In real life, the horse’s trainer told his wife on his deathbed that he wanted Useeit bred to Black Toney because he had a vision of the mare throwing a Derby winner.
In true storybook fashion, Black Gold is born with his father’s great endurance and his mother’s breathtaking speed. But his owner, a selfish and misguided old man, fails to take action after the Derby win when the horse develops a crack in a front hoof. Black Gold, meanwhile, still loves to race. The bugle call from a nearby private track sets him off, and every day he conducts a little race in his paddock, wearing a circle on the perimeter.
Finally, during an actual race in New Orleans, Black Gold snaps a leg above the ankle; only tape holds it in place. “But,” as the track announcer puts it, “he finished his race — on three legs and a heart he finished it.” He was buried at that track, Fair Grounds Park, where every year the winning jockey in the Black Gold Stakes puts a wreath of flowers on the grave.
Human affection for horses may owe something to generations of readers returning over and over to the well of literature on horses. My Friend Flicka, a book that dates from 1941, begins: “High up on the long hill they called the Saddle Back, behind the ranch and the county road, the boy sat his horse, facing east, his eyes dazzled by the rising sun.”
The boy is Ken McLaughlin. He is desperate for a colt of his own and he has spotted a young mustang filly. He calls her Flicka (it means “little girl” in Swedish) after a Scandinavian ranch hand referred to her that way. A book such as this might be wrapped up today in eighty pages in one of those thin-as-gruel horsy paperbacks aimed at young readers. But My Friend Flicka, a 251-page paperback, has endured for close to sixty years.
The somewhat churlish Rob McLaughlin, the boy’s father, is a compelling character. On the one hand, he kills cougars, harbors no romantic sentiments about feral mustangs and wants to shoot Flicka when an infection brings her close to death. On the other hand, he rails against traditional horse breaking: “I hate the method, waiting until a horse is full grown, all his habits formed, and then a battle to the death, and the horse marked with fear and distrust, his disposition damaged — he’ll never have confidence in a man again.”
More out of efficiency than softheartedness, he wants the horses treated well. The rancher lectures his son Howard for being heavy-handed, telling him that while horses sometimes need to be punished they should never get more than is necessary. He praises Ken for his delicate hands, but laments his dreamy ways that often let the horse take control. He tells both sons to be in the corral when a certain horse is to be broken by a rider with fine hands, a light seat and perfect balance: their mother, Nell.
The way she approaches the trembling, fearful mare calls to mind the modern gentler’s approach. Nell is slow and patient, lets the horse smell her and then, significantly, turns her back to the horse to talk to the men. “Under the eye of a human being,” Mary O’Hara writes, “an unbroken horse is in terror.” When the horse nuzzles her back, Nell carefully turns and begins talking to the animal. She strokes her, leans on the saddle and places her knee under the mare’s belly as if to mount, and only when the horse shows no signs of fear does she rise into the saddle and begin the work.
The strange thing is this: Mary O’Hara wrote My Friend Flicka when she was fifty-six and only after she had moved to Wyoming with her second husband. A strong woman who had made it as a scriptwriter in Hollywood in an era when most women felt confined by domestic duty, she somehow sensed that a three-thousand-acre sheep ranch thirty miles outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, was where she was meant to be. In her autobiography, Flicka’s Friend, she concedes she could never have written the book without actually living in Wyoming and seeing wild horses. Wyoming, she came to realize, was not another state but another planet, one that “orbited at a different tempo, under different skies, under different orders.”
Wyoming made her, as it did me, “silent and spellbound.”
O’Hara, meanwhile, struggled to write and sell stories to magazines. One day she realized that whenever she chattered on about her animals, people stopped and listened. And whenever a story was written about wild horses in the American West, a long line formed at the Cheyenne library to read it. What if, she wondered, she were to write a tale about that mustang filly she had once seen caught in barbed wire? What if, in a story, a little boy were to catch and tame that young horse? Within twenty-four hours, O’Hara had the notes and scenes that would form My Friend Flicka.
