A number of years ago, amidst the Nesaen pastures of Persia, the great Sheik Ahemid, a powerful ruler…ruled in love and firmness…. For there was in his dowar…the fair Lauretta, with a lineage carefully kept on tablets of ivory that reached back to the broods of Pharaoh, comrades, friends of the tented tribes whom long association, love and kindness had nearly brought up to their own plane, and when to their animal instincts had been added wits and a reasoning sense, they feel and know all of ambition, love and hate.
—ALBERT R. ROGERS,
“Beautiful Jim Key: How He Was Educated,” first edition, 1897
August 7, 1897. Nashville, Tennessee.
The train depot on the corner of Church and Walnut.
ALBERT ROGERS WAS LATE. He hoped his two new business partners, Dr. William Key and his uncanny horse Jim, wouldn’t mind. Taking care of last-minute arrangements for their trip to New York and for the press party he was hosting a week later on Saturday, August 14, he had struck upon an idea he was sure could make their fortunes.
It was to be a pamphlet, a quality brochure, perhaps a short biography of the horse and a little on his enigmatic trainer. Since he had only a week to conduct interviews, write, and publish the booklet, Rogers had already made notes for the preface, asking in writing: “How was Jim Key taught? How did his teacher, Dr. Key, come to notice the extra intelligence this horse possessed? What breed is he? And a dozen similar questions are asked so often, that the writer has tried to give in the following pages, the answers to them all.”
The moment he began the interview process, en route to New York, he seized on the romantic story of Jim Key’s parentage, which was exactly what he needed to facilitate the horse’s entrée into high society. That was, in part, what he had said he could help make happen when he convinced Dr. Key to let him be their promoter.
At age eight, Jim was not yet a star. Even though he was a veteran performer of medicine shows and county fairs, he had only just that summer made his debut as an “educated” horse at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, basically as a novelty attraction within a larger exhibit. Rogers had discovered him there, only days before the three embarked on this train ride and grand experiment to make kindness to animals a household ideal. With no small effort, he had managed to persuade Doc Key not only that Jim was ready for the big time but also that he, Albert R. Rogers, was the man who could get him there.
At the train depot, William Key had been unruffled by Albert’s tardiness and instead went about reassuring Jim—who wasn’t the least bit fond of train rides, especially long ones—that the adventure ahead would be well worth the trouble. Moving with the energy and gait of a man much younger than his sixty-four years, the Doc proceeded next to lead Jim toward the foot of the ramp to the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railways private boxcar that Rogers had secured for him.
Now reassuring the Doc that he would be just fine, Jim wore an expression that would become familiar in the press, his nostrils flaring with an aristocratic sniff of disdain—as if bored already with the fuss. Then Jim Key flashed a toothy, aw-shucks grin that, with a knowing twinkle in his eye, made him look like a country boy punch-drunk on his good luck to have been marked by stardom.
In moments, eighteen-year-old Stanley Davis, Jim’s valet and groom, appeared on the platform, having stowed the steamer trunks and large crates that held the props used in their demonstrations. Like Jim and Doc Key, Stanley—the younger brother of Lucinda Davis Key, the Doctor’s third wife, recently deceased, as well as being the younger brother of Maggie Davis (later to become William Key’s fourth wife)—had been born and raised in Shelbyville, the seat of Bedford County in the heart of Middle Tennessee that was about sixty miles south of Nashville. Unlike Jim and the Doc, Stanley had never been out of state, and he was having a hard time concealing his excitement and his nervousness. Dr. Key had arranged for Albert Rogers to hire Stanley for their trip up north not because of their family ties but because his brother-in-law would be an asset in their work. Stanley was likeable and good-looking—with his warm, curious countenance, cream-and-coffee coloring, and thick, shiny black hair—all pluses when it came to dealing with the public. He also happened to have a gift for tending horses and other animals, traits that showed he had the makings of a first-rate veterinarian. While Bill Key had received no formal veterinary training, he was determined that Stanley attend veterinary college and become licensed as soon as their traveling days with Jim were over. It is doubtful that either knew how long those days were to be.
In contrast, Albert Rogers—hurrying through the torrents of travelers onto the overcrowded platform, waving an apology and a greeting to Dr. Key—may have had a keener sense of the distance they were about to go. Only a man of such convictions could have persuaded Key to enter into a partnership in the first place.
Bill Key no doubt had misgivings about throwing in his lot with a fellow he had just met. But there was something about A. R. Rogers he liked, something about the intensity of the man thirty years his junior that he found refreshing. The redheaded, bearded, stylishly coiffed and attired Rogers may have come from a world of privilege, but there was about his soulful, saucerlike eyes the look of a man who longed for more than the comfort and status of wealth. Key sensed that Rogers fancied himself as a showman in the mold of P. T. Barnum who, though he had died in 1891, still hovered as the most dominant force in American entertainment. But for some reason, maybe because Rogers was self-conscious in front of crowds, or because he lacked the requisite skills to be a performer himself, he had opted for the role of a behind-the-scenes impresario—destined to live out his dreams vicariously.
There was something else. Rogers had prominent ears. They were not the small, pinned-back type that horses interpreted as a threat or posture of anger in their own species. That may or may not have had anything to do with why Jim had taken to Albert Rogers right away, but Doc Key saw that Jim’s instincts were to trust the stranger.
