The 1870s, the decade when General Custer visited the Bluegrass, brought to prominence a horse Americans came to call the King of the Turf. His owner had named him Longfellow. Bred and born in Kentucky, Longfellow was big and brown but not entirely handsome, for his head lacked the finely chiseled appearance characteristic of the classic Thoroughbred. He possessed a somewhat unfortunate profile. His face curved downward like the lower end of a whiskey jug, convex where it should have tapered in a straight line to his nose. Any horseman would have called him Roman nosed in the parlance of the turf. His owner and breeder John Harper called him the best thing ever on four hooves.
Robert Aitcheson Alexander had been dead three years and his protégés the Bruce Brothers were only five years into ramping up their marketing machine at Turf, Field and Farm when Longfellow ran his first race in 1870, at age three. Over the next three years, Longfellow and Harper would have much to do with the way outsiders perceived the Bluegrass region. People thought of Harper and saw neither a Southern cavalier nor a Southern colonel. In Harper, they saw remnants of a wild and untamed West.
Longfellow was the genuine article, a fast Kentucky racehorse, the very notion of which helped reinforce Bluegrass Kentucky’s position as the cradle of the racehorse. Harper, whose twenty-five-hundred-acre Nantura Farm lay adjacent to Woodburn, sent Longfellow into New York and New Jersey to defeat horses that the turf moguls reeled out of their stables one after another to challenge him. Longfellow was “beyond question the most celebrated horse of the 1870s,” wrote the historian Walter S. Vosburgh. “No horse of his day was a greater object of public notice. His entire career was sensational…. People seemed to regard him as a superhorse.” People sought to snatch long hairs from his tail as keepsakes. He traveled east in a boxcar emblazoned with his name on the exterior.1
Americans called Longfellow the King of the Turf during the early 1870s. His owner, John Harper of Nantura Farm in Woodford County, shown here with Longfellow, saw three family members killed in two separate incidents. Harper likewise engaged in violence. He ordered a mock lynching of two African Americans on his Nantura Farm. (W. S. Vosburgh, Racing in America, 1866–1921 [New York: Scribner Press, 1922], facing 86.)
A writer for one of the Eastern sporting journals once asked Harper whether he had named Longfellow after the popular poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Harper replied that he had not heard much about the man. He said he gave the brown colt that particular name because he had the longest legs “of any feller I ever seen.” His folksy, backwoods manner in describing the horse and his self-acknowledged lack of formal education made Harper seem like a throwback to Kentuckians of the frontier era. The frontier had long since passed by Kentucky, yet the image remained, even after the Civil War.2
In the practice of the day, Harper had sent his broodmare Nantura to a stallion standing at stud not too far from the Harper home place. The stallion stood at the Bosque Bonita Stud, which belonged to an ex-Confederate cavalry officer, General Abe Buford, who had lost most of his horses during the war. Bosque Bonita was only two miles from Nantura Farm. Thus, the mating arrangement was convenient. It also proved fortuitous. The stallion Harper had chosen for his mare was Leamington, an imported horse whose destiny was to prove him a rival worthy of Woodburn Farm’s renowned Lexington. Leamington’s stay in the Bluegrass was brief, only one year, his owner then moving him to Pennsylvania within easy reach of New York breeders. But, in siring Longfellow, Leamington helped stamp the direction that horse breeding would take in Kentucky, for Longfellow became not only a popular and successful racehorse but also a valuable sire.
Unlike most Thoroughbreds, Longfellow did not race at age two because he was ungainly and nonathletic. His legs had grown faster and longer than his body had developed; it would take another year for the body to catch up. When he matured, he grew into an extraordinarily tall Thoroughbred of seventeen hands, the equivalent of five-foot-six at the top of his shoulders, called withers. He raced with considerable regional success at age three. When he reached four years of age, Harper took him to the Northeastern tracks, whereupon his career shot to the heights at the national level. It was in the Northeast that he earned his reputation as the King of the Turf. Unlike Woodburn Farm’s Asteroid six years previously, Longfellow earned this title because he had raced not exclusively in “the West,” as people of the time referred to all regions across the Appalachian Mountains, but against the best horses of the Northeast.
