MISS ALICE ROOSEVELT parted the seas of fairgoers as she paused to smooth her skirt, making sure, as she always did, that it had just the right swing. With her gaze fixed ahead at her destination, the unusual Silver Horseshoe Building, the President’s daughter continued along the Pike, the exposition’s mile-long amusement area. Gone was her trademark expression of boredom. On her way to preside at an Opening Day performance given by the smartest horse in the world, Alice appeared to be positively delighted.
Neither Alice nor her escort, Ohio congressman Nicholas Longworth, had yet to witness the horse in action, but they had certainly read his press and heard enough claims about the Celebrated Educated Arabian-Hambletonian to understand why he was expected to be the top draw on the Pike.
This stretch of marketplaces and attractions, she could see, didn’t have the expansive grandeur of the rest of the fair. Architecturally, there was no comparison. Thus far, the Pike was an unfinished hodgepodge, while the main exhibit areas seemed to be perfectly realized visions. They radiated in avenues and plazas to provide spectacular views of the main Festival Hall—one part Louis Quatorze and three parts fairyland—along with the euphoric Cascade Gardens pumping ninety thousand gallons of water per minute into geysers and fountains that spilled over plunging falls lit by green glass steps, offsetting the futuristic fantasy of the Palace of Electricity, which turned megawattage into visual evidence that the planners had truly outdone themselves.
Earlier that day, exposition president David Francis had welcomed the first flanks of what would total 200,000 Opening Day visitors. The weather itself was miraculous. It had been cold and stormy for weeks in St. Louis, with black skies and oppressive winds almost causing Francis and fellow officials to delay the date of the opening. After they decided to take the risk and open, rain or shine, the city nervously awoke at dawn that Saturday to a pale fog. By early morning, the sun broke through, sending the temperature and humidity rising, and basking the World’s Fair in a jubilant golden mist.
Alice Roosevelt and Congressman Longworth were on hand to listen as John Philip Sousa and his band played “Louisiana” while simultaneously, back in Washington, D.C., in the East Room of the White House, Alice’s father, President Theodore Roosevelt, was joined by an assembly of ambassadors and ministers from around the globe, his cabinet, justices of the Supreme Court, president pro tem of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House. The President was then handed a golden key, which he ceremoniously turned to trigger a telegraphic transmission that moments later in St. Louis unleashed the electricity required to raise and unfurl flags of all nations, thus starting the machinery of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
“Open ye gates!” shouted David Francis, after the cries of the crowd had subsided. “Swing wide ye portals! Enter herein ye sons of men! Learn the lesson here taught and gather from it inspiration for still greater accomplishments!”
Trumpeting the fair’s themes of progress and education, Francis made no apologies for the unfinished construction of the Pike. Rather, he promoted the manner in which he and fellow planners had looked for a way to elevate the carnival atmosphere associated with amusement and midway areas by envisioning it as a “living color page of the world.” Anything foreign or different was a go: food, beverages, rides, shows, souvenirs, creatures, and humans. But ironically, as the months ahead would prove, for all its otherness, the Pike became the soul of the Exposition, the mingling and mixing pot that was becoming America. It was the meeting place of the fair, to be immortalized in song and film, where the nation responded to the call to “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
The mile-long Pike was so called in tribute to its trek across time and space that reached at its zenith the stratosphere of the North Pole (but only took twenty minutes to climb), echoed by the dominating snowcapped Alpine peaks at the avenue’s eastern border. As an unmistakable precursor to Disneyland’s Matterhorn, the Alpine heights were complete with medieval castles, peasants singing Tyrolean folk songs, a mammoth cyclorama enclosed within the mountains’ caves, and a heart-racing tram ride up the slopes, on which the Piker (any visitor to the Pike) could observe the lay of the land.