For as much as Bill and Jim were able to intuit about Rogers, their new promoter was still mystified by them. And that was a problem he hoped his interview for this promotional pamphlet might address. He had to come up with a way to entice the leadership from New York’s prestigious ASPCA to attend his private press party, and a way to overcome the question he anticipated hearing—just who is this “Dr.” William Key?
That was why, when he heard the tale of Bill Key’s pure Arabian, Lauretta “Queen of Horses,” he pounced on it and decided to make it the centerpiece of his publicity push. Was it true? Doc Key insisted it was. Then again, he quickly learned that Key was an artful storyteller, an occultist, a die-hard capitalist, a voracious reader (with interests that included the Bible, veterinary medicine, politics, the history and struggle of African-Americans, and strange news items dealing with outer space), and was, in Bill Key’s own estimation, the best poker player south of the Mason-Dixon.
Rogers had to have known that promoting the story as fact, if it was fabricated, could undermine Jim’s credibility. On the other hand, Albert Rogers was a romantic—a man born to wealth who didn’t need to cavort with the masses but who sought on many levels to be one of them—and he chose to believe Doc Key’s account mainly because it moved him. What was clearly evident in the telling was that Key, the son of a slave woman and a white father he never identified, had in the spring of 1889 anticipated the birth of his Arabian’s foal as if he was awaiting a Second Coming.
Doc Key by that year was already fifty-six years old and recently wed to Lucinda Davis, the third of what would be four wives, with no children of his own. He had presided over hundreds of foalings, several from mares and stallions he owned. But this colt or filly was going to be something more special than any of them, having, after all, the finest pedigree in the nation. All the omens that spring were favorable.
William Key set stock in signs. Key explained to Rogers that black folk called it “mother wit,” a kind of earthy second sight, an inherited knowingness. His ability to observe and interpret signs had helped him survive terrible times and prosper, allowing him to heal animals and humans, figuring out their ailments and devising homemade remedies that cured about anything. Despite the fact that he was self-taught, by the early 1880s his renown as a medical practitioner and expert in animal sciences had well earned him the appellation of “doctor.”
His success came also because he understood the laws of supply and demand, and many times throughout his life he had faced down death by letting it be known that he had the ability to fix whatever demanded fixing. Cavalry horses shot or maimed, wild colts in need of taming, mules gone lame, milk cows turned dry, hens refusing to lay, wagon wheels to repair, saddles and harnesses to be restored. He had remedies for other human wants and needs: his own country cooking, rooms to rent, a hand of cards, and races to wager on.
Though Rogers obviously recognized that Key was an unusual man, he couldn’t yet have known the extent of his success—that the kindly Doctor had created something of a small kingdom for himself, at various points owning and operating a veterinary hospital, a hotel, a restaurant, a blacksmith and wagon wheel shop, and his own racetrack. But Key couldn’t restrain his pride in admitting that one of the different businesses that occupied him had boomed. “I had a liniment which I called ‘Keystone Liniment,’” he told Rogers, almost casually, “and everybody wanted it, so that started me in the medicine business. I used to travel around the country with a minstrel band to attract a crowd, and then sell my medicine.”
Rogers saw the approach as further evidence of Key’s ingenuity. In this heyday of the patent medicine era, the highways and byways of much of the country were littered with all classes of medicine men selling their miraculous concoctions that promised everything from a cure for the common cold to life everlasting—boasting ingredients that came anywhere from the salt of the Dead Sea to the planet Mars. There were the usual scoundrels selling snake oil and the big-budget productions pushing famous labels like Kickapoo (products sold in elaborate Indian medicine shows starring Kickapoo tribal members, including a salve and a sagwa, or tonic, the precursor to the Joy Juice cola that had future comic book fame) and Carter’s Little Liver Pills. But every now and then a product with actual therapeutic properties came along. One of them was Keystone Liniment, used internally and externally, for such horse and mule afflictions as joint spasms, cuts, splints, swelling, cholera, saddle sore, lameness, bots, colic, and their various corresponding human maladies. Breaking into the exclusive ranks of top-selling patent medicines, however, required not only a credible medical expert, but also a brilliant pitchman, as well as a riveting form of entertainment to draw an audience.
Cutting down on expenses, Doc Key did most of that himself, playing three roles: formulator, pitchman, and medical expert. Since he traveled with a group of black minstrels (typically banjo, bones, mouth organ, and sometimes fiddle), he had the advantage of employing friends and relatives, and he benefited because crowds were starting to prefer authentic Negro music to the minstrel tunes borrowed by whites in blackface.
Whatever his secret was, with repeat business and word of mouth, Key hit a gold mine, which kept him busy filling mail orders when he wasn’t on the road. Keystone Liniment may not have been as big a name as Jack Daniel’s—which was distilled and bottled in Lynchburg, Tennessee, not far from Shelbyville—but the low cost of production and the high demand made it hugely profitable. Just how profitable, Rogers wouldn’t know until later, when he was shocked to learn that Bill Key was worth more than $100,000 (a multimillionaire by twenty-first-century standards). And that was before he went into the practice of teaching horses to spell.