Longfellow was a marvel. So was his owner, Harper, in the view of Eastern racing patrons. Harper brought a touch of the exotic into their lives. He appeared quite unlike anything they were accustomed to seeing even among the many other Kentuckians who traveled northeast to the new racecourses. Like the Kentuckians, Eastern folk began calling Harper by the familiar name of “Uncle John.” And, just as Longfellow had stamped himself the genuine Kentucky article, so did his owner.3
Harper gave the appearance of a wizened Kentuckian who had spent a lifetime in the company of horses. The finishing touch that stamped him as exotic was the frock coat he wore, a coat evocative of an earlier time in Kentucky, somewhere at the margins of the antebellum era and the frontier as it moved west. One person described Harper as “an animated ghost, with his white hair streaming in the wind. It is a queer sight to see this venerable bachelor … tottering along after his only love—a horse!” Harper posed a reassuring, idealized connection to older, more steadfast days that people wanted to believe had been more reliable than the present, which seemed always in flux. Harper stood as a nostalgic anchor in an ever-more-industrialized world.4
Horse-racing patrons clung to this comforting notion of Harper even after revelations of his darker side: information that fixed him squarely within the culture of violence raging all throughout border-state Kentucky and the South. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” the New York Times wrote about Kentucky’s raging violence and lawlessness. During Harper’s lifetime, Kentucky ranked as especially lawless within a violent Southern culture that did not appear to place a high value on human life. As newspaper readers throughout the United States learned, Harper experienced multiple encounters with crime that represented both ends of this lawless spectrum. On the one hand, crime had victimized his family, leaving his brother and sister dead in a home invasion in 1871; this occurred not many years after he lost another brother, Adam, during a guerrilla raid on the home place during the war. On the other hand, Harper served as an accomplice to a racially motivated vigilante incident in response to the deaths of his brother and sister. He ordered a mock lynching to take place on his farm in the hope of forcing confessions from two of his African American employees. As both the victim and the perpetrator of crime, Harper stands out as an excellent case study illustrative of the violence raging at every social and economic level throughout the state.5
Violence and lawlessness explained much about why the new men of the turf avoided Kentucky when choosing to develop horse farms in the Northeast. The New York Times opined: “So long as these midnight assassins continue to ply their trade within the shadow of the State Capitol, Kentucky has no claim to be considered a civilized State.” Southerners, and also Kentuckians, were aware of this stigma adversely affecting their regional economies. “We have reason to believe that a large number of our Northern friends earnestly desire to emigrate to the South … and we fear they may be deterred from doing so by the publications [of Ku Klux stories in newspapers],” stated a letter to the editor of the New York Daily Tribune in 1871. Kentucky held the distinction of having one of the highest crime rates in the nation during the latter part of the nineteenth century. “The ‘Ku Klux’ are pretty bad,” commented the manager of Woodburn.
Kentucky was famed for its fine women, excellent bourbon whiskey, and Thoroughbred racehorses, including the nineteenth-century champion Salvator, pictured on this circa 1910 postcard. But not to be ignored was the state’s reputation for violence and lawlessness. Note the pistol and the group of masked night riders on their way through a tobacco field. (Collage of “Kentucky’s Fame,” ca. 1910, Kramer Art Company Postcard Proofs, 1999PH10.46, Kentucky Historical Society.)
