis hotel. His doctor reported that Clark had been suffering from “melancholia.” There was some speculation that Clark may have experienced financial hardship in the aftermath of the economic depression that hit the United States beginning in 1893, but he had battled depression much of his life.20
Clark had dreamed that the Derby’s significance would one day exceed that of any other horse race in the nation. In the Derby’s early years he had predicted that one day the winner of the race would be worth more than the farm on which he was raised.21 This seemingly preposterous prognostication had been fulfilled by the 1881 winner, Hindoo, and continues to be true today, with syndications of recent Derby winners for stud purposes (including Fusaichi Pegasus, Smarty Jones, and Big Brown in the past decade) reaching well into the tens of millions of dollars.
Clark had established the Kentucky Derby as a major date on the local social calendar and as a noteworthy event in the pages of the national sporting press. He had worked tirelessly, often without pay, to ensure that the Louisville Jockey Club was a respectable organization and an attractive destination. While his temper, arrogance, opulent lifestyle, and expensive habits of consumption may have kept Clark from being thoroughly embraced and celebrated by the public and the press in his lifetime, no one could dispute his crucial role in the development of the Derby.
Three years after Clark’s death the New Louisville Jockey Club underwent a major change in management. Majority shareholder William Applegate maintained a significant interest in the business, but turned over operational control to a new group that included Louisville mayor Charles Granger and the man who would become the human face of the Kentucky Derby for almost fifty years, Martin J. “Matt” Winn. Applegate understood that the racetrack required new energy and focus if it were to survive. Unlike the prior group, the new management team was made up of socially prominent Louisvillians who were able to attract a wider group of spectators to the races than had their immediate predecessors. Thus began the most important period in the history of Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby.
Martin J. “Matt” Winn (right), the man more responsible than anyone for the Kentucky Derby’s ultimate success, would later be called “Mr. Derby” by sportswriters. (Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
Plans for a new clubhouse at Churchill Downs had been in the works before the 1902 shakeup, and they were quickly implemented. Today what is commonly referred to as the clubhouse is actually a sprawling conglomeration of luxury suites, box seats, and dining rooms, including a section favored by celebrities called Millionaires’ Row, but it was once a freestanding building reserved for members of the Louisville Jockey Club and their guests. The cost of construction was partially offset by the sale of two hundred club memberships to leading Louisvillians for $100 apiece. The new clubhouse was designed in the Classical Revival style and included a wide veranda reminiscent of the Old South. The Kentucky Irish-American called it “a thing of beauty.”22 The attention paid by the press to the new facilities underscores the emphasis that the new group in charge of Churchill Downs placed upon marketing their product to general populations, including the socially prominent, rather than just to hardcore gamblers. This had been a major concern of Lutie Clark’s, but the upper classes had received less attention from the group that immediately succeeded him. By reestablishing the Derby and Churchill Downs as a playground for the rich, Winn helped raise the stature of, and prospects for, both the event and the racetrack.
Churchill Downs clubhouse, ca. 1914. The new clubhouse opened to rave reviews in 1903, evoking the Old South with its white columns and wide veranda. (Photographic Archive, P_00408, Special Collections, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.)
Matt Winn was born in a small house on Louisville’s Fifth Street, between Main Street and the Ohio River. His father, an Irish immigrant, owned a local grocery store. After attending Catholic grammar school and Bryant & Stratton business school, Winn began his professional life as a teenaged bookkeeper for a glass company. He later accepted a position as a traveling salesman for a Louisville wholesale grocery company, affording him the chance to buy, sell, and barter his way across the Commonwealth for ten years. Then, in 1887, Winn’s tailor approached him with a proposition: he needed capital to expand his clothing operation and a partner with sales experience. Winn accepted the offer of partnership and entered the clothing business, where he would remain until joining the administrative team at Churchill Downs in 1902.