Some years later, O’Hara was taking a course in short-story writing at Columbia University in New York, an older woman embarrassed to be in a classroom of young, aspiring writers. (As with Anna Sewell, her first book would come late in life.) One evening the instructor announced he would read three manuscripts, the last being the Flicka tale. The whole class fell on it, as if upon a feast in the forest. The instructor put O’Hara on to an agent called Sidney Lambert, who later told O’Hara: “I’ve been saying it was time for another Black Beauty. You’ve written it.”
Lambert wisely advised O’Hara not to cash the $25 check sent her by the writing instructor when he published the story in his anthology. Had she signed that check — and the little contractual hook on the back — and not kept it as a souvenir, the anthology’s publisher would have been entitled to half of all future revenues. Given that more than four million copies of the book have been sold to date, those revenues are substantial. Flicka had a future: the “vulture” of a writing instructor knew it instinctively, and so did Mary O’Hara.
Proof that Flicka lives on came during my week of riding in Wyoming in 1997. One of my fellow riders was a fifty-something woman named Ro (short for Rosemary) from Suffolk, England. She was arrestingly polite and formal, and her very Britishness seemed at odds with her cowboy hat and chaps. Her impish smile, however, served to warn of some small, impending mischief and I learned to heed it. I also came to realize that her passion for horses was rooted in knowledge and experience gained from raising Arabs at home.
As Ro would later explain in a letter, she had read the Flicka trilogy as a child and still escapes into those books. It was precisely because of those books that coming to Wyoming had seemed so much like a homecoming. “I spent most of my childhood and teenage years obsessed by horses and ponies, riding them and reading about them. Heaven was galloping into the wind — it was like flying. My imagination galloped too — I was a cowboy, an Indian, a Pony Express rider. I loved reading — Westerns were my favourite — not for the stories (I can’t remember a single one) but for the horses.”
Her zeal for horses existed in any case; the literature on horses had honed it, sharpened it, given it a language. For other people, too, reading that literature prepared the way so that when they came west, sometimes decades later, it felt familiar, even welcoming. On that Wyoming trip, I encountered several women, from Holland, Boston and New York, who had moved west and set down roots, sometimes in dramatic fashion. One woman had taken as a holiday a riding trip — a gift, ironically, from her husband; she fell for a horseman and that was the end of her Long Island life. The Dutch woman had similarly come west to ride for a week; she is now happily married to a wrangler. They slipped into the land of horses and never looked back.
Maybe it was like that for Will James, too. The award-winning author of Smoky the Cow Horse (published in 1927 and made into a Hollywood film in 1933) was born Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault to a francophone family in St-Nazare d’Acton, Quebec, in 1892. His parents ran a general store, and four-year-old Ernest would sit outside, transfixed by horses. His sister Eugénie remembers how he would draw horses without having to look at them: “He would just start with his pencil at the hoof and work his way up.”
When he was nine or ten years old, Ernest mistakenly consumed a bottle of caustic lye and only alert action by his mother saved his life. Like many, many writers who have dealt with incapacitating childhood illness or injury by turning to books, Ernest spent his convalescence devouring cheap western novels left behind by g
uests at his parents’ boarding house. The horse stories and romantic illustrations must have inflamed his cowboy yearnings, but what put him over the top was seeing the Buffalo Bill Wild West show in Montreal. His father later enrolled his wide-eyed son in art classes. Where other students sketched nudes, Ernest drew horses.
His mania for all things western finally led him to leave home, when he was barely fifteen, for farms and ranches in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and later all over the American Southwest. He adopted the dress, language and culture of the cowboy. Though he spoke no English until well into his teens, his joual gave way to a convincing drawl.
6.5 Will James, left, with actor Randolph Scott in 1932: his love of horses was more genuine than his legend. (photo credit 6.5)
Dufault would refine both his drawing technique and his writing style when he had some time on his hands — fourteen months in a Nevada prison for cattle rustling. He worked up a sketch for the character he would wholeheartedly become: Will James, born in a covered wagon in Montana; orphaned early when his father, a Texas-born cowhand, was lanced by a rogue steer; raised by a French Canadian trapper named Jean Beaupré (a clever fiction to account for young Will’s accent).