This notorious reputation led to a widespread belief among outsiders that the commonwealth was too unstable for capital investment. Some observers blamed the widespread lawlessness on the lax system of justice prevalent in the commonwealth. Others placed the blame for this high crime rate partly with the people of Kentucky. “Frontier violence, wars, racism, nativism, alcoholism, duels—all fueled the commonwealth’s aptitude for violence,” James Klotter has written. “The prewar years only set the stage for the postwar actions that followed and made it easier for them to occur.” The New York Times, which routinely reported on the lawlessness throughout the commonwealth, wrote tongue-in-cheek that Kentucky would be a delightful place to live if a person enjoyed “personal affrays and private assassinations.” In the words of Robert Ireland: “While nineteenth century Kentucky produced fine horses, hemp, and whiskey, she excelled most in crime.”6
Kentucky’s upper classes shared in this public penchant for violence. The New York Times once commented that even the state’s “best society literally streams with gore.” Landowners and elected officials might engage in violent crimes or at least turn a blind eye to their existence. As Ireland writes: “The New York Times branded county officials as ‘particeps criminis.’” This only darkened outsiders’ perceptions of the state, for, if the leading citizens of the commonwealth were bound up in lawlessness, how was Kentucky to rid itself of the violence that seemed endemic to all layers of the social fabric?7
While the dilemma seemed unsolvable at the time, the degree of lawlessness did not appear to be in dispute. Kentucky and the former Confederate states to the South did, in fact, exhibit a higher rate of violence than the Northern states, according to popular belief as well as published literature. In one example, Klotter cites the 1880 book Homicide, North and South, by H. V. Redfield. The author chose Kentucky as one of three states emblematic of Southern disorder and identified it as having more murders in 1878 than eight other states combined. The New York Times also singled out Kentucky as especially violent. Giving a word of caution, Klotter does point out that some reportage on Kentucky violence in the Times stemmed from regional animosities that lingered after the Civil War. Stories of lawless incidents in Kentucky frequently originated in Cincinnati, a trade rival of Louisville’s; Cincinnati wished to portray Kentucky in a negative light. But Klotter still reaches the same conclusion that Americans had reached for decades following the Civil War. “The accounts, biased though they might be,” he writes, “were essentially correct: Kentucky was a violent place.”8
Kentucky’s ever-darkening reputation adversely affected economic development, as the pattern of horse farms developing in the Northeast had suggested. The New York Times took note of this in 1878 while also chastising Kentuckians for their own role in their state’s worsening reputation. “[Kentucky] needs development; but she never will get it … until she suppresses effectually the spirit and practice of butchery with which her tarnished name is associated,” the newspaper suggested in frank and certain terms. It warned that, even if the commonwealth didn’t care enough about itself to guard its reputation, “material interests demand that she should use all her powers to compel respect for law and order within her bounds.” In other words, Kentucky needed to own up to the harsh fact that it would continue to fall behind other states in economic development—until the state itself chose to clean up its lawlessness. But that appeared unlikely. The New York Times reported: “We have an admission from the highest Democratic authority in the State of Kentucky that constant outrages are committed against persons and property by bands too powerful for the officers of the law to cope with.”9
As incidents at the Harper family’s Nantura Farm demonstrated, this violence could strike within residences on famed Bluegrass farms just as it did throughout Fayette County. The New York Times concluded: “The peaceable people of Kentucky are today in more danger from outlaws and murderers of their own race than they were at the dawn of the century from hostile Indians.” The lawlessness did not stop with the Harpers on their Nantura Farm. Nearby in Fayette County, residents petitioned authorities for police protection in 1876 “to render their houses and property … more secure than they have been for a number of years.” The violence was still going strong in 1890 when the U.S. Census reported, as Klotter writes, “that Kentucky had more homicides than any state except populous New York.” Ten years later, in 1900, Kentucky violence arrived at its zenith with the assassination of Governor William Goebel.10
Newspapers were rife with stories about Kentucky violence, and many Americans read newspapers daily during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Consequently, a great many people read about the killings at the Harper family’s Nantura Farm, for the Harpers’ great wealth in land, money, and racehorses made for a titillating tale of the type newspapers and their readers accepted as the spice of real life. Perhaps, a century later, revelations about Harper’s ordering up a lynching party would have tarnished his memory in the sport’s narrative and diminished by association the reverence afforded his champion racehorse Longfellow. But this is not what occurred in Kentucky as it evolved during Gilded Age America.
The Harper tragedy began unfolding three months before Custer’s tour of horse farms. John Harper’s brother, Jacob, and sister, Betsy, both elderly, suffered a brutal attack by an unknown assailant or assailants who broke into the Harper residence during the night of September 11, 1871, at Nantura Farm. The farm lay near Midway, some fourteen miles west of Lexington at the heart of early racehorse country in Kentucky. This was the same rural neighborhood that had Woodburn Farm at its center. When the break-in occurred, John Harper was away from home at the races in Lexington. He was preparing Longfellow for an important race to take place that week at the Kentucky Association track. Harper was asleep in the barn where he had installed Longfellow at the track when a loud banging at the stable door awakened him. With him were his favorite nephew, Frank Harper, and the stable lads whose job was to care for the horses.
