DATE: 1890.
WHAT IT IS: The hoof of a horse that was cut off by the wheels of an engine it was drawing while racing to a fire.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a complete hoof, four inches high, with a diameter of about 6 inches and a shoe about 6 inches.
In the annals of animal-heroism stories, all sorts of four-legged and winged creatures have aided people in times of emergency and distress. Legend has it, for example, that one night in ancient Rome the raucous honking of the sacred geese in the Temple of Juno woke up a patrician named Manlius and caused him to leap out of his bed and run to the edge of the Capitol, where he found a ferocious Gaul army scaling the fortress. The increasingly clamorous geese awakened other Romans, who came to help Manlius successfully repel the invaders. And during the Battle of Verdun on June 4, 1916, Commander Raynal dispatched his last homing pigeon with the desperate message: “We’re still holding out but we are under attack by gas and smoke. It is very dangerous and urgent that we get out of here. … This is my last pigeon.” The pigeon, named Le Valliant, flew over battlefields and arrived, badly poisoned, at its destination, where it died shortly after delivering its crucial message.
Sometimes, animals selflessly—as we humans understand the word— carry out a task that saves human lives even when it ultimately results in their own demise, such as Le Valliant, or the anonymous late-nineteenth-century horse that in early morning darkness pulled a company of firefighters to a blaze, only to suffer a mishap on the way that made it an enduring symbol of bravery.
Fire has always been a menace to humans. Early humans found that flames could be used to cook meat or keep warm, but they were plagued by the consequences of reckless handling of fire. Firefighting was apparently a vital concern of early civilizations, as many societies organized special groups to combat the potential hazards unwanted fires posed.
In ancient Rome, for example, special lookouts on the street would shout out an alarm when they spotted a fire, whereupon large squadrons of men wearing battle gear and carrying hatchets, mallets, hand pumps, and other equipment, as well as fire officials, investigators, and physicians, would come rushing by foot and chariot to the fire scene. In colonial times in America—where dense forests led to the construction of wooden buildings—firefighting was a community effort in which human chains would pass buckets of water to dousers at the front, with another chain passing the empty buckets back for replenishment. The statesman and philosopher Benjamin Franklin recognized the need for organized fire companies, and in 1736 formed America’s first volunteer group of firefighters, the Union Fire Department.
In the early nineteenth century, hand pumps with hoses handled by several firefighters simultaneously shot water onto fires, but around 1830 these were replaced by steam engines, which pumped out heavier water flows. As cities grew ever larger in the nineteenth century, organized fire departments sprang up; London, for example, had its first official public fire department in the mid-1860s, and it often fought fires in buildings several stories high. Before the age of power-driven vehicles, the heavy engines had to be drawn to the fire scenes, and to this end, firefighters employed horses to pull the carts on which these were mounted.
Which brings us to this story of four-legged heroism in the late nineteenth century, before the age of the gasoline engine, its protagonist an intrepid horse with no name. The horse is known only by the number assigned to it, perhaps designating its hitching post assignment at the fire station.
Richard Hayne was an elderly resident of 1011 Sixth Street, Southwest, between K and L Streets, in Washington, D.C. After his wife had died just over a year earlier, Hayne, who lived alone, had taken to drinking rum whenever he had the chance, and was so careless in the way he carried around his coal-oil lamp that several times police officers who walked his beat had to come to Hayne’s house to make sure he went to bed safely. Indeed, a small fire had once broken out in his house; Patrick Hurley, Hayne’s next-door neighbor, lived in constant fear that one day Hayne would start a larger fire that would spread to nearby homes.
Richard Hayne had been out drinking and returned shortly after midnight on the morning of March 28, 1890. Not long after, police officers Cook and Kelly discovered Hayne’s house in flames, and sent out an alarm over call box number 415. Minutes later Patrick Hurley’s worst fears were realized: his own house caught fire.
After Fire Horse Number Twelve's hoof was severed as he was rushing to a fire, it was recovered and became a symbol of bravery to Washington, D.C., firefighters.
The District of Columbia Fire Department’s Engine Company Three responded to the alarm. At about 1:30 A.M., as the company’s hose carriage and engine were racing to the scene, a collision between the vehicles occurred at the steam railroad crossing at First and C Streets, Southwest. In the accident the wheels of the heavy engine ran over the left foot of horse number twelve, which, with another horse, was drawing the hose carriage. The accident severed the hoof of the horse.
Unaware of the animal’s injury, the firefighters continued on feverishly as horse number twelve—along with the other horse—pulled the engines more than half a mile on the stub of its injured leg.
The firefighters employed their hoses at the scene and within minutes of arriving had the fire under control. Hayne’s house had been burned to the ground, and in the rubble firefighters found Hayne’s charred body. Next to it was a key, a silver dollar, and a pipe; Hayne had probably fallen asleep smoking. Patrick Hurley’s house was destroyed, but all the inhabitants escaped safely.
At the scene the firefighters made the gruesome discovery of the horrible injury to the leg of horse number twelve. The firefighters were flabbergasted that the horse had raced for more than half a mile on the cobblestone street on the exposed bone of the stump where the hoof had been torn off. Somebody went back to the scene of the accident and retrieved the sheared hoof.
Had horse number twelve not carried on after the accident, the men of Engine Company Three would not have been able to reach the fire scene promptly, the fire may have spread, and more lives could have been lost. The steed had performed its duty nobly, but the injury was irreparable, and it was immediately put out of its misery. District of Columbia Fire Department Chief Parris was quoted by the Washington Evening Star as saying, “Never since I have been in the fire department, and I have seen twenty-five years’ service, were my sympathies so appealed to as last night when I ordered that horse killed. Truly he had more grit and sagacity than any horse I ever saw.”
To honor the horse’s courage and devotion to duty, the fire department entered the horse high on its Roll of Honor. The department also had a tangible reminder to firefighters, as well as the public and all posterity, that firefighting is a dangerous enterprise in which both humans and four-legged creatures can be heroes—a sad but honorable souvenir, the severed hoof of fire horse number twelve.
LOCATION: National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.