Rogers made the initial decision to make little mention of Key’s wealth in his publicity materials, choosing instead to promote Jim’s costar by focusing on the less threatening image of a kindly, older, colored country doctor—the Uncle Tom figure from page and stage who was more popular than ever as the turn of the century approached. Initially, Dr. William Key went along with the portrayal, just in time for the New York press to be charmed by “Uncle” Bill’s quaint colored country expressions.
Despite its patronizing ring (more pronounced in later generations), calling a man or woman of color “Uncle” or “Aunt” was long assumed by Southern whites to be a term of affection and familiarity. Then again, Doc Key would have agreed with the delegates to the 1865 State Convention of the Colored People of Tennessee when they complained about the demeaning ways that both former slaves and freeborn were addressed. One of the more famous complaints arose when a delegate had been asked by a white man who passed him on the street, “Well, Uncle, how are you getting along?” The delegate feigned surprise: “I was glad to know that I had a white nephew.”
At the same time, as a poker player Doc Key knew it could be advantageous to presume upon the prejudices of others, in other words, not to show one’s hand. This had been his secret, he told Rogers, in finding and buying the Arabian mare.
Around 1885, after getting a healthy start in the medicine business, Key and his group were out on the road when they met a man who knew of a circus that had become stranded near Tupelo, Mississippi. In order to raise money to get home, the circus owners were selling out, including their stock of horses.
The Doc was mighty interested, he recalled, but not sure if the risk of heading down that way, either alone or with his minstrels, would be worth it.
Risk? Rogers didn’t yet understand the kind of peril that such a trip might entail for a black person, although over the years that he and Key worked together, Rogers came to witness many indignities of the color bar that his partner faced—from the different train compartments they were sometimes forced to occupy, to the hotels that prohibited Key from entering, to the rules of theatres and concert halls that permitted the Doc to perform onstage but which only allowed Negroes as audience members on certain days or in certain sections. Rogers hurt for the injustices, and later devised ingenious ways to break down some of the barriers. But no matter how much he sympathized, he couldn’t change the color of his skin, and it would have been hard to relate to all the considerations Key must have had while traveling among the many worlds he inhabited.
Rerouting to Tupelo to inspect what was left of a small circus was not only inconvenient but it was, after all, Mississippi. There, as in other areas of the South (including pockets in Tennessee), in the 1880s lynchings were on the rise. The tide of justice that had helped Lincoln to free the slaves and had moved toward full and equal rights had turned back. Not only was the federal government unable to stop vigilantes and lynch mobs and the spread of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but now there was also a trend moving south and north toward institutionalizing racism.
Doc Key’s survival instincts warned him not to travel unfamiliar roads into Mississippi. Then again, he smelled a good deal—something he could rarely pass up—so he proceeded on down to Tupelo cautiously, keeping his troupe nearby but not with him, as he made sure he didn’t arrive looking too much like a duded-up somebody. He went ready to play poker, prepared to look and sound as raggedy and illiterate as he could pull off.
When he came along the rutted road outside the stables where the sale was taking place, Key recalled to Rogers, he was struck by the sight of a gray mare standing in the field, like a sculpted though weathered marble statue, as if she’d been waiting for him for a long, long time. He read the signs: she was probably younger than she looked, underfed, badly abused. But despite the injuries that slowed her down, as she cantered curiously alongside his carriage with a fluidity that conjured images of desert sands, he could have begun to guess that the gray mare was a true Arabian and that she must have once been extraordinary.
Bill Key didn’t elaborate to Rogers as to what kind of ruse he used with the owners of the circus, except to say that he first picked out a string of other horses to buy, before asking if the gray mare was for sale. Masking their amusement, the sellers brought her into the stables so he could have a closer look.
Since the time of the Prophet Mohammed, the laws of Islam restricted the sale of prized horses, so most pure Arabians in Europe or America were considered either stolen, illegally sold, or the descendants of either. Females were called Daughters of the Wind, because of their exceptional speed. Arabians were the progenitors of the English Thoroughbreds, horses originally bred primarily for racing. But Arabian blood was valued for other traits of equal or greater importance than speed: intelligence and a familial connection to human beings, even what some called a humanlike morality.
Arabians had another telltale trait that Doc Key easily spotted—jet-black skin showing through underneath a thinning iron gray coat, a genetic gift of equine sunscreen. The other signs were there—the wise eyes low and widely spaced, their color deep and dark, the small perky ears that pointed inward, and the distinctive shape of the head, tapered, with a prominent brow, chiseled cheekbones, flat nostrils—natural traits without embellishment said to make the Arabian an essential drinker of air, a breathing machine destined for speed.
These were the features of the gray mare inspected by Doc Key. Because of what he judged to have been years of mistreatment, she appeared to be in her midtwenties, not long from death. Once Key got a look at her teeth, however, pretending to be an amateur, he saw she was probably ten or twelve years younger.
Bill Key offered forty dollars for the old mare, a price high enough for the sellers not to bother hiding their laughter. But once Key and his troupe had finished hitching up the horses, Lauretta among them, and were back on the road to Tennessee, they were the ones having the bigger laugh. For forty dollars, Doc Key had just bought a horse that had once fetched $50,000.