Everyone bought the story. Adopting cowpoke grammar, but with a nice eye for detail and, especially, horse character, Will James the writer soon had his audience. In 1922, he sent a dozen sketches and a short story called “Bucking Horses and Bucking-Horse Riders” to Scribner’s Sons in New York, where a legendary editor championed it. Maxwell Perkins, who had taken his red pencil to the novels of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, would watch Will James become a legend himself.
Throughout the next two decades, James would write twenty novels (most with the words horse, cow or cowboy in the title) and a memoir called Lone Cowboy. The film of Smoky the Cow Horse begins with Will on camera offering this paean, delivered in true cowboy drawl, to the horse: “Well, folks, to my way of thinking, there’s something wrong and amissing with any person who hasn’t got a soft spot in their heart for animals of some kind. Me? I prefer horses ’cause they’re man’s most faithful and useful friend.”
The voice, though, was dubbed. By then a binge drinker, James flubbed so many scenes and narrations that most were cut from the film. Even he had begun to believe the big lie he’d concocted in 1920; but the more he was pulled into the limelight, the more he feared being unmasked. He returned home and burned incriminating photographs and letters, yet his private terror still hounded him. He drank — to forget Ernest, to sink deeper into Will.
The fortune he amassed was soon squandered; the eight-thousand-acre ranch in Montana was taken by creditors. Will James died of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure in a Hollywood hospital in 1942. Only in 1967 was the truth finally told: the American biographer Anthony Amaral discovered the James will, which had, either wittily or boozily, left part of the estate to Ernest Dufault in Ontario. Amaral followed the tracks to Auguste, Ernest’s brother in Ottawa. The famous American cowboy’s favorite meal, it turns out, was tourtière, a classic meat pie from Quebec cuisine.
What was genuine about James-Dufault, unlike his folksy spelling, was his love for the horse. “I admire every step that crethure makes …” he wrote in the preface to the first edition of Smoky the Cow Horse. “I’ve come to figger a big mistake was made when the horse was classed as an animal … He never whines when he’s hungry or sore footed or tired, and he’ll keep on a going for the human till he drops.”
Like James’s Smoky, other horses from literature have found their way into film. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (half a dozen films and one TV series), Walter Farley’s Black Stallion, John Steinbeck’s Red Pony, Marguerite Henry’s Misty — all have inspired Hollywood films many times over, all in celebration of the child-horse connection.
Behind the scenes, that connection brought at least one young actress to tears. In the film National Velvet, for example, produced in 1944, twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor played the role of a little Sussex girl who wins a horse in a raffle, disguises herself as a boy and rides the horse to victory in the Grand National Steeplechase. One scene called for tears as Velvet learns that her sick horse may not live.
Taylor’s co-star, the veteran actor Mickey Rooney, counseled her that to produce real tears she might imagine great hardship and misery inflicted on her own family — her father dying, her brother starving. Elizabeth, who in fact felt no great affection for her family, had a better idea. “All I thought about,” she said later, “was this horse being very sick, and that I was the little girl who owned him. And the tears came.”
Taylor’s genuine love for the horse imbued her character. “I can’t help it, Father,” she says in the film. “I’d rather have that horse happy than go to heaven.”
Taylor had ridden horses since the age of four. Although Monty Roberts was her double in some of the racing scenes, Taylor railed against using doubles and paid the price. She suffered a concussion during the filming of National Velvet, and in Lassie Come Home, filmed the year before, a horse stepped on her foot and broke several bones.
The horse, real or imagined, will always inspire writers, and anyone who reads widely will have encountered horses. Male writers have also found Equus a powerful subject: John Steinbeck and his red pony, Sir Walter Scott and Lochinvar, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Silver Blaze, D. H. Lawrence and St. Maẁr, Dick Turpin and Black Bess, Virgil and his warrior horse, Homer and Diomed, Leo Tolstoy and Frou Frou, Mark Twain and the Mexican Plug, Cervantes and Rozinante, Liam O’Flaherty and the old hunter, Rudyard Kipling and the Maltese Cat, Wallace Stegner and his colt.