In his tenure of almost half a century at Churchill Downs, there was quite simply no better promoter of the Derby than Matt Winn. “Colonel” Winn, as he was widely known, was a gregarious fellow and an aficionado of bourbon whiskey (though “never before noon”) and cigars. Winn did not earn his colonelship from any military service. Kentucky colonel is an honorary title that has been bestowed upon thousands of men and women through the years. Isaac Shelby, then in his second stint as governor of Kentucky, granted the first Kentucky colonelship during the War of 1812. In its early years the colonelship carried some official duties and responsibility, but the title had been completely honorary and ceremonial since the late 1800s.23
Winn was awarded his title by Kentucky governor J. C. W. Beckham while Winn was serving on Mayor Granger’s Board of Public Safety in 1904. (Ironically, Beckham would lose a 1927 gubernatorial bid on a platform opposed to wagering on horse racing.)24 The title bestowed on Winn by Beckham was a crucial element in the ultimate success of the Kentucky Derby. Winn was terribly proud of his title, and his name was practically never printed or uttered without the “Colonel” prefix from that day forward. Notwithstanding the title’s purely honorary significance, to Winn, the son of an immigrant grocer, it represented a symbolic statement of status. The title became an indispensable part of Winn’s identity and persona, which Winn would eventually exploit masterfully in his promotion of the Derby.
Winn worked tirelessly to encourage top owners to bring their stock to Churchill Downs and to elicit favorable reviews of the Kentucky Derby from influential sportswriters. In doing so, Winn served as a living, breathing advertisement for Kentucky as a place where colonels sip juleps and smoke cigars on verandas. In his travels to promote the Derby, he was also promoting himself as an embodiment of a lifestyle—a lifestyle that could be enjoyed by those who came to the Kentucky Derby.
The legend of Matt Winn became an important part of Kentucky Derby mythology and lore. Winn claimed to have seen every Kentucky Derby in person, including the very first from the back of his father’s grocer’s cart in the Churchill Downs infield. He also claimed that he had saved the Derby in 1902 by forming the group that took over the struggling track. By his own account, Winn, then a merchant tailor and a gambler, was asked by Churchill Downs’s secretary Charlie Price to buy the financially strapped racetrack.25 According to his autobiography, Winn was at first shocked by the request. He told Price that he was nothing more than a tailor and did not know the first thing about running a racetrack. Price told Winn that if no buyer could be found, the racetrack would be forced to close, and there would be no more Kentucky Derbies. To this Winn claimed to have responded, “This is a rash and reckless thing you are asking me to do. I’d say no and make it stick for a thousand years if it involved anything but the Derby. But they mustn’t stop running that race.”26 The tailor was able to raise the money from a group of his “close friends,” including Mayor Granger, and Churchill Downs was purchased for $40,000. In reality, the majority owner of the racetrack, W. E. Applegate, was the driving force behind the deal that brought Winn and Granger to the racetrack, and Applegate retained a significant percentage of ownership.27 But the facts do not make nearly as romantic a story as the one that Winn remembered about the reorganization that took place at Churchill Downs in 1902; Winn was as capable a self-promoter as he was a promoter of the Kentucky Derby.
Racing historian Joe Palmer made light of the larger-than-life persona that Winn created for himself and sold to the American public: “It is no longer possible to write anything new about Colonel Matt Winn,” Palmer wrote, with tongue firmly in cheek. “He came into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap (it is a baseless legend that he cut it himself) about 1770. After clearing the land of cane breaks and Indians, he gave his mind to further improvement and invented bourbon whiskey, the Thoroughbred horse, hickory-cured ham, and Stephen Foster. It was not until 1875 that he risked the combination of all these elements and produced the first Kentucky Derby.”28 Winn’s contributions to the growth of the Kentucky Derby were undoubtedly immeasurable. But his almost legendary stature has largely worked to obscure exactly what those contributions were.