Lauretta’s history, compiled by Rogers and Key, centered on a shady figure by the name of Jack Randall, a light-haired, blue-eyed Englishman, known to have traveled to Persia in the late 1870s, who arrived in the many-tented domain of the powerful Sheik Ahemid, bearing a gift of holy Arabic tablets of unknown origin. The charming Randall was welcomed by the sheik and treated royally to a series of nightly feasts, earning the trust and generosity of his host through his flattering “tongue of oil.” The sheik—his guard down—soon began to boast about his four priceless horses, the Kingly Four. There were three stallions, Philis, Ectes, and Ranus, and a mare, Lauretta.
Sheik Ahemid told the Englishman of their illustrious history, how they were the four remaining descendants of the horses who had lived in the time of the great pharaohs, that their names were inscribed on ivory tablets, and that none was more prized than she, Lauretta Queen of Horses.
Key and Rogers knew well that Arabian mares were valued over the stallions—indeed, that Prophet Mohammed had decreed, “Give the preference to mares; their belly is a treasure and their back a seat of honor.” As the Islamic saying had it, “The greatest blessing is an intelligent woman, or a prolific mare.” The superior ride and comfort of the female Arabian was so seductive, some even said the ease of her gait could render her rider effeminate.
Jack Randall, according to the Key/Rogers account, told Ahemid that he worked for a great sheik in far-off England, whose name was P. T. Barnum, that he had enormous power and wealth, and would pay an unprecedented price to purchase Lauretta—her weight in gold and one thousand horses.
“Sell Lauretta, my Queen? Sell the Mother of all Horses, to whom a million Allahs are said?” the sheik allegedly thundered. He would first pluck out his own eyes. So enraged was Ahemid that he ended the feast and sent the Englishman back to his tent, still not suspecting what the stranger might do.
In a frothy, almost cinematic piece of prose, Rogers and Key described Randall’s daring predawn theft of the mare, detailing how he stole from his tent, gliding into the semidarkness under a starlit sky, creeping past the sleeping guards into the tent of the Kingly Four. “’Twas a moment that made his hair turn gray, but there at the very place stood Lauretta, her trappings on a post near her. No hesitation now; ’twas a lifetime in the minute it took to sling a bridle on her noble head and lead her out. Cautiously, with silent tread, in the sand he led her, and then bounding on her back glided as if she had wings, out in the desert.”
Once the theft was discovered, Ahemid and hundreds of horsemen gave chase into the desert, but the shifting sands, blown by the wind, had hidden Lauretta’s tracks.
While the sheik was reportedly overwhelmed by anger and grief, the whole of Arabia was outraged, and suspicion soon turned against him. The sheik’s boasting was at fault, said some. Others believed he had secretly sold her to Jack Randall for some portion of the $50,000 that P. T. Barnum was said to have paid for her.
A short time later, when a gray Arabian began to appear as a main attraction in Barnum’s European shows, the semifictionalized controversy turned into a real-life scandal. In the British Parliament, a lord lamented to the London press over the exploitation of the horse that was “drawing such crowds at the circus because she was known as the Queen of Arabian Horses, causing no end of annoyance by the fanatics of Arabia…all because of one gray mare.” He called it tragic that Lauretta, the once proud queen of the desert, was now the “slave of a circus owner, though the greatest in the land, to be exhibited to the tens of thousands of the curious.”
Key figured that the worst of her mistreatment began once the controversy died down and the crowds stopped caring about the stolen, royal horse. No longer a spectacle of intrigue, Lauretta was sold to a lesser circus, brought to America, and taught the typical circus tricks, through the typical means that were all too familiar to Doc Key. Some methods were violent, others more insidious like the common practice (considered less extreme) of using pins and sharp tacks, pricking the horse’s head to teach her to nod yes, pricking her shoulder to teach her to nod no, pricking her leg so many times to get her to kick the dirt to tell her age, later using the whip to remind her of the pinpricks, then eventually using signals to remind her of the lashes.
Doc Key calculated she had been with at least three circuses before he found her in Tupelo, and he believed that besides the cruelty of her training she had also been broken down by neglect. Even though Key was well known in Tennessee and in other Southern states for his skill in rehabilitating sick horses, almost no one had any hope for anything more than a minor, superficial improvement for Lauretta.
Using his own cures, Dr. Key tended to her continuously, spending hours every day rubbing her down with his homemade liniments, feeding her his remedies, talking gently and kindly to her. After almost a year, she revived. She was as beautiful as he could have imagined she once was, though she would never again be as strong as was her heritage to be. But her spirit was back.
Because Lauretta had become so attached to the Doc, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her at home when he was traveling and began to use her case in his medicine shows as proof of the healing properties of Keystone Liniment. Before long, he told Rogers, she showed an interest in performing and started to do some of her circus tricks to entertain the crowds. But instead of being pricked and whipped, she was rewarded with apples and sugar. Bill Key explained to Albert Rogers, “The whip makes horses stubborn and they obey through fear and they can’t be trusted. Kindness, kindness, and more kindness, that’s the way.”
Rogers was curious. What about horses who weren’t naturally of a superior intelligence?
The Doc said, “Give me any horse of average intelligence and I will train him.”