Even though construction hadn’t been completed by Opening Day, Alice and her escort and most of the 200,000 fairgoers who poured onto the Pike at noon, could see the magical domain shaping up. Due west of the Alpine Heights was the Irish Village with the Blarney Stone Theatre, Irish dancing maidens, and the Great Dublin Army Band playing Celtic music, while an adjacent concession, Under and Over the Sea, used lights and scenery to evoke the Jules Verne–inspired experience of a submarine ride to Paris with a return by airship. This was still considered futuristic, even though five months earlier at Kitty Hawk the Wright Brothers had taken their machine-powered Flyer on her maiden voyage.
Below France, the Streets of Seville were so painstakingly re-created by Mrs. Hattie McCall Travis, the only female concessionaire on the Pike, that the massive undertaking was reported to have killed her before completion. Next came the Hagenback Animal Paradise with a glamorous assortment of animals to rival any of P. T. Barnum’s menageries, displayed not behind bars but simply with mosquito netting to separate spectators and animals. From there, the Piker could travel toward Mysterious Asia, past the wares and snake charmers in the Taj Mahal marketplace, under the carved and gilded gateway to the Japanese gardens, through the Chinese Village, into the Moorish Palace with its wax museum display of anthropological history, to Cairo and Constantinople, amid roaming elephants, monkeys, camels, and donkeys.
Competing for attention were such attractions as the very popular Filipino Village with its cast of hundreds, the Palais du Costume exhibit at the Paris Pavilion, the assembly of authentic representatives of fifty-one different Native American tribes, the Abbey Battle Cyclorama with scenic representations and live reenactments of America’s famous battles, a ride through the Galveston Flood, the New York Fire Station theatre extravaganza with illusions that made a building burst into flame, and an indoor boat tour through the Six Days of Creation—from “Let there be light!” to a finale in Eden. There were the scientific concessions not to be missed, such as the hospital wing that exhibited newly invented incubators (with real preemie infants, live nurses and doctors), the Magic Whirlpool ride, which took passengers across an enchanted lake and over plunging waterfalls, and the novel Scenic Railway Pavilion, where trains could be boarded for other destinations at the fair.
The Pike was to stir some of the biggest newsmaking events that took place over the course of the exposition. One such event occurred later in the summer when an enterprising concessionaire—facing low sales of hot tea at his café—came up with the madcap idea of pouring the tea over glasses of ice. Before long, iced tea was the beverage of choice across much of a sweltering and not yet air-conditioned nation. The heat provoked a second innovation, for which at least three of the fifty ice cream vendors on the Pike claimed credit. When the demand for ice cream dishes and spoons exceeded the supply, one, two, or all three of these concessionaires concocted a method of baking waffle cookies in conical shapes. By the end of the summer, ice cream cones were an American institution. The portable cornucopias cut down on utensils and allowed fairgoers to continue spending money and visiting other attractions while they walked and licked their ice cream. Using the tongue with such abandon was still a rather risqué public act, even with waning Victorian values, but it was made respectable by the liberating atmosphere of the Pike.
But the event that truly became the gossip of the season was an encounter on Opening Day during an American Humane Education Society benefit performance given in the Pike’s quirky Silver Horseshoe Building, a pseudowestern-styled piece of architecture with a four-story facade rising up in the shape of a gigantic horseshoe around which tiled letters declared it the home of THE MOST WONDERFUL HORSE IN THE WORLD. The encounter, of course, was between Beautiful Jim Key and his guest of honor, Miss Alice Roosevelt, who seldom did anything that went unnoticed.
Almost from the moment, three years earlier, when her father ascended suddenly from the vice presidency to become president, following McKinley’s assassination, the seventeen-year-old became known as Princess Alice. She was royalty, on her way to becoming what many consider the first female American celebrity of the twentieth century. Strikingly pretty, brunette and bright-eyed, with a high-bred, turned-up nose and full pouting lips, she managed to stir up so much public frenzy that she was lampooned in a Chicago Tribune political cartoon that showed crowds in the stands at a horse race, looking not at the track but in every other direction, with a caption reading “Alice, where art thou?”