In 1908, the rise to power of an antigambling group in Louisville challenged the Derby’s very existence and eventually afforded Winn the opportunity to change the face of Thoroughbred racing in America. Still stinging from fierce opposition from track president Charlie Grainger during election season, the new city hall group wasted no time in passing an ordinance that banned bookmakers (then the primary means of wagering on horse racing) from operating in Louisville. Reform groups had been a thorn in the side of Churchill Downs since at least 1877, when they opposed a proposal to make Derby Day a local holiday, but this threat was much more serious. The future of the racetrack, which relied heavily on licensing fees from bookies, was in immediate and serious jeopardy—the very survival of the Kentucky Derby was threatened. Track officials quickly scrambled to find some way around the new law, and the possibility of reinstituting the pari-mutuel (French for “bet among ourselves”) wagering system was soon suggested. Older racing enthusiasts recalled that Lutie Clark had first encountered this then-revolutionary system of wagering (invented by Parisian Pierre Oller in 1865) while traveling in Europe prior to the founding of Churchill Downs. The parimutuel system created a pool of all money wagered on a given race. After the “house” took its cut, the pool would be split by those who had placed a wager on the winning horse in proportion to the amount wagered. Thus, the more money bet on a particular horse, the lower the odds and return would be for those who bet on that horse. The system removed the possibility of underhandedness on the part of human bookmakers, but required a complicated machine to calculate the figures.
Upon hearing of the plan to circumvent their antigambling law, city leaders reminded track officials of an old Kentucky state statute that banned “machine” gambling. The law was intended to prohibit machines that facilitated games like keno and faro, but by the letter of the law it appeared that pari-mutuel machines would be in violation. Fortunately for the future of horse racing, Winn and Grainger recalled that while Clark had promised to have a pari-mutuel system in place for the opening of the Louisville Jockey Club in 1875, it was not actually implemented until 1878. The pair discovered to their delight that in that three-year interim Clark had sought and acquired an exemption for parimutuel wagering in the form of an amendment to the machine gambling law, which allowed that system to operate until 1889, when pressure from bookmakers forced Clark to discontinue its use. Winn and Grainger quickly began an exhaustive search for the machines necessary to reimplement the system. They found one in a Churchill Downs storeroom and another in a Louisville pawnshop. Two more turned up, but they still needed additional machines to handle the Derby Day crowd. They found an unlikely savior in Phil Dwyer, who with his brother had been responsible for the introduction of bookmakers to Churchill Downs. Dwyer located two additional machines in New York City, where the pari-mutuel system had proven unpopular in the 1870s and had been abandoned.29
The New York Times reported that the on-site money bet on the Derby that year was less than half of what it usually was, but conceded that much of that difference could be attributed to the thunderstorm that dumped nearly three-fourths of an inch of rain on Louisville on Derby Day, creating “fetlock deep” mud on the track. Bettors who placed the minimum $5 wager (it would be lowered to $2 two years later) to win on Stone Street that wet day were rewarded with a $123.60 return on their investment.30
Later that year the Kentucky State Court of Appeals (then the highest court in the Commonwealth of Kentucky) held in Grinstead v. Kirby that pari-mutuel wagers were legal under Kentucky law, ensuring that Derby patrons would have an officially sanctioned means of backing their favorite horse in what, for many, would become an important part of the Derby experience. Unlike bookmakers, whose interest in the outcome of races could invite the appearance of (or actual) chicanery and corruption, the operators of pari-mutuel wagering had no rooting interest in the actual outcome of the races as the amount bet on each horse determined the odds for that horse. Also, the pari-mutuel system possessed a communal quality as winners collected from a pool created by all the punters. This slight distinction from a wager between two people in which there was one winner and one loser was significant to reformers, who objected to a winner “taking” from a loser.31 This “sanitized” form of gambling would eventually be the path to the restoration of racing in many of the states that had abandoned it, and today is by far the most prominent method of gambling on American racing.