Whoever was outside the barn door had made a great commotion, having bumped into a warning mechanism that Harper had laid across the door before all inside bedded down for the night. The mechanism served as a crude burglar alarm. “The door liked to have hit him,” Harper would recall two years later during his deposition for a court case. The noise also woke the young stable lads sleeping in the loft. One of them shouted down from his bed made of fluffed-up straw, demanding to know what their unknown caller wanted. The caller answered from outside the door that he would very much like to visit Longfellow. To those inside the barn, the request seemed ludicrous, a stranger wanting to see the famous horse in the middle of the night.11
“It was a darn pretty time of night to want to see Longfellow,” Harper recalled the youths mumbling as they awoke. The stable lads, clearly annoyed at being awakened, shouted again from the loft, as Harper recalled later, “that if he wanted to see him he would have to come in the morning.” Morning was a time when most racehorses received visitors, during training hours, when they had their exercise on the track and then stood for their baths and walked to cool out following their gallops. Something about this midnight visit at the barn seemed so alarming that those inside the stable understandably would not have unlocked the door under any circumstances.12
The stranger did return at daylight. Receiving the visitor at a more civilized hour, Harper invited him into the stable, telling him that, if he waited until the lad had cleaned off the horse, then he could take a proper look at Longfellow. Harper apologized and said that he needed to hurry away to observe his other horses training on the racecourse. He left the man at the stable with Longfellow’s groom. A short time later, while close by the racecourse, Harper was priming a water pump when he received the news about his brother killed at Nantura and his sister lying near death. He forgot about the stranger at the barn and would not remember him until much later. He left right away in a horse-drawn buggy for the two-hour ride back to Nantura Farm, fourteen miles away.
Harper arrived at Nantura to find a crowd of perhaps thirty or forty persons standing around in the yard outside the family residence. The scene inside the house would be described in all its horrific detail in newspapers from the New York Times to the local papers in Lexington. Jacob Harper’s body lay diagonally across his bed with one foot hanging over the edge. His left cheek had been crushed, as though with an ax handle. His bed had been drenched in blood that had dried by the time John Harper arrived.13
The local magistrate, the sheriff, the doctor attending Betsy Harper, and the Harper neighbors and relatives had already formed a hypothesis about how the assailant or team of killers might have gained entry to the house. The Harper home was a weather-beaten building in rundown condition; a window close by Jacob Harper’s bed had needed repairs for some time. The catch for fastening the shutter was broken. Persons investigating the scene quickly surmised that the home invaders had gained easy entry through this window.14
It had not been out of character for the Harpers to ignore the need for window repairs. People widely knew the brothers and their sister as miserly, eccentric types. “The economical, almost penurious habits of the Harpers were well known,” the Frankfort Commonwealth commented. John Harper was so reluctant to spend money that he had a habit of bringing his own wood to the racetrack in order to cook meals for his stable help and his horse trainer. He also dressed simply, in jeans, looking a lot more like a frontiersman than a Bluegrass landowner and breeder of Thoroughbred horses.
In reality, the Harpers were well-off. According to speculation, they possessed at least $500,000, hoarding great amounts of money in bonds and cash. Rumor also held that they kept huge sums of money in their house at Nantura. “The impression was general that they kept their treasure concealed about the house,” the Frankfort Commonwealth noted. Longfellow’s upcoming race might have led someone to suspect that the Harpers had more cash than usual on hand the night of the home invasion. The horse was to race that week against another turf star named Enquirer; people so greatly anticipated the race that the railroads had scheduled extra trains to bring patrons out to the track. Quite a few persons had known that Jacob Harper had planned to wager $500 on Longfellow in this race, even though he usually bet no more than $5 or $10. Someone might have broken into the house in search of this cash.15
Outside the house, the neighbors had found a meat ax lying on a tree stump. Here was the murder weapon, or so they reasoned. W. A. Moore, the magistrate, looked the situation over and announced that the assailant must have used the ax handle rather than the blade to kill Jacob Harper and wound his sister, for the handle showed evidence of clotted hair. Whether the hair had belonged to a human or an animal was a forensic detail no one appeared to consider. All simply seized on the idea of the ax handle as the weapon.16