Or those uniquely Swiftian horses in Gulliver’s Travels. In 1723, at the age of fifty-six, Jonathan Swift (born in Ireland to English parents) undertook long journeys on horseback, including a two-hundred-mile trek along the wild coast of western Cork. Maybe he came to love horses then; maybe he always had. But in his famous satire, written in 1726, he seems to wish that men were more like horses.
In part IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift writes of “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms” (read, horses). The humanlike Yahoos on that island are nothing to admire; the horselike Houyhnhnms, on the other hand, were “so orderly and rational, so acute and judicious, that I at last concluded, they needs be Magicians.” They are sweet and caring, and unashamed of their nakedness.
“The word Houyhnhnm, in their Tongue,” wrote Swift, “signified a Horse, and in its Etymology, the Perfection of Nature.”
Many of the men who wrote of horses earlier this century were eastern-born, even European-born, chroniclers of the cowboy way. Zane Grey, of Zanesville, Ohio, started his working life as a dentist, but a trip out west in 1904 changed all that and he began writing western novels, among them Riders of the Purple Sage. Fifty-four novels would net him more than seventeen million sales. Owen Wister, a Philadelphian who took a music degree at Harvard, intending to become a composer, earned his fame with The Virginian, a novel of Wyoming cowpokery written in 1902 and based in part on the life of an Alberta cowboy. That novel inspired the 1960s television series; similarly Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove inspired both a mini-series and a weekly television program in the 1990s.
The cowboy, not so much the horse, occupied center stage in these books and the authors played fast and loose with the truth. An American stagecoach guard once observed that “the majority of cowboys shoot pool better than pistols.” But books and film entrenched the myth of the cowboy way, and it lives on.
The Indian way had its champions, too: some of them poseurs like Grey Owl (a Canadian conservationist named Archibald Belaney, who passed himself off as half Apache) and Karl May (pronounced “my”). May was a nineteenth-century scam artist in Germany who wrote novels featuring a German frontiersman, a warrior and a trapper named, respectively, Old Shatterhand, Winnetou and Canada Bill. Writing of locales he had never seen and getting lots wrong (he claimed all Indians could create a smokeless fire), he nevertheless inflamed German imaginations
and would sell sixty-five million books, making him one of the best-selling authors in history.
Today, six hundred or so frontier clubs in Europe foster Western fantasies. Every spring some four hundred tepees are set up in a cow pasture in central Germany and hundreds of people dressed to the authentic nines — eagle feathers, bear claws, six guns and chaps — pretend they are cowboys and Indians. Der wilde Westen lives on, thanks, in the main, to Karl May.
And reverence for the horse continues to mark literature. Angela’s Ashes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1997, is a memoir by Frank McCourt, an Irish American writer who grew up penniless in Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s. His father is a hopeless romantic, Irish nationalist and drunk, and his mother has too many babies who die of hunger and deprivation. The family lives in a tenement house, the poorest of the poor. Nearby is a stable, where an old workhorse named Finn finally breaks down and has to be shot. Here is the scene through the eyes of eleven-year-old Frank as the horse is being drawn up a plank into a truck:
The three men and the stable man tie ropes around Finn and pull him up the planks and the people in the lane yell at the men because of the nails and broken wood in the planks that catch at Finn and tear out bits of his hide and streak the planks with bright pink horse blood.
Ye are destroyin’ that horse.
Can’t ye have respect for the dead?
Go easy with that poor horse.
The stable man says, For the love o’ Jaysus, what are ye squawkin’ about? Tis only a dead horse.
Frank’s mother and his brother, who had earlier stood vigil over the horse to keep the rats off the body, fly in rage at the man, who retreats into the truck. All this for a dead horse.
The play Equus, written by Peter Shaffer in 1977, is still produced, still shocks with its horse killings, beheadings and blinding. The horse is still sacred; harm to a horse, still heresy.
Wild About Horses Page 17