Every public sighting drew reams of ink. Her face was described as artfully animated. The gossip pages of the San Francisco Call dubbed her petite nose “saucy,” her chin as firm and round, her body as a “slender, supple, lissome figure expressing youth and life in every line,” and her fashion genius was attested to by her ability to attain the right fit of her bodice, the perfect tilt to her hat. Her life story—she was an independent heiress to the fortune left to her by her mother, Alice Lee (Teddy Roosevelt’s first wife), who had died just days after giving birth—made Princess Alice that much more compelling.
But she was not famous because of her childhood troubles or because she was beautiful and inordinately rich. She was famous because she was her father’s daughter—fearless, blessed with an irrepressibly rebellious spirit, a gregarious, barbarous wit—and was such an original that her favorite pale gray/blue color was eventually named “Alice blue.” She was endlessly forgiven for smoking wherever she pleased, for racing a motorcar from Newport to Boston (not the daintier electric horseless carriage most female drivers preferred, but the noisier, faster gas-run automobile), for traipsing around the White House with her pet garden snake wrapped around her arm, for jaunting off to foreign destinations whenever she liked, and for her bold disdain of anything or anyone who struck her as boring or too much of a do-gooder. When a frustrated adviser once implored Teddy to control her, Roosevelt’s famous reply was: “I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”
Instead, in a canny PR move, Teddy encouraged his daughter to be of service as his emissary to certain affairs of state he was unable to attend, a role she played masterfully. In that capacity she had come to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition to preside in her father’s place during the Opening Day festivities on the Pike.
Alice’s name had been romantically linked to a handful of eligible sons of the European nobility (and it was assumed with her money and her family’s political might, she would certainly want to marry a title) as well as several young American bluebloods. But Congressman Nicholas Longworth, thirty-five years old to her twenty, was not yet considered to be one of Alice’s suitors. Not that he was an unlikely candidate. Besides being from a prominent Cincinnati family, he was a Republican, as was Alice’s father; he was a Harvard graduate and a member of Harvard’s very exclusive Porcellian Club, as was her father. Longworth had also been moving quickly up the political ranks and seemed to have a promising future (eventually making him Speaker of the House). He was known in some circles to have a propensity to be a womanizer and to have a propensity to drink, but neither traits were necessarily political liabilities, and what seemed to make up for those or any other shortcomings was his virtuosity at the violin. Hearing him play, gentlemen removed their hats in awe; ladies swooned. In another day and age, he would have been a rock star.
In front of the Silver Horseshoe Building, a receiving committee comprised of world’s fair officials and some of the well-known members of Beautiful Jim Key’s entourage waited anxiously in the rising noonday heat until they finally spotted Miss Alice Roosevelt, on Longworth’s arm, “comin’ down the Pike,” as the saying soon to be coined went. Among the greeting committee were Jim’s two grooms, brothers Stanley and Sam Davis, both in their early twenties, from Shelbyville, Tennessee, where the Equine King had been born and bred. There was also the much-publicized Monk, the smallish, scruffy stray dog who had become Jim’s self-appointed bodyguard and traveling companion. Then there was the celebrity horse’s famous promoter, Albert R. Rogers, who stepped forward to greet the President’s daughter and Congressman Longworth before ushering them through the archway into the packed auditorium.
Inside, as Rogers led Alice and Nicholas down to their front-row seats, the temperature and humidity had risen to summerlike highs in an auditorium packed well over its capacity. A noisy buzz of anticipation already running through the crowd was amplified with excited comments spurred by Miss Roosevelt’s presence. Energy, heat, and the loud volume of voices conspired to become intolerable.
Then: a hush. On a stage that was set as part classroom and part business office, with a bizarre string of what looked like garlands of garlic but were actually five thousand rabbit’s feet dangling above the stage, Dr. William Key seemed to materialize without an entrance. Standing quietly, he commanded an instantaneous silence. The program described him as mulatto, and in that mix his skin had the tint of a seasoned penny, with bloodlines of black, white, and Native American in his features. With his long white hair and beard in the style of General Custer, Doc Key was dressed in fashionable equestrian attire. He stood with the bearing of an aristocrat and took in the audience with a piercing intensity—all creating an aura of a tall, powerful man, even though his wiry frame was average to slight. Just as mesmerizing was his voice—soft and rich in texture, yet large and resonant enough to fill the hall. The voice of a horse whisperer. Like a cool breeze sweeping through the audience, its sound—pleasant, intelligent, kind, with tinges of both humor and authority—put everyone at ease, as if they’d forgotten the sticky spring weather.