Did that mean he could also teach any horse of average intelligence to read, spell, and solve mathematical problems?
Much to Rogers’s surprise, Doc Key asserted that with patience and kindness, he could. He added, “I would rather have him four years old, providing he had not been abused. It is like teaching a blind child to read. You have got to find out where the power is and cultivate the senses.”
Key had not advanced to teaching human academic subjects to Lauretta, but in recalling her with profound affection, he told Rogers, “She was the smartest horse I had ever seen.”
William Key shared the view that when an Arabian mare had proven herself to have superior strength, courage, and humanlike understanding, it was in her very nature to pass on those exceptional traits to her offspring. For this reason, despite her age and her earlier injuries, he was absolutely intent on breeding her, certain that under his care she could be the dam of a true champion. And so, like any protective, doting father, he set out to find just the right match for her. Only the finest bred horse in America would do.
“All men are equal on the turf and under it” was a saying whose meaning would not have been lost on William Key. As a metaphor that had wound its way through time and place, it described the gamut of fortunes found and lost at the racetrack, and the diversity among kings and commoners whose passions have shaped the sport of horseracing and the breeding of champion horses.
Doc Key was also aware that in a geological fluke of equality, the actual turf of Kentucky’s inner bluegrass region—with its calcium-enriched, limestone-laden soil responsible for the blue hue of the grass eaten by grazing horses whose bones became stronger and more resilient in the process—recurred almost identically some three hundred miles south in Middle Tennessee’s central basin. These two veins of prime horse country in both states likewise shared the same gentle, rolling hills, a forgiving landscape that resulted from the millennia of limestone erosion. Breeders believed this kind of topography to be more conducive for exercising young equine athletes than rockier, steeper terrain. Some even observed that the gentle, rolling gait of horses raised in the two localities had developed naturally in response to the rise and fall of the earth beneath their hooves, much like the lilting Southern accents of the two regions, which contrasted with the roller-coaster accents of their mountain neighbors, or with the heavy, imperious tones of the deeper South.
Bill Key’s backyard of Bedford County boasted other natural advantages for bringing up horses, claiming its own network of rivers and creeks that curled in and around the farmland, flowing down from higher rims, feeding the soil and making the pastures that much more lush. In a whim of nature’s overachievement, the earth surrounding Shelbyville was doubly blessed by not one but two varieties of limestone—the white rock variety and that of sandstone, also known as fire rock. This combination, which provided such an ideal foundation for raising horses, also gave Doc Key the natural ingredients he used in making his horse and human liniment, a formula he kept secret but whose name, Keystone, hinted at its essence—pulverized bedrock. Mixed with oil, it could be absorbed by tissues; diluted by water, it made a tonic for drinking or a tincture to be applied to wounds.
Kentucky sires still had leading status, but rather than having to travel there to find a promising match for Lauretta, Doc Key felt he had plenty of options in his home state. From early on, after Andrew Jackson founded Nashville’s Clover Bottom racetrack and spent many fortunes importing the best breeders, trainers, and jockeys to Tennessee, the Volunteer State had been recognized for promoting superiority of equine bloodlines, a fact acknowledged in the 1830s by Kentucky breeder Lewis Sanders, who went so far as to say that Tennessee had more and better blood than his own state.
Famous horses who bore that out were legends such as the acclaimed broodmare Madame Tonson, her son Monsieur Tonson, who became the top American stallion in 1834, Tennessee Oscar (who never lost a race and never paid a forfeit, said to have never been pushed to top speed by any competitor, having, in his second start, walked over), prolific sires Leviathan and Glencoe—whose lineages both ran to Petyona, the top money winner of the pre–Civil War era. Then there were champions being turned out with regularity at Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville, which by the 1880s had steadily acquired a position as the leading stud farm in Tennessee. The philosophy employed at Belle Meade, under the stewardship of head hostler Robert Green, also a former slave and revered horseman, was that winning bloodlines were more productive than the overuse of horses who had themselves been exhausted at the track.
Such thinking made Belle Meade the home of Iroquois, the first American-bred stallion to win the English Derby, and brought nineteen-year-old English import Bonnie Scotland to Tennessee, where he spent the next eight years fathering formidable racehorses, none more famous than Luke Blackburn. Known as the most muscular horse ever seen on American turf, so powerful that jockeys complained they couldn’t walk after trying to hold him back, Luke Blackburn spent his season at age three by winning twenty-two of twenty-four starts.
Luke Blackburn had recently begun his stud career at Belle Meade just at the time that Dr. Key went out to find Lauretta’s ideal mate. As a Thoroughbred, Luke Blackburn had bloodlines that couldn’t have been more ideal. Not only was he a son of Bonnie Scotland, his dam was Nevada, sired by Lexington—the horse considered the leading American sire of the century. A mating between Lauretta and Luke Blackburn would have been easy to arrange, especially because Bill Key was a friend and contemporary of “Uncle” Bob Green at Belle Meade.