The neighbors and local officials found more evidence: hoofprints leading from the house to a place where someone had hitched two horses in a lot at the front of the property. They also discovered a human boot print matching a size 6 shoe. The boot print revealed a peculiarity that all hoped would make it easy to find the actual boot and, thus, the killer: the top piece of the leather shoe appeared to have projected over the sole of the boot, making a clearly identifiable mark in the dust. A few people noticed at the time that this appeared to match the boot of a young relative, John W. Harper. He was the son of John Harper’s other (and least favorite) nephew, Adam Harper. No one acted on this observation about the boot. All were preoccupied with turning their suspicions to easier targets: the African American domestic help.17
Young John Harper cried out, in the presence of Uncle John, “Let’s kill the damned negroes.” Witnesses described the youth as in a wild state, driven to tears. Old Uncle John Harper thought this murderous suggestion over and agreed. Not long afterward, he told some of his closest friends and relatives that, if they strung up the “negroes” and choked them for a while, perhaps they might reveal who had broken into the house and killed Jacob.18
The local sheriff also did his part to hurry the process along. Before the mock lynching occurred, the sheriff had rounded up five more blacks, whom he took into custody on the charge of “suspicion.” Among these were a boy called Will Pryor, who tended the fireplace in Jacob Harper’s bedroom; Will’s father, Sam Pryor, who disappeared the morning after the killing, thus focusing suspicion on himself; Henry, a stable boy; Will Scott, a man arrested at the racetrack in Lexington; and Tom Parker, whom the Harpers had owned during slavery. Eventually, the sheriff released all five. Taking them into custody had been entirely in keeping with customary practices, for suspicion of crime in Kentucky and the South usually fell first on persons of color.
The mock lynching did not take place in the heat of passion despite the younger John Harper’s urgent plea to “kill the damned negroes.” John Harper commissioned a number of neighbors and relatives to carry out the mock hangings only after the sheriff failed to build a case against anyone else. The vigilantes called themselves “ku-kluxers,” employing a frequently used reference to the Ku Klux Klan. Whether these men actually were a part of the Klan is not known, but they did know how to mimic the Klan’s practices. They rode their horses to a place on Nantura Farm where they tied up a woman named Darkey and a boy named Henry and strung them up from two separate trees. Their intent had been to force confessions. But the two offered up nothing to their assailants, perhaps because they knew nothing at all. Deciding this was a waste of time, the vigilante party lowered Darkey and the boy to the ground—still alive. Not revealed was the extent of any injuries they might have suffered or whether the two incurred psychological damage. However, as one in the lynching party had said, they put the two “to a pretty severe test.”19
These two had not been afforded due legal process, as had the other five African Americans that the sheriff had arrested. But, by this point, tempers had grown as short as the list of suspects. Henry was, perhaps, a son or a grandson of Darkey, whose name has also been spelled as Darky and even given as Darcus. The woman and boy lived in a little frame house some fifty or sixty feet behind the main Harper residence.
For quite some time, Darkey had engaged in a quarrel with old Betsy Harper. John Harper’s sister appeared to quarrel a lot with her domestic help, but her rancor had reached its highest pitch with Darkey. The quarrel itself had fully escalated during that summer of 1871, when John Harper was leaving on the train with Longfellow to campaign the horse at racetracks in the Northeast. The black employees in the house at Nantura had reached a state where they paid attention to no one but John Harper; with Harper away at the races, things apparently did not go well. Someone who knew the Harpers well described Darkey as “a very devilish old negro woman” who treated Betsy Harper impudently. This was the only excuse Harper needed sometime later when he ordered the mock lynching.20
By summer’s end, Harper and Longfellow had returned home with the horse a disgraced hero: even though he had won the Monmouth Cup and defeated August Belmont’s Kingfisher in the Saratoga Cup, he had lost his most recent race to Helmbold, a horse he had defeated in the Monmouth Cup. His race coming up in Lexington the week of September 11 would be critical if he was to redeem himself in the public’s opinion. Hence, the great number of patrons expected at the track and the extra number of trains brought in to transport people to the races. Harper was packing Longfellow’s equipment, preparing for his journey to Lexington, when his sister delivered an ultimatum: either Harper banished Darkey from Nantura, or she, Betsy, would leave the farm. Harper left the matter undecided. He planned to resolve the situation when he returned home from the races later that week. In the interim, he forbade Darkey from entering the family home while he was away.
