He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Reinventing the American Thoroughbred: The Arabian Adventures of Alexander Keene Richards, and shared the following:
From page 99:Visit Gary A. O'Dell's website.Writing in 1897, Wallace, who apparently despised Arabian horses root and branch, asserted that when Richards’s “half- breeds” were put to trial, they were soundly defeated by the American thoroughbreds against which they were pitted: “Under these humiliating defeats a careful man would have hesitated before he went further, but he at once jumped to the conclusion that his defeat was not in the fact that Arab blood could not run fast enough to win, but in the fact, as he supposed, that the rascally Arabs had sold him blood that was not Arab blood. In a short time he was off for Arabia again.”I was surprised to find that the Page 99 Test seemed to work very well for my book. Even though some context was lacking, the three paragraphs – especially the last – rather successfully encapsulate the basic theme of the book. Alexander Keene Richards, a resident of Georgetown, Kentucky, would become one of the more significant Thoroughbred breeders of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, the sport of Thoroughbred racing was more about endurance than speed, because “heat” racing was the dominant form. In heat racing events, horses would compete in multiple heats of three-to-four miles each with a short break between heats, the winner being the horse that won the most heats. Today we would consider this very cruel treatment. Horses would thus gallop at full speed for nearly twenty miles of racing in a single day, and were often permanently lamed by the practice or sometimes even dropped dead on the track.
Wallace’s chronology is grievously in error. At the time Richards set off again in 1855 to purchase more Arabians, he did not possess any Anglo-Arab crosses that were old enough to compete in any racing event. Both Boherr and Zahah were pureblooded Arabian, and even Richards acknowledged that pure Arabians were not competitive against Thoroughbred Running Horses. Although he purchased Peytona in autumn 1853 and subsequently bred her to Massoud, this likely would not have occurred before spring 1854, since the traditional season for breeding horses was from March to June. Mares, having an eleven- month average gestation period, were typically bred at this time so as not to deliver a foal during either the chill of winter or the heat of summer. The result of the Massoud-Peytona match, a filly named Transylvania, was foaled early in 1855. Not even a yearling, she would not have been eligible for racing. According to Richards’s obituary in the Kentucky Live Stock Record, “it was not until 1856 that his colors, silver gray and white stripes, were seen on the turf.”
Keene Richards’s published statements clearly indicate that he was planning a second trip back to the Near East immediately on return from his first expedition: “I commenced preparing to make another trip to the East, determined to spare no trouble or expense in procuring the best blood, as well as the finest formed horses in the Desert. For two years I made this subject my study, consulting the best authors as to where the purest blood was to be found, and comparing their views with my own experience.... After two years spent in close investigation as to the best means of obtaining the purest blood of the Desert, I matured my plans and started again for the East.”
Stamina was the key to successful competition in heat racing, and the Arabian horse was legendary for its endurance, able to run through the desert lands for miles without rest or food. The Thoroughbred horse had been developed in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by breeding common English mares to so-called “Oriental” stallions imported from the Near East. Richards believed that he could increase the stamina of American Thoroughbreds by a new infusion of Arabian blood. To achieve this, he made two trips to the Near East in 1851-53 and 1856-57, venturing into the Arabian desert to bargain directly with the Bedouin tribes for their finest pure-bred horses. He imported several outstanding Arabian mares and stallions, and also imported some of the best English Thoroughbreds for his breeding program. His experiment was interrupted by the Civil War before he had made much progress, and ultimately was judged a failure.
The first paragraph of page 99 reflects this judgement in the words of John Wallace, one of the leading equine historians of the late nineteenth century. In my second paragraph, I note some of the chronological errors made by Wallace without disagreement as to his overall assessment. The third and final paragraph presents a good summary of Richards’s breeding hypothesis and his determination to import the best Arabian stock. Although his thesis is more fully explained in the introduction to the book, a reader would be hard pressed to find any single page other than 99 that so well presents the theme of the book.
[Note: The Page 99 Test is not successful for my previous book, Bluegrass Paradise: Royal Spring and the Birth of Georgetown, Kentucky (2023).]
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