Convenient though that might have been, William Key wasn’t looking for a Thoroughbred. The Doc had turned his attention to the Standardbred turf heroes, the trotters and pacers of harness racing who had, for the time being, surpassed Thoroughbred stars in terms of popularity and prestige. Traditional running races were regarded by increasingly sophisticated crowds as too primitive or lacking the skill that the demands of trotting and pacing required. Moreover, with scandals and infighting between turf owners and lawmakers plaguing the Thoroughbred racing world, some of the more famous running racetracks had changed to become Standardbred courses.
The Standard, a record of two minutes and thirty seconds (2:30) or better for a time trial of trotting a mile (with the proviso that “a record to wagon of 2:35 or better shall be regarded as equal to a 2:30 record”), was declared and published in 1879 as an admission to registration in the National Association of Trotting-Horse Breeders (later changed to the United States Trotters Association). The Standard for pacers required a mile to be paced in 2:25 or under.
Elements of harness racing had been in existence for thousands of years. The trotting gait had been described as early as four centuries B.C. by the Greek military officer Xenophon, a visionary horse gentler in the mode of Dr. William Key. He described the trotting gait as distinct from the walk and the gallop in its unbroken pattern, by which the front left leg moves at the same time as the right hind leg, the two strides alternating diagonally. In pacing, also recognized by the Greeks, the elegant, faster lateral gait required the horse to move his right front leg at the same time as his right hind leg, distinguished by a gliding side-to-side motion.
When William Key decided to establish Keystone Driving Park, a half-mile harness racing course on Key’s Lane, just off the heavily traveled Shelbyville and Murfreesboro Turnpike, not far from his veterinary hospital, he may have been influenced in his choice by John H. Wallace. The editor of Wallace’s Monthly—published between 1875 and 1893—Wallace wrote about a range of turf topics, promoting the prestige of Standardbred racing, and created Wallace’s Year Book, a Standardbred registry.
Doc Key had an audacious plan up his sleeve. Instead of scouring the country for just the right pedigreed trotter or pacer to sire Lauretta’s colt or filly, he imagined that he could use Keystone Driving Park to lure some promising Standardbred blood to his neck of the woods. The line he was most interested in was the Hambletonian. At the time, the Hambletonian was a relatively new breed, later viewed as progenitor of almost 99 percent of latter-day harness racers, the very cornerstone of the Standardbred. But in 1887 when William Key opened his track, what interested him most was the Hambletonian story. It was a saga of an American original who had sprung from modest means to become practically the most fashionable horse of the day. A truly modern horse.
Rogers, a marketing man, knew only that the Hambletonian was an elite name, but he had to be reminded by Dr. Key that the story centered on the faith and foresight of an elderly stable hand named William Rysdyk up in Sugar Loaf, New York, who tended to the birth of an unpromising foal born to the aging, injured dam known as the Charles Kent Mare (of Norfolk Trotter descent) after she had been bred to a questionable stallion named Abdallah.
Reputed to be ugly and mean, Abdallah was redeemed by the fact that he was the grandson of Messenger, one of the most illustrious horses in breeding history. An imported English Thoroughbred, Messenger had sprung from the bloodline of the Darley Arabian, a stallion brought to the British Isles in the early 1700s that went on to be seen as one of the most influential progenitors of English Thoroughbreds. In an uncanny similarity to William Key’s account of the theft of Lauretta from Arabia, the history of the Darley Arabian had it that Thomas Darley may have stolen the impressive stallion from a Bedouin sheik in Syria. Through the importation of Messenger in 1788, the Darley Arabian’s blood came to the American shores, where, instead of furthering the English Thoroughbred line, a new breed emerged. After the spring of 1801, during which Messenger stood at service in the stables of Anthony Dobbin’s Stagecoach Inn of Goshen, New York, a batch of foals began to exhibit a similarly distinctive gait, described as a slinging walk that when sped up produced a masterly trotting gait. After a few more generations were foaled, Messenger and his progeny had brought renown to Goshen as the Cradle of the Trotter. The Standardbred line had been born.
Even with Abdallah’s pedigree, when the Charles Kent Mare gave birth to her foal in 1849, his owner didn’t see enough to like about him and accepted old Rysdyk’s offer to purchase the dam and her colt for $125. Registered as Hambletonian (10)—registries like Wallace’s typically assigned numbers to resolve confusion over names being reused for often unrelated horses—the ugly duckling of a colt began to transform under the care given him at Rysdyk’s stable in Chester, New York, near Goshen. With a muscular behind pitched higher than his shoulders (later dubbed a “trotting pitch”), the dashing mahogany bay had the ideal anatomy for racing under harness. At age two, before he had even proven himself on the turf, Hambletonian began his stud career, covering four mares. When he went on to win decisively in a series of blistering match races and time trials, Rysdyk’s Hambletonian, as he was also known, trotted his way into celebrity status. He more than lived up to his reputation as a sire of speed, raising his stud fee to as high as $500 and repaying his devoted owner’s investment many times over. By the time of Hambletonian’s death at age twenty-seven in 1876, he had sired a trotting dynasty that began with an astounding 1,331 foals. Among his immediate offspring, four sons in particular—George Wilkes, Dictator, Happy Medium, and Electioneer—furthered the Hambletonian lineage to such an extent that it came to obscure other trotting bloodlines in future Standardbred stock.
