Bones

Bones

Chapter One

Foundations

You’ve seen a horse race. Maybe you’ve leaned over the rail at your local track, hollering at the seven because you bet the seven, for reasons that made sense at the time. Maybe you’ve donned a floppy hat and gotten hammered off mint juleps, running in from the kitchen to catch the end of—or maybe a replay of?—the Derby. Maybe you’ve been in a Vegas sportsbook, where not even the immortal gods of American football can muscle the ponies off those little TVs in the corner.

Somewhere, someway, you’ve seen a horse race. Most likely you saw thoroughbreds, the horses that were loping down the backstretch when you stumbled in from the kitchen. Maybe you watched a steeplechase, for the novelty of seeing these graceful beasts leap through a manicured obstacle course. But it’s unlikely that you’ve ever knowingly watched a quarter-horse race, and, for our purposes, you’ll need to see one, if only in your mind’s eye or on YouTube.

Be forewarned: There are no mint juleps here. The best we can offer is a lime in your Corona.

The colonists who settled Virginia and the Carolinas invented quarter-horse racing in the 1600s. It was more or less an accident.

They’d brought a handful of Arabians and thoroughbreds with them on the voyage, and between shifts tilling the New World, they started racing through the main streets of their newly settled villages. The races were informal and short, usually about a quarter of a mile, run between two horses down straight streets lined with villagers. But winning them became a point of pride, and over time, the colonists discovered that breeding their horses with those ridden by the natives resulted in even faster racehorses. They called this new breed the quarter-of-a-mile running horse, accurately if not cleverly.

Around this time, a British military captain visited North Carolina and wrote home about his experience. He marveled at the lush tobacco fields, the “shocking barbarities of the Indians,” and the horses:

They are much attached to quarter racing, which is always a match between two horses to run a quarter of a mile, straight out, being merely an exertion of speed. They have a breed that performs it with astonishing velocity. . . . I am confident there is not a horse in England, or perhaps the whole world, that can excel them in rapid speed.

In the 1800s, as settlers moved west, they encountered a racing culture similar to the one established by those original colonists. Three centuries of ranching across Mexico—including in the northern state of Coahuila y Tejas—had propagated a breed of stock horses built for working the farm. They were short, muscular, and placid amid the chaos of a cattle herd. They were “cow ponies,” first and foremost. But they could run, too, if only for a few hundred yards, and their serenity with a rider in the saddle made them easy to settle down at the starting line.

The Southwest in the nineteenth century was defined by bloodshed, as Coahuila y Tejas became the Republic of Texas, and then an American state. Throughout it all, though, the white American settlers, Mexican ranchers, and Native Americans challenged each other to quarter-mile races all across the disputed territory. Gamblers would line the track, forming a human rail, with money and property at stake. One race was said to attract such prolific betting that it bankrupted and shuttered an entire Texas town.

The eastern settlers touted their “quarter-of-a-mile running horses.” The Texans swore by the speed and smarts of their cow ponies. An imported stallion named Steel Dust quickly extinguished the East-West rivalry. He was already thirteen when he arrived from the East in 1844, but he beat every “cow pony” they lined him up against. Before long he was being bred with ranch horses from across the new state of Texas, infusing the Spaniards’ placid cow-pony breed with a burst of speed and additional weight.

The resulting horses were, as one quarter-horse historian described them, “small, [with] alert ears, a well-developed neck, sloping shoulders, short deep barrel, a great heart girth, heavy muscled in thigh and forearm, legs not too long, and firmly jointed with the knee and pastern close.” They were rarely taller than fifteen hands but could reach twelve hundred pounds. (Thoroughbreds are lither, averaging sixteen hands but just a thousand pounds.) The new breed of horse was even better on the farm and unbeatable in a rodeo ring or on the track, provided the track wasn’t longer than a quarter mile. They called him the American Quarter Horse.

By the 1940s, an industry had sprung forth around the breed. In Texas, a group of cowboys founded the American Quarter Horse Association, to manage and regulate breeding and competition. In New Mexico and California, businessmen pushed for pari-mutuel betting, allowing racetracks to collect the bets and manage the payouts. That lured horsemen and gamblers from Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico for weekends spent drinking and betting on the races, which could now feature six or eight horses instead of two.

The quarter-horse meccas built in the 1940s and ’50s still anchor the sport today, especially Ruidoso Downs, in the mountains of New Mexico, and Los Alamitos, in the palm-studded suburbs of Orange County, California. They host futurities, for two-year-old racehorses, and derbies, for three-year-olds, with millions on the line. And on any given day, at tracks sprinkled across the Southwest and Mexico, quarter horses as old as five, six, even seven run races with a few grand on the line and a few hundred people in the stands.

The best of these horses are descendants from American Quarter Horse royalty—sired by name-brand stallions like First Down Dash, Corona Cartel, or Mr Jess Perry. They’re ridden by jockeys who often learned to ride in unsanctioned match races in the countryside of Texas, Oklahoma, or Mexico. Many of the best are Mexican immigrants.

The races typically cover between 350 and 440 yards. The best feature a little bumping out of the gate and all the way through the finish line. The fastest 440-yard races are run in about 20 seconds, compared to the two minutes it takes the top thoroughbreds to circle Churchill Downs. The short track leaves little time to overcome a stumble. the horses are loaded up, rearing and kicking up dust, and everything goes still. The gates fly and and the race is already almost over. The horse that best taps into its English-Spanish-Mexican-Tejano cow-pony DNA has the advantage, using its hulking haunches and quiet demeanor to go from dead still to full speed in a few strides.

Now maybe you can see it, even if you’ve never seen it: stocky horses raised by cowboys, racing on short tracks, ridden by jockeys trained in the thick brush of cow country, all a safe distance from the floppy-hatted dignitaries of the Jockey Club. They call thoroughbred racing the sport of kings? This is the sport of cowboys. Muddle your mint elsewhere.