With the survival of racing in Louisville assured, Winn embarked on a quest to make the Kentucky Derby the most important race in the country. To accomplish this task, he would need all of his charm and charisma to win the support of racing’s top owners, who were focusing their racing campaigns on the more prestigious and richer races in the East. In that endeavor Winn received some fortuitous help from a piece of legislation pushed by the governor of New York, the future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes.
On June 11, 1908, the New York legislature passed the Hughes-supported Hart-Agnew bill (named for the bill’s legislative sponsors), outlawing all gambling in New York. Though it did not specifically prohibit horse racing, this law eventually led to the blackout of the 1910 and 1911 racing seasons on the country’s most important racing circuit which, in turn, forced eastern owners to find alternative locations to run their horses (some shipped their horses overseas) or to abandon the sport entirely. The Hart-Agnew law followed in the footsteps of other laws passed across the country that came close to effectively ending the sport of Thoroughbred racing in the United States. In 1906 Tennessee, once a major center of Thoroughbred racing, outlawed gambling on the sport. States across the South and across the country soon followed suit. Opponents of the sport claimed that racing had become tainted by the influence of gamblers from the North. While it may have been acceptable for gentlemen to wager on the outcome of sporting events, professional gamblers were seen as a different element entirely.
In 1897 there had been 314 racetracks operating in the United States and 41 in Canada. By 1908 the number of active racetracks in the United States and Canada had fallen to 31.32 After the wave of reform that hit the sport in the early 1900s, racing would not reach its prereform levels of popularity until the 1930s, when many states began to approve pari-mutuel racing in order to increase tax revenues during the Great Depression. This general decline in American racing at the beginning of the twentieth century made the survival of racing at Churchill Downs in that era all the more significant.
As the antigambling movement was sweeping the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, another dramatic change was permanently altering the face of American Thoroughbred racing—the disappearance of black jockeys from the sport. In the early days of Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby, blacks were annually among the leading jockeys and trainers. In the first Kentucky Derby, thirteen of the fifteen riders were black, including the winning jockey, Oliver Lewis. But by the early 1900s black riders had all but disappeared, not only from the Kentucky Derby but from major American racing as a whole. In 1975, ninety-six-year-old trainer Nate Cantrell recalled the end of the era of black dominance in American racing. “In the old days, if you ran twelve horses, from six to eight of the jockeys were always black. And it remained that way until a lot of money got in the game. The white men then, like they do now and like they’ve always been, wanted his people to have, not only the money, but also the reputation.”33
In the early days of American racing, particularly in the South, many jockeys had been slaves. After emancipation, many of these continued to serve their former masters in the same capacity. Relationships between white owners and their black trainers and jockeys in the years immediately after the Civil War continued to have undertones of a master-slave relationship. While jockeys were seen as mere tools of their owners, not successful athletes in their own right, white supremacy was not threatened. However, by the turn of the century, jockeys were becoming relatively rich and famous. There was widespread suspicion about professional athletes in general in this era as it became increasingly possible to make a good living in the realm of sport that had previously belonged only to those with disposable time and money. Having the leisure time to devote to sport was once an indicator of elevated social status. Professional athletes turned that system on its head. Black professional athletes were doubly unacceptable in this environment.
Black jockeys won half of the first sixteen Derbies, and fifteen of the first twenty-eight. Both Oliver Lewis and Ansel Williams, the jockey and trainer of the first Derby winner Aristides, were black. Aristides was owned by the flamboyant H. Price McGrath, a tailor who had made a fortune in questionable gambling enterprises from New Orleans to New York, which afforded him the opportunity to enter the world of racing on a large scale. He wore large white hats and loud red neckties, and was fond of referring to “his darkies” as though they were property. In 1877 a black jockey-trainer tandem again found themselves in the Derby winner’s circle after Billy Walker guided Baden-Baden to victory for trainer Ed “Brown Dick” Brown. Brown was one of the most successful trainers in the country and famous for his expensive suits and large bankrolls. Walker was one of the nation’s top jockeys during the 1870s. The year he won the Derby aboard Baden-Baden, the U.S. Congress adjourned to watch Walker race in Baltimore aboard top horse Ten Broeck.