Was it audacious in 1887 for William Key to believe that his own aging, injured Arabian mare could be bred to a blue-blooded Hambletonian, perhaps for his own crossbred foal to launch a new equine dynasty? To many it was the height of audacity. But from what Albert Rogers was learning about Key early on, that wasn’t going to stop him.
The morning of Saturday, June 18, 1887, had dawned in Shelbyville like most Middle Tennessee mornings that follow the weeks of spring rains—humid, sunny, and abrasively hot in the season’s run-up to summer. These were the kind of weekend days when everyone tended to slow down and take life a little easier, to tend, when possible, to avoid the everyday annoyances and excitements. But weather notwithstanding, an unavoidable atmosphere of excitement percolated throughout the homes of many leading citizens of Shelbyville, Bell Buckle, Wartrace, Flat Creek, and other satellite villages of the area.
The day promised to be one in an ongoing series of Saturday-morning races at Keystone Driving Park out on Key’s Lane, open to the public, with a specially invited cadre of Bedford County officials and business leaders. Having served as grand marshal for the livestock divisions for various county fairs, Dr. William Key had set out to create the same festive atmosphere at his own racetrack, hoping to attract owners of well-bred horses from around the county.
By midmorning a large, eager crowd, including a young reporter from the Shelbyville Gazette, had gathered in time for the exercises to be opened with a dramatic pacing race, in which even Shelbyville mayor W. G. Hight had entered one of his best pacers but lost to a plucky bay owned by businessman Sam Thompson of Flat Creek. The friendly competition didn’t raise blood pressure too badly, but the next few races did, especially the highlight of the morning, a harness race between Mr. T. C. Buchanan’s trotter, Muggins, and Keystone, the favorite, a handsome trotter belonging to Mrs. Sally Whiteside, whom she apparently named for Dr. Key. The two contenders, “both fine ones and fast steppers,” noted the Gazette article, got off to an explosive start. The crowd immediately went silent, everyone holding their breath as they watched each trotter maintain an impressively fast pace, holding neck and neck for the first half mile. On the second half mile, the spectators exhaled collectively as Muggins faltered down the stretch, and amid chaotic applause, the spirited contest was won by Keystone.
Doc Key didn’t spot the Hambletonian he was looking for that Saturday, but he was encouraged by the democratic scene of his own making. It was an uncommon mix of class and race, a grouping of former slave owners and former slaves, former Confederate soldiers and former Union soldiers, and just as complicated an assortment of current political opposites. But the old and deep wounds that remained were not in evidence that Saturday, and no one seemed to think it surprising that an ex-slave was the owner of so impressive a driving park and so comfortable a house cloistered under the trees beyond the track. There was no mention of color in the Gazette’s lengthy coverage of the event, although it was clear that the reporter was awestruck when Dr. Key invited him up to his house, where “a bountiful repast of substantials had been prepared under the shade of the trees and proceeded at once to refresh the inner man.”
By midday, the sun’s rays had become oppressive, and the crowd, visibly pleased with the morning’s entertainment, quickly dispersed. Among the last to leave was the reporter, who profusely hailed Dr. Key as extremely courteous and attentive to the wants of all his guests.
When the article ran five days later, it ended with an added note from the paper’s editors, acknowledging William Key: “The doctor is doing everything he can to bring the stock of our county to the front and we are glad to learn that he is meeting with much success. We are glad to chronicle these friendly meetings as they all tend towards the development and improvement of Bedford County’s horse flesh.”
In later years when the history of the origin of the Tennessee Walking Horse would be tied to Bedford County and to this particular time period toward the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. William Key’s early contribution, which the Gazette had then described, would have been forgotten.
But what he did get for his efforts was exactly what he was looking for: the perfect match for Lauretta. The stallion, auspiciously named Tennessee Volunteer, was a great-grandson of Rysdyk’s Hambletonian. In the spring of 1888, Doc Key took Lauretta Queen of Horses the ten miles to the Bell Buckle livery stable—where Tennessee Volunteer was said to be standing at stud for the season—so she could have a look at her prospective beau.
Though Tennessee Volunteer’s track record didn’t show up in Wallace’s registry, Bill Key assured Albert Rogers he had seen the Hambletonian race.
How fast was he? Rogers wanted to know.
“Well,” said Key, putting it simply, “he couldn’t be beat.”
But it was Tennessee Volunteer’s pedigree that really interested Key. Early in the prolific career of Hambletonian (10), he had sired the excellent trotter Volunteer (55)—who held a pre-Standard record of 2:37 while hitched to a wagon. In turn Volunteer sired Kentucky Volunteer (2784), foaled in 1874 and bred by a John S. Briggs of Cincinnati, Ohio. Kentucky Volunteer went on to sire Tennessee Volunteer, ownership unknown.
Even though Albert Rogers grew up in Cincinnati and may have been acquainted with the Briggs family, upon hearing this history he became fixated on the idea that Jim Key was “bred in Old Kentucky.” Not so. The confusion about the Ohio-bred Kentucky Volunteer was that he took his name partly from his dam, Kentucky Girl. She too was not necessarily Kentucky bred, although, along with her sire, Blue Bull, she did come from a winning bloodline noted for fast pacers and may have won races there.