Some reporters who interviewed William Key tended to depict his accent in the stereotypical Southern black dialect exaggerated by minstrel shows. But, in fact, aside from a Tennessee country cadence, Doc Key’s articulate use of the English language was finely cultivated from years of public speaking. That may have surprised Princess Alice, though she, of all people, should have known better than to believe everything she read in the papers.
As he prepared the audience for Jim’s entrance, Key must have felt kindly toward Alice Roosevelt, given his esteem for her father. Dr. Key’s friends at some of the humane societies were not happy with the hunting enthusiast of a President, despite his much publicized 1902 refusal to shoot a bear cub on a hunting trip and despite the “Teddy bear” craze that followed and had yet to abate. The President had benefited from the ingenuity of a shopkeeper-turned-manufacturer named Morris Michton, who saw the news item as a marketing opportunity. His wife made the first prototype, which sold after five minutes in his front window, followed by a deluge of orders. Michton made a mint, and the stuffed toy bears would keep Teddy’s namesake for posterity.
William Key had other reasons to see Roosevelt as a man of character. Three years before, Theodore Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to dinner and had become the first president in American history to meet with a Negro leader in the White House, making Washington the first African-American so honored. The historical gesture was meaningful not only because Dr. Key was a personal friend of Mr. Washington’s; Bill Key also admired the President for doing what was only right because he recognized Roosevelt’s courage in being willing to incur the political wrath of many Southern states. The vitriolic condemnations followed swiftly, including some southerners’ blasts terming the dinner a “crime equal to treason,” with newspapers proclaiming that no true son or daughter of the South be allowed to accept invitations to the White House.
The backlash had stung Alice too. The year before, when she visited New Orleans, public sentiment against her father prevented her from being invited to the Mardi Gras Ball. At the time and throughout her life, she remained an outspoken advocate for civil rights.
While Dr. Key was obviously pleased to have the President’s daughter and her distinguished escort in seats of honor for the show, Beautiful Jim Key—upon his theatrical entrance—was apparently indifferent. He glanced not at the front private boxes, where dignitaries typically sat, but all the way to the back, like a politician letting the folks in the rear seats know he was one of them. A down-to-earth famous horse. Or perhaps it was his way of checking to make sure there were no empty seats. Doc Key had admitted to reporters that Jim performed better for larger crowds and actually turned in halfhearted efforts when the applause was not to his liking.
After finding this crowd to his liking, Beautiful Jim Key turned his head from side to side, showing his best profile—the left one and the right one—milking the moment.
The Arabian-Hambletonian mahogany bay, standing at sixteen hands high, bore the traits of his ancestors with distinction—from his sleek, sinewy lines to the grace with which he moved, to his curly black mane and long, ropey black tail that nearly touched the ground. With splashes of white here and there, in a star on his forehead, on a blaze down his nose, in a half stocking on a foreleg and one full stocking on a hind leg, he actually looked like the equine blue-blood Messenger—foundation sire to lineages both Thoroughbred and Standardbred, and Jim’s great-great-great-great-grandsire. Much was often made of Jim’s wide-set eyes—said to be a measure of intelligence, an Arabian trait—but it was his constantly moving, tapered ears that were most distinctive, as he listened to the roaring applause with the delight of a connoisseur, one ear actively wagging in order to catch every ripple of the sound waves that surrounded him.
Throughout Jim’s opening demonstrations, expressions of incredulity fluttered through the crowd. Many were keeping a close watch on Dr. Key, trying to discover any secret signals that he might be sending Jim, even as all the questions came, in no order or prior planning, from audience members. Off to the side of the stage, Dr. Key had his back to Jim, both of his hands inert, one holding a riding crop as he prompted individuals in the crowd to stand and move into the spelling exercises by asking Beautiful Jim Key to spell their given names.