Edward D. “Brown Dick” Brown, ca. 1900. One of the top horsemen of his era, Brown trained 1877 Derby winner Baden-Baden. (Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
Ten Broeck the horse was named for Richard Ten Broeck the famous Kentucky breeder and father-in-law of Lutie Clark. The horse was also immortalized in a famous Kentucky folk song, “Molly and Tenbrooks.” On July 4, 1878, Ten Broeck and Walker were part of one of the most famous match races in American history when they took on a filly from California named Mollie McCarthy at Churchill Downs. Walker and his horse won the race, but Clark had heard a rumor prior to the start that Walker planned to “throw” the race. Clark warned Walker: “You will be watched the whole way, and if you do not ride to win, a rope will be put about your neck, and you will be hung to that tree yonder and I will help to do it.”34
During the 1880s Isaac Burns Murphy was the most famous rider in America. Despite his skin color, he was widely respected by race fans and horsemen for his skill in the saddle. In 1884, the same year Moses Fleetwood Walker became the last African American to play in a major league baseball game until Jackie Robinson, a newspaper report of Isaac Murphy’s first Derby aboard Buchanan called his riding “admirable.”35 The report of Murphy’s winning ride in the 1890 Derby aboard Riley fell beneath the headline “The Colored Archer,” a reference to a famous white English rider Fred Archer. The article contained a handsome illustration of the jockey, and credited him with being the “greatest judge of pace this country ever saw.” But the article also credited the mistress of the central Kentucky farm on which Murphy was raised for instilling him with “good breeding and fine moral character.” In an effort to show that the large salary Murphy earned did not make him a threat to the racial order of white-dominated American society, the same article explained that Murphy had “always been very grateful to his benefactors,” that he was “saving in his habits,” and that he “spends his leisure hours in reading and studying.”36 Murphy’s public image would stand in marked contrast to that of the twentieth century’s first black superstar athlete, champion boxer Jack Johnson, whose conspicuous consumption, braggadocio, and tendency to associate with white women scandalized the nation and eventually resulted in Johnson’s flight to Europe to escape trumped-up criminal charges.
Isaac Burns Murphy, ca. 1890. Murphy, one of the greatest riders in American history, was the first jockey to win three Kentucky Derbies. (Hemment Collection, Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
In 1891 Murphy became the first jockey to capture successive Kentucky Derbies. This was Murphy’s third victory in the Derby, a feat that would not be matched until 1930, when Earl Sande captured his third Derby aboard Triple Crown champion Gallant Fox. But Murphy’s career quickly went downhill after his last Derby victory. He battled weight problems and was widely believed to have struggled with alcoholism. Murphy died in 1896 at the age of thirty-four or thirty-five. More than five hundred people attended his Lexington funeral service, but his place in popular memory has been inconsistent since then.
In the year of Murphy’s death a black jockey named Willie Simms won his first Kentucky Derby aboard Ben Brush. Simms, like Murphy a posthumous inductee into the National Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame, won two Kentucky Derbies in the 1890s and was applauded by the sporting press both for his prowess in the saddle and his deferential demeanor. Following one of the greatest rides in Derby history, which gave Simms his second Derby victory aboard Plaudit in 1898 by a whisker’s margin, the jockey told reporters, “There is not much to say about it, and I suppose the people in the stand who are more familiar with racing can tell more about the race than I can.”37 It would be unfathomable for a modern athlete to suggest that any spectator might know more about a performance than the athlete him- or herself, but this says much about the environment in which Simms and other black jockeys existed in the late 1800s. There was no mention of the skin color or race of the winning jockey and trainer in the coverage of the first Kentucky Derby, but by the end of the nineteenth century, “blackness” had become more significant. While riders like Murphy and Simms were celebrated as outstanding jockeys, they also won approval for remaining within their “place” as black Americans.