Whether Darkey wielded the meat ax to kill Jacob and Betsy Harper is not known since the mystery of the killings never was solved. But she did draw suspicion to herself. Soon after Jacob Harper’s death, people noticed that she was the only one of the servants who did not inquire about what the family had learned as the day went on. Harper relatives noticed her hiding outside the open window at Jacob Harper’s bedroom, eavesdropping while they carried on discussions about the killing in the dead man’s room.21
Other, more leading clues about who might have killed Jacob Harper went ignored in the initial confusion surrounding the crime scene. One of the most puzzling of these was why the one nephew, Adam Harper (the least favorite), seemed preoccupied with demonstrating how the assailant must have been a right-handed man. He must have been right-handed, according to Adam’s explanation, to have effectively landed blows on the left side of Betsy Harper’s face. One friend of the Harpers remarked that he actually thought this to be quite interesting when, the next morning at breakfast, he observed Adam Harper carve the meat with his left hand. He wondered whether Adam could have been trying to deflect suspicion away from himself. This same person also noticed that young John W. Harper’s boot matched the oddly shaped print outside the house. But this friend of the Harpers said nothing at the time about the suspicions that he deduced from these clues.22
Sometime after the mock lynching had failed to produce confessions, the neighbors, relatives, and local authorities began to turn their suspicions away from the African American employees of Nantura Farm, focusing instead on Adam Harper. Custer wrote in Turf, Field and Farm after visiting John Harper three months later: “The theory of the neighbors regarding the murder of the brother and sister of Uncle John Harper is, that instead of being committed by negroes, as was at first suspected, the real perpetrator of the horrible deed is a relative.” The suspicion turned in this direction when people became aware of the contents of the wills of Jacob, Betsy, and John Harper.23
According to these wills, any of the three siblings who survived the others was to inherit the Harper wealth. On the death of the last of these three, nephews Adam and Frank (the favored nephew who had been at the track with John Harper) were to inherit the Harper land and money. Two female relations also stood to inherit. Now, at last, the odd midnight call on Longfellow and John Harper at the racetrack barn in Lexington began to make sense. People began to consider that someone might have tried to kill not only Jacob and Betsy that night, but John and his favorite nephew, Frank, as well.
Betsy Harper had given the strongest indication of this possibility before she died. “It must have been one of our own,” she had muttered feebly from her bed. Then John Harper recalled the midnight visit to the racetrack barn. It had seemed suspicious at the time; it seemed more suspicious in light of the killing of his brother and sister. Harper also revealed that he was followed from the track all the way to downtown Lexington by a stranger he thought was the same man who had stopped by to see Longfellow the morning after the mysterious nighttime visit. He grew concerned for his safety.24
The rural residents of the farms close by Nantura and the town of Midway began to whisper that Adam Harper must have been the killer. The gossip reached such proportions that internecine tensions also began to build. Eventually, Adam Harper sued a cousin, J. Wallace Harper, for slander. He asked $500,000 in damages, accusing the cousin of defaming his reputation by identifying him publicly as Jacob and Betsy Harper’s killer.
Adam Harper lost his lawsuit. The killer never was identified, although most continued to believe that Adam indeed had been responsible for the Harper deaths. Old John Harper’s role in ordering the “ku-kluxing” of the woman and boy at Nantura was brought out during the trial, but nothing came of this revelation. The New York Times expressed outrage over the mock lynchings and speculated that indictments would be forthcoming. None were. Uncle John’s role as advocate of the “ku-kluxing” failed to result in indictments even as it failed to blemish his character—or the reputation of his popular racehorse, Longfellow.
The trial, conducted in Georgetown, the seat of Scott County, following a change of venue from Versailles in Woodford County, brought some high-profile persons from the horse-racing world to the witness stand. One of these was Hal Price McGrath, John Morrissey’s associate at the Saratoga Race Course and a partner with old John Harper in the ownership of racehorses. Adam Harper’s son, John Harper (the nephew who had urged others at the Harper house to “kill the damn negroes”), concluded the day following the verdict by drawing his pistol on the defense attorney’s brother when he encountered him at a hotel in Georgetown. The ending was a perfect commentary on the state of violence prevailing in Kentucky at the time. The Harper tragedy was a high-profile incident that revealed just how deep within the Bluegrass this state of violence reached, for it affected the wealthy and landowners as well as common folk.
