The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [11]
By the middle of the twentieth century, there were many more sellers than buyers. Ben K. Green, in his reminiscence Horse Tradin’, talks about tractor dealers in the late 1940s whose backlots contained pens for the horses and mules the tractor dealers had taken in on trade. “Great big broad-hipped, good kind of sound, beautiful-headed, heavy-bodied Percheron and other draft-type horses weren’t much in demand,” Green writes. “Every tractor trader had a penful of them somewhere around the edge of every little town, and they were hard to sell.” There were too many horses. The big auctions served as a whittling-down point. Camps, dude ranches, and riding academies bought some of these horses for the summer, then off-loaded them at season’s end. A 1956 article in Horse Magazine described the fate of these horses: “In the fall, many of these unfortunate creatures, cow-hipped and sore-backed, are trucked off by the killers.” Tens of thousands of horses, many of whom might have been perfectly useful if given proper care, found no buyers and ended up at the slaughterhouse.
While the precise number of horses who were slaughtered in the 1950s is not known, the fact that three million horses disappeared from the American landscape at midcentury is well documented. In the 1970s, the horse population rebounded to about seven million, where it has stayed steady since. However, virtually all of those horses are now pleasure horses, many of them specialty breeds. The draft horse and the fine carriage horse have also lived on in the hobby markets. It is the general “farm chunk,” the average horse—the crossbred, lighter-boned grade horse—that has all but disappeared. Some died of old age, some were retired to pastures, and many undoubtedly ended up in a dog food can on a supermarket shelf.
The horses in the killer pen were mostly anonymous. A few might be marked with a brand, showing that they had started life on a western ranch. Every registered thoroughbred had its unique number tattooed on the inside of its lip. But most horses were ordinary, and the marks and traces they bore were those of hardship—scarred hides, rheumy eyes, cracked and curling unshod hooves.
Snowman brought no story except the one inscribed on his body: the cups in his back molars told that he was nearing nine; the cuts on his knees signaled some kind of accident. Across his broad chest, the hair was rubbed away—signs of being yoked to a burden. The green manure stains, the matted tail, and the unclipped legs and muzzle indicated neglect. The missing shoe and thin frame hinted toward an owner who’d refused to invest money in an unwanted horse.
But beneath all of these superficial marks, this horse still carried the story of his bloodlines, the broad chest and strong cannons perhaps originating in the elegant Percherons of France. Even better hidden, in his small, well-set ears and the proud look—often described as “the look of eagles”—in his eyes, he carried the mark of a thoroughbred, and bloodlines that could be traced all the way back through England to the Godolphin Arabian and the desert sands of Morocco.
By best guess, Snowman had been born in 1948—a grand year for the American thoroughbred. In horse racing, Citation triumphed as the eighth winner of the Triple Crown, thrilling a country that was newly cheerful after the war’s end.
That year also marked the return of the summer Olympic Games, after a hiatus during the conflict. On opening day in London’s Wembley Stadium, the British track star Lord Burghley said the London games represented a “warm flame of hope for a better understanding in the world which has burned so low.” After 1948, the equestrian competition would no longer be an all-military sport; that year’s team may have been the best one the United States had ever fielded.