Willie Simms, ca. 1894. Simms won two Kentucky Derbies, in 1896 (Ben Brush) and in 1898 (Plaudit). (Hemment Collection, Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
The last great black jockey to ride in the United States, Jimmy Winkfield, was also the last black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, a feat he accomplished in 1901 and 1902. In 1901 Winkfield, called “a little chocolate colored negro” by the Courier-Journal, won the Derby aboard His Eminence, but was replaced as the horse’s rider later that summer in favor of a white jockey.38 In 1902 Winkfield became the second jockey (joining Isaac Murphy) to win consecutive Kentucky Derbies. Described that year by the Courier-Journal as “black as the ace of spades,” Winkfield won aboard Alan-a-Dale, a horse bred, owned, and trained by a great-grandson of famous Kentucky statesman Henry Clay.39 Winkfield himself also had connections to the “Great Compromiser,” as his mother, Victoria, was descended from slaves owned by Henry Clay.
Jimmy Winkfield, winner of back-to-back Kentucky Derbies in 1901 and 1902, and the last black jockey to win the race. (Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
In the weeks leading up to the 1903 Derby, Winkfield was still considered one of racing’s top national riders. Journalistic descriptions, however, demonstrated that this title would have to be accompanied by an asterisk. Local press reports described Winkfield as “a colored boy, but one of the great race riders of the world.”40 Jockeys had not always been given so much individual attention in the press. But by the turn of the century, as riders were receiving more fame and money, black jockeys were being forced out of American racing. The year 1903 proved to be Winkfield’s final Kentucky Derby. Later that year he agreed to ride for one of the nation’s top owners and trainers, John E. Madden, master of Hamburg Place outside of Lexington, Kentucky, in what was then the nation’s richest race, the Futurity at Sheepshead Bay in New York. Winkfield, however, accepted a $3,000 offer from another owner to break his contract with Madden, who had won the 1898 Derby as the owner and trainer of Plaudit and would later breed five Derby champions. Upon learning of this breach of contract, Madden told the rider that he would see to it that Winkfield would not ride for anyone in the United States again. While that threat did not entirely pan out, Winkfield’s offers for mounts did fall drastically and he was forced to leave the country to ply his trade.41
Though black jockeys became increasingly rare in American racing in the early 1900s, blacks were still employed in large numbers as grooms and stable hands at racetracks and breeding farms. Grooms did not receive public attention or adulation like top jockeys or trainers did, remaining in the background and performing subservient roles. Black grooms and exercise riders fit nicely within traditional racial hierarchies, and were often described as merely part of the Derby scenery by journalists. Black jockeys’ successes in the Derby in the event’s first quarter century were realized at a time when Churchill Downs leaders were often struggling to keep the track and the Derby in operation. But by the time the Derby and Churchill Downs reached solid footing, black jockeys would not be there to share the spotlight.
In 1911 jockey Jess Conley, a black rider, would finish third in the Kentucky Derby aboard Colston. The horse was named for his owner, a black former jockey named Raleigh Colston. The Louisville Herald reported that “Colston carried the dollar of every dusky hued spectator in the city. Had Colston won there would sure have been some pork chop feasts in town today.”42 After Colson, only one black jockey would ride in the Kentucky Derby until Marlon St. Julian finished ninth aboard Curule in 2000, the exception being Henry King’s tenth-place finish aboard Hal Price Headley’s Planet in 1921. In 1930 the Baltimore Afro-American reported that there were “fewer than half a dozen” black jockeys riding in the United States.43 Top jockeys who in the 1870s and 1880s had been called simply “riders” or “jockeys” in newspaper reports were by the turn of the century “black jockeys.” Soon they would be forgotten almost altogether for decades, only briefly remembered in obituaries or obscure articles that would recall a strange time when jockeys were not all white in the United States.