This situation was something that not even those master drumbeaters the Bruce brothers could ignore in their efforts to promote Kentucky horse country. The Bruces treated the Harper incident as delicately as they could in the pages of Turf, Field and Farm. They permitted Custer to revisit the killings with a brief treatment in his article about his horse-farm tour three months later—but brief was the operative word. The less written, the better, for the prevailing lawlessness was overriding the brothers’ work and giving credence in the Northeast to those newspaper stories about violence in the Bluegrass. The lawlessness in horse country stood as one more reason that the new titans of the turf might be better served building Thoroughbred farms in the Northeast rather than in Kentucky.25
From other news stories, Northeastern turfmen would have realized that the Harpers did not stand alone among Kentucky’s racing fraternity in being touched by crime. Eight years following the Harper incidents, Thomas Buford shot and killed the Kentucky Court of Appeals justice John Milton Elliott. Buford was the brother of one of central Kentucky’s most respected horse breeders and major landowners, General Abe Buford of Bosque Bonita Farm. Thomas Buford, according to reports on this fatal shooting, felt driven to assassinate Justice Elliott because the latter had written a ruling upholding a lower court decision that caused Buford’s sister to lose her farm. Buford stopped Justice Elliot on a street in Frankfort and raised his pistol, shouting: “Die like a man.” Such was life in Kentucky.26
Violence and danger never seemed far removed from the realm of turfmen in Kentucky. In 1879, Captain T. G. Moore of Crab Orchard, Kentucky, a well-known owner of a racing stable who patronized Eastern tracks, shot and wounded the founder and president of the Louisville Jockey Club, Colonel Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. The latter was the grandson of the explorer William Clark of Thomas Jefferson’s Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific in 1803. Clark had informed Moore that he could not race his horses any longer at Louisville until he paid money that he owed the track. Clark then struck Moore to make his point, threw the man out of his office, and lodged his foot against the door to keep Moore from forcing his way back inside. Moore’s response was to fire a shot at Clark through the glass door with his pistol, wounding Clark in the chest. “Doubtless the thickness of the glass prevented the wound from being fatal,” read a report of the incident. Clark himself often waved a pistol at others whom he wanted to threaten. Eventually, Clark pointed the pistol at himself, committing suicide in 1899.27
Violence also managed to stalk Richard Ten Broeck, the man who had sold the horse Lexington to Robert Aitcheson Alexander. Ten Broeck also had owned and operated the once-fashionable Metairie Race Course in New Orleans before the Civil War. Later, he became a Kentucky horse breeder. Harper named a fast colt Ten Broeck in honor of this man who had raced horses in partnership with him. Ten Broeck was in his sixties and retired from gambling and operating racetracks when in 1874 he nearly lost his life over an incident on a train.
Ten Broeck was living in Kentucky at the time, on a farm he had purchased near Shelbyville. He had realized sufficient success that the New York Times referred to him as “the well-known Kentucky stockraiser.” Having one day boarded a Louisville to Shelbyville train, he found himself in the same car with one General Walter Whittaker, with whom he was, apparently, acquainted. Whittaker was notoriously unstable, having stabbed and killed a lawyer in Shelbyville, shot and killed another man in Frankfort, and spent time in an asylum after suffering a blow to the head in yet another altercation. The two men fell into conversation, Whittaker took offense at something Ten Broeck said, and Ten Broeck wisely removed himself to another car. However, when Ten Broeck disembarked at Shelbyville, so did Whittaker, who pulled a pistol and shot Ten Broeck, seriously wounding him. As with other stories about lawless incidents in Kentucky, this one received coverage in the New York Times.28
Klotter once quoted a nineteenth-century judge who exclaimed in frustration: “Human life in Kentucky is not worth the snapping of a man’s fingers.” Given the incidents that had affected even Kentucky’s most recognizable turfmen, one would think not. The New York Times observed: “From no state of the South today come such frequent and continuous reports of brutal murders and whippings by Kuklux and other secret organizations…. This is a very singular position for a State of the American Union to find itself in during the latter half of the nineteenth century.” Kentucky stood in a singular position, indeed. But this singular position was not helping the state economically.29