Rogers and Key missed the irony of the fact that Jim Key was most likely conceived in Bell Buckle, a burgeoning academic enclave set in the wooded rolling hills and a place so picturesque and serene it had been chosen in 1870 by William R. Webb for the location of a boys’ private college preparatory boarding school. Old Sawney, as Webb was known, believed that by fostering character as well as a devotion to learning, Webb School’s students would go on to excel at higher levels of education and in life. His philosophy would be borne out, making Webb School, later a coeducational institution, the most prestigious college preparatory high school in the South, producing over the decades to come an impressive ten Rhodes Scholars and three governors of different states, including three-term Tennessee governor Prentice Cooper, a native of Shelbyville. Old Sawney’s presence would linger long past his life, forever freezing the look and feel of the town in the time of the 1880s—when Webb’s original classroom building was built.
If Doc Key had been paying attention to the signs, he might have interpreted the significance of Jim’s conception in Bell Buckle as an indication that Jim was destined to become a horse of higher learning.
But for once, the Doc misread the signs. At least that was his conclusion for nearly a year following the birth of Lauretta’s foal.
May 1889, foaling time in Bedford County, was marked by the kind of raucous explosion of nature that the season was known for: the air, warm, thick and wet, pungent with the smell of regeneration, its moistness a match for the black rich earth long fed by the Duck River, which had lured the early settlers of Shelbyville to its banks.
The profusion of color and fragrance, everything growing and living and being born, in so extravagant a manner as to be downright dizzying, conspired to create signs that could have seemed to the expectant doctor like a welcome celebration for the foal.
“Knowing he was the finest bred horse in the country, I was very anxious to see what he would turn out,” Doc Key told Rogers, recalling his ambitious visions of owning a famous, noble racehorse. “I had some very fine Bible names picked out for him.”
And why not? Rogers was shocked to hear the Doc say that the foal he had planned to name for a revered prophet or disciple “pretty damn near broke my heart.”
The foaling apparently proceeded normally, starting with the incomparable, overpowering smell of equine amniotic fluid, which summoned the Doc and his stable hands to Lauretta’s stall at night—often a dam’s instinctual time for avoiding predators by giving birth under the blanket of darkness. Lauretta frantically paced, then lay down, her whinnying crescendoing with the night-splitting universal cry of a female in hard labor while Key coaxed her with his indecipherable, whispered words—a self-created language based on the practices of his African and Cherokee ancestors. As the foal emerged in its white sack, he was there to help the weakened Lauretta by tenderly clearing the white cloak off the foal.
In answer to his prayers, he at first rejoiced in seeing that the foal was a male. As close to a son of his own as he would have in this life. But as he continued to examine the colt, Bill Key saw that he was as misshapen and bony as any sickly foal could be.
Neither Lauretta nor the foal improved over the next twenty-four hours. The dam, in fact, was to deteriorate dramatically over the next eight months, the ordeal of procreation having depleted whatever reserve of health Doc Key had helped her regain before breeding her. From the beginning of the colt’s life, it was obvious that his dam’s ability to care for him and guide him into his journey as a young equine was to be impaired. His first efforts to stand and walk were not unlike most foals’—with bent, splayed legs teetering up only to slide down, then hunkering up and flailing into an attempt at balance, only to wobble from side to side, making scant progress at forward motion.
That was normal, sometimes for the first hours or day of life, even for a day or two longer, before most foals—some with maternal nudging—find the natural dance of movement that is part of their genetic gift, and are soon galloping with finesse. But after weeks, Lauretta’s colt could barely walk or run.
The Doc kept hoping he’d improve as the days went by. “For almost a year I had no hope for him. He was the most spindled, shank-legged animal I ever did see.” His coat was a dingy, tufted brown—not even a hint of dark bay—and he appeared to be in a pain so severe from an unidentifiable infection or injury that the grooms working for Doc Key begged him to shoot the foal and put him out of his misery.
“I made up my mind to kill him,” Key said to Rogers, a statement made for the sake of his dramatic narrative, since it was impossible for anyone who knew Bill Key just in passing to imagine him committing such an act, even if committed in mercy. Despite his supposed intention, he focused his energies instead almost exclusively on saving Lauretta’s life and easing her colt’s ailments, hoping and praying that Keystone Liniment and his other remedies would provide the solution. Doc Key was sure the foal wasn’t going to make it, but not giving up, as he confirmed to Rogers, “I took mighty fine care of him.”
Yet his disappointment was so pronounced that instead of the biblical name he had planned to bestow on the stallion that he had once imagined being immortalized on the turf, he refused to give the misfit the name he’d chosen. “It would have been blasphemy.”
Searching for a name that would fit, after watching the colt attempt to walk, he had an encounter with a Mr. Jim Hunter, a bowlegged, no-account drunk who wandered by his stables on occasion. “If this raggle-taggle, trashy man had attempted to walk through a wheat field, he would have ruined it.”
As though to mock his own audacity, perhaps having in his own mind, as Tennesseans like to say, “gotten above his raisin’,” Bill Key named his raggle-taggle horse Jim. But just in case Jim understood and took it as a lack of kindness, he gave the unpromising young Arabian-Hambletonian his own last name.
Jim Key was a member of Bill’s family now, but still a long ways from being beautiful.