Over the years writers and historians have suggested several causes for the disappearance of black jockeys. Many have argued that the migration of blacks to the industrial North in the twentieth century removed blacks from regular exposure to horses. One old-timer horseman explained that black jockeys had simply gone out of use, “like the old sidebar buggy of that period.”44 In fact, black riders were forced out of the sport by jealous white jockeys and bigoted owners and trainers in an increasingly racially biased American society whose court system had given official sanction to various Jim Crow laws by the end of the nineteenth century. As the Derby became increasingly popular on a national scale in the twentieth century, blacks still played indispensable roles in the lives of racehorses and the sport of horse racing. But grooms, hot-walkers, and stable hands operated far from the spotlight that would shine ever brighter on top athletes, including jockeys.
As the increasingly white Derby was wallowing in short fields and mediocre performances on the racetrack at the turn of the century, Kentucky’s reputation in the national press was not faring much better. Stories about violence and lawlessness in the Bluegrass State were pervasive in national print media, which did not help to attract either people or horses to the Derby. In the aftermath of the Civil War, and in the presence of growing nationalism at home and abroad, Americans in the late nineteenth century wanted to know what made their country unique. In this environment, “local color” books and articles became fashionable with American audiences. Eastern Kentucky became a favorite topic for writers in this emergent genre. Tales of violence and “feuds” in mountainous eastern Kentucky fit well into the popular notion that Kentucky was different. Stories of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, waged on the border between Kentucky and West Virginia, were especially popular with late nineteenth-century audiences.
Feuds and politically motivated violence in the region in the late 1800s were reported zealously from the Breathitt County seat of Jackson, described by one reporter as “a miserable town in the heart of the hills.”45 Writers were generally content to give their eager readers explanations of the violence that bordered on the absurd (including a fight over a watermelon, lingering resentment over the results of the Civil War, and slanderous remarks about a relative) rather than attempt to arrive at any real understanding of the causes of the violence.46 In almost every case, reports of the mountains included tacit assumptions that the violent and lawless mountaineers could not be explained in a way that readers could understand. These were people who were assumed to be different by their very nature, and certainly distinguishable from (though related to) their central Kentucky lowland brethren. But this distinction existed more in perception than in reality, as national newspapers covered violence occurring across the state at the dawn of the twentieth century.
In 1900 Kentucky became (and remains) the only state to have a sitting governor assassinated. On January 30, William Goebel was shot outside the state capitol building in Frankfort where the state legislature was deliberating over the results of a contested gubernatorial election that, according to the certification of the Board of Election Commissioners, had been won by Republican William S. Taylor by scarcely two thousand votes. Civil war seemed imminent when Taylor called in the state militia and ordered the legislature to reconvene more than one hundred miles away in London, located in the southern part of the state. However, the legislative committee called upon to investigate the election invalidated enough “illegal” Republican votes to declare Goebel the rightful winner. Goebel was sworn in as governor before he died, and eventually court decisions upheld the legitimacy of the Democratic legislature’s findings. Goebel’s death created deep fissures in Kentucky politics for decades to come and reaffirmed Kentucky’s national reputation as a hotbed of lawlessness and violence.