Despite his complicity in the near lynching at Nantura, Harper continued to fascinate Northeastern racing fans. Custer, when he interviewed Harper in Kentucky in 1871, asked the question that every sportsman had on his mind during that autumn: Did Harper plan to return Longfellow to the races the following year? From Harper came these words, as Custer presented them in his peculiar vernacular: “I don’t say I am agoin to run again any particular horse, but I do say I am goin to git my horse ready, and when the time comes I am agoin to the races at Long Branch [New Jersey] and will run Longfellow agin any horse that wants to run agin him, and, gentlemen, thar’s no livin horse can run with my horse if he is in fix to run.” The vernacular, like Harper’s wild appearance, depicted him not as a wealthy landowner but as a backwoodsman.30
In 1872, Harper did return the horse to the Northeast. Man and horse departed Kentucky in a boxcar that Harper had outfitted with a banner reading, “LONGFELLOW ON HIS WAY TO MEET HIS FRIEND HARRY BASSETT IN THE MONMOUTH CUP.” Blazing across miles of railroad track on its way to New Jersey, Longfellow’s boxcar must have prompted a curious mix of images among those who saw it pass by. The King of the Turf rode in that railroad car, as all would have known from the sign. People ran to the railroad sidings, hoping to get a glimpse of the famous horse when the train made a stop. Riding with Longfellow, as people also would have realized, was the man who had lost his brother and sister in a most brutal and widely reported Kentucky crime—an incident that gave many pause, for not even the Bluegrass gentry appeared safe in Kentucky.31
As Harper had predicted, Longfellow defeated Harry Bassett in the Monmouth Cup. When the two met again in the Saratoga Cup, however, the story took a sad turn. Longfellow twisted his left front shoe on the way to the post. It cost him everything. He ran the entire two and a quarter miles on the twisted shoe, his jockey whipping his sides furiously while the great horse struggled unsuccessfully to catch Harry Bassett. This senseless effort ruined Longfellow. The twisted iron shoe became bent over double as the horse pounded on it all the way through the race. Longfellow returned to the unsaddling area walking on no more than three feet, with the shoe embedded in the soft portion of the sole of his left front. Writers chronicling the event told how old Harper stood on the track with tears streaming down his face. The Eastern writers who had become so fond of Harper and the folksy ways he brought from Kentucky waxed as overwrought in their prose as the old man himself appeared on realizing the horse was ruined. Old Harper sadly told the writers: “I’m taking him home.”32
And take him home he did. The two Kentuckians, man and horse, returned to Kentucky on the railroad that had brought them up to the new center of racing in the Northeast. They went back to the Bluegrass, where Longfellow had a career as a breeding stallion that equaled or even exceeded his racing career. By 1891, the King of the Turf had become the king of sires, reaching the pinnacle as the number one Thoroughbred stallion in the United States.
The Harper family memorialized its two greatest horses, Longfellow and Ten Broeck, with grave markers at their burial sites on the family’s Nantura Farm. (Courtesy of the Kentuckiana Digital Library.)
Harper did not live to see Longfellow’s reaching the pinnacle of the breeding industry. Nor did he live to see another horse he bred, the one called Ten Broeck, achieve renown as a top racehorse during the middle and latter part of the decade. Uncle John died in 1874. The Nantura Farm horses became the property of the old man’s favorite nephew, Frank Harper, who continued the operation of the farm and racing stable. Frank Harper campaigned Ten Broeck through a rivalry with the inaugural Kentucky Derby winner, Aristides; through an East-West showdown at Pimlico Race Course against the titan that Pierre Lorillard owned, Parole; and, finally, through the defeat of the California-based mare Mollie McCarthy in a famous race at Louisville. Ten Broeck’s regular rider, Billy Walker, was the same who mentored the jockey Isaac Murphy and who would eventually become the trusted adviser of a renowned Kentucky horse-farm owner, John E. Madden. Ten Broeck and Billy Walker inspired a folk song of the era of which the opening lines went:
Down in Kentucky where Ten Broeck was born,
Dey swore by his runnin’, he came in a storm.33
Mention of John Harper’s complicity in the mock lynching at Nantura Farm never went beyond the initial reporting on the slander trial of his relative. But memory of the terrible killings of Harper’s brother and sister remained long affixed to the story of Longfellow. No doubt the brutal deaths of two white landowners mattered more in popular ideas about the Bluegrass than did the near deaths of two African Americans. Still, the outcome was the same: proof positive that not even the landed gentry of Bluegrass horse country stood aloof, or even protected, from the lawlessness in this unstable, violent place. Small wonder that men of the turf in the Northeast shunned Kentucky for their own countryside when building their new horse farms.