With each request, Jim trotted to a rack holding cards of all the letters of the alphabet, out of order, and selected letters, one by one, with his mouth, carrying them individually to an adjacent rack—like a long music stand—with a thin nickel rail that let him slide the cards into slots. The more ordinary names were easy for him: “M-A-R-Y,” “T-H-O-M-A-S,” “G-E-O-R-G-E.”
“Can he spell Alice Roosevelt?” shouted a man in the back.
“Well, Jim?” asked Dr. Key.
With a bent shrug of his front legs, Jim Key bowed his head up and down. Kid’s stuff. He’d been reading and spelling the President’s name for the last three years. Then he curled back his lips, showing clenched teeth in the form of the grin he practiced when grabbing coins in his teeth. A gasp shot through the crowd. It was the famous Teddy Roosevelt grin.
Doc Key shook his head. Even he was amazed. “Grin, Jim”—he beamed proudly at his protégé—“grin!”
Alice bubbled with laughter. With a flirtatious flick of his tail, Jim looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and for a moment the two celebrities connected on a visceral level, sensing a shared history. Both Jim Key and Alice Roosevelt had lost mothers early in life, both had once been given up for crippled, causing Jim to almost die and Alice to spend her childhood in metal leg braces. With the knack that certain horses have for picking up on the energies of certain personalities, Jim zoned in on her survival skill, her scathing wit, and instinctually knew that his great reward would be if he could get her to laugh again. Dutifully he headed to the rack, drew each letter without hesitation and placed the cards quickly—A-L-I-C-E, then a space, R-O-O-S-E-V-E-L… but just before he placed the letter T into position, another voice from the crowd cried, “Nicholas Longworth!”
The wagging ear caught the word, and Jim, as though he understood and had planned the joke he was about to make, shrugged his forelegs once more, placed the T, and spelled out the congressman’s last name, adding it to the same rack, making it read “Alice Roosevelt Longworth.”
The crowd erupted into laughter and cheers, none more enthusiastically than the guest of honor and her escort. Skeptical reporters, on the constant lookout for chicanery, were momentarily stunned. Over the next week, however, pens scrawled and presses rolled as the incident went the rounds of the nation.
With all his intellectual talents, it appeared that Beautiful Jim Key was also prescient. Two years later, on February 17, 1906, in an elegant ceremony for one thousand in the East Room of the White House, Alice Roosevelt married Nicholas Longworth. The society pages covered the event from every angle, making much of the fact that it had been thirty-two years since a presidential daughter had married in the White House, the last being Nellie Grant. To make sure she didn’t abide too much by convention, Alice made even more headlines when she insisted on borrowing a sword from one of her father’s guards in order to cut the wedding cake.
It took a horse with a sense of humor to convince a generation of its human responsibility to care for animals, proving our interconnectedness by demonstrating his capability of thoughts and feelings as complex as our own. Given the underlying prehistory, that seems fitting, because once before, six thousand years ago, when Beautiful Jim Key’s ancestors stood on the brink of extinction, the human race—fulfilling our own quest for survival—had rescued and domesticated the equine species. In return, horses have existed to serve humankind, as our primary mode of transportation (up until the last hundred years), as beasts of burden in our work, as soldiers in our wars. The current equine population, an estimated sixty-five million horses around the world, serve now at our pleasure. For that pleasure, for their noble majesty, for their six thousand years of service, we owe them an everlasting debt.
Evolutionary theorists have said that horses defy all principles of adaptation that stem from the theory of the survival of the fittest. The species, they say, has not needed to become fitter but has remained almost unchanged throughout the millennia, as close to perfection as any species can be. They are magical, supernatural creatures by virtue of the fact that when, by all the force of the universe, they should have perished, somehow they didn’t.
The same journey into life happened for a horse from Tennessee in the spring of 1889.