Kentucky violence, and coverage of it by national newspapers, did not end with the Goebel assassination. The feuds of eastern Kentucky that had fascinated Americans in the late nineteenth century continued into the twentieth. In 1904 the New York Times ran a lengthy article beneath the headline “Kentucky’s Reign of Terror and Murder: A Tale of Savage Personal Warfare Unparalleled in the History of Civilized Communities.”47 The article described the bloodshed in Breathitt County, Kentucky, over the previous two years and previewed further anticipated violence. Five years later, in 1909, the same newspaper again visited Jackson, the Breathitt County seat, claiming, “Breathitt County [is] again a battlefield: Election night starts a new feud in Jackson with an outbreak of violence reviving old feudal days and calling out troops.”48 Again the Times described “Bloody Breathitt” in a way that made its inhabitants seem like crazed maniacs. The previous summer the newspaper had reported calls coming from central Kentucky to “abolish” the county entirely.49
The western part of Kentucky also had its share of well-publicized violence in the first years of the twentieth century. At that time tobacco farmers, particularly those in the “Black Patch” region of western Kentucky and Tennessee (so named because of the “dark-fired” tobacco grown in the region), were struggling to survive. The American Tobacco Corporation, owned by James Buchannan Duke, had obtained a virtual monopoly on the American tobacco market, driving prices paid to farmers to critically low levels. In response, farmers in the Black Patch organized a cooperative called the Planters’ Protective Association, with the goal of pooling tobacco crops to achieve higher prices.50
Only about a third of the Black Patch growers joined the association, and the American Tobacco Company tried to cripple the Protective Association by offering nonmembers higher prices for their crop. The area soon turned violent as vigilante groups of Night Riders attempted to intimidate growers not participating in the association with barn burnings, whippings, beatings, and even murder. Eventually the violence spread beyond the group’s original goal, and vigilantes began to target personal enemies and blacks. In 1907 the Planters’ Protective Association officially repudiated the Night Riders. Kentucky governor A. E. Willson dispatched troops to calm the region, and the violence subsided by 1909.
During the early 1900s, these reports of violence in the national press did not paint an appealing picture of the state and did not encourage tourism to the area which, in the short run, had negative consequences for Kentucky and the Derby. Had popular memory of Kentucky as a lawless and ultra-violent land not faded, it might have been quite difficult for event promoters to convince travelers or horsemen to visit Kentucky. However, once the reports of violence in Kentucky abated, residual interest in tales of mountain feuds remained, ensuring that Kentucky remained a unique and interesting place in potential visitors’ minds. The phenomenon is not unlike what has happened in recent years to the tourism industries of Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the Balkans. Closer to home, the “Wild West” was not a tourist destination when guns were actually blazing, but crowds later flocked to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the eastern United States and across Europe, helping to pave the way for a tourism industry in the American West. The same was true in Kentucky.
“Kentucky’s Fame” postcard, ca. 1910. This postcard depicts some of the imagery most readily associated with Kentucky at the time, including a Kentucky “belle,” a group of Night Riders crossing a tobacco field, a pistol, a Thoroughbred racehorse, and a bottle of bourbon. Though Kentucky’s reputation for violence would dissipate, the Commonwealth would continue to be known for its racehorses, beautiful women, and bourbon whiskey. (Kramer Art Company Postcard Proofs, 199PH10.46, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.)
As tales of Kentucky violence disappeared from the pages of American newspapers, the memory of the bloodshed quickly joined the reservoir of myth and legend that had originally helped make Kentucky unique in the minds of Americans. This notion was evident in a postcard produced in Cincinnati in 1910, the year after the end of the Tobacco Wars. The card contained a collage of images, including a Night Rider, a pistol, a bottle of bourbon, a “Kentucky Belle,” and a racehorse, arranged beneath the title “Kentucky’s Fame.”51 In the course of the following decade, the bourbon, the horse, and the belle would remain major icons associated with Kentucky. The Kentucky Night Rider would take his place among the alluring imagery associated with a legendary past that gave the state its distinct identity, and that imagery would soon help to make the Kentucky Derby the most popular sporting event in the country.
As the first decade of the twentieth century gave way to the second, Kentucky’s reputation for violence would be eclipsed in American culture by a growing association between Kentucky and the memory of the Old South. This shift made Kentucky and the Derby more attractive to Americans at a time when the Old South was being remembered and celebrated (by whites) as a romantic time and place that was a model for racial, social, and gendered order in an ever-more-complicated modern world. This shift in the popular perception of Kentucky was another element in the confluence of events and circumstances that would eventually allow the Derby to take its place in the American pantheon of sporting events and, in time, become America’s greatest sports spectacle.
