The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [16]
Early reformers like Sewell, Appleton, Angell, and Bergh felt strongly that horses were living creatures and thus should be afforded basic rights, but that point of view was not widely adopted. Both Sewell, a Quaker, and Bergh, a Unitarian, had religious underpinnings to their anti-cruelty stance, as their faiths gave great emphasis to the humane treatment of all living things. Among the general public, however, the horse remained a work engine, and the public could spare little room for softhearted sentimentality.
Our language is rich with examples of the horse as engine; we describe a hard worker as a “workhorse” and a car’s engine as having “horsepower.” Though the role of the workhorse diminished significantly after the advent of the automobile, horses performed vital tasks well into the twentieth century. The city of Pittsburgh still owned three hundred draft horses in 1930, and the city fathers claimed that all of them could understand traffic lights. In the 1940s, horse-drawn carts were seen even in highly urbanized areas like Baltimore, where the clip-clop of hooves on pavement announced the arrival of the junk peddler, the ragman, and the fruit-and-vegetable cart. In city neighborhoods, the milkman’s horse knew the route so well that he would pause at the next stop and wait patiently unattended as the milkman ran back and forth across the street to deliver his bottles. In these “route-driven” professions, the horse’s intelligence allowed the deliveryman to complete his job faster than was possible in a motor-driven vehicle, and it was in these jobs that the horse-driven conveyances lasted the longest. As late as 1950, there were still hundreds of livery stables and riding establishments within New York City’s boroughs.
By the mid-twentieth century, the horse business had shrunk considerably from its heyday, but its basic infrastructure was still in place. Horses were born and raised on farms or western ranches, auctioned off to dealers who served as middlemen, then sold to individual owners. Noble steed, heroic beast, partner for man—the horse fulfilled all of those functions. But the average horse was born and bred to be a stalwart servant—harnessed up to drag a burden behind him until his useful days were over, then to survive only as the products that had been made from his flesh and bones. That is the way it was in the horse business. The animals had a purpose, and that purpose was to serve man. Sentiment had no place in the transaction.
Whether Snowman knew it or not, his second chance at life, his tenure as the brand-new lesson horse at the Knox School, came about because of one unpredictable chance encounter. For all of the hundreds, thousands, and untold millions of horses who were tossed away like so much detritus as soon as they reached the end of their working lives, here was one who crossed paths with the right man at the right moment.
As with every horse, Snowman’s melted-chocolate eyes hid the secret of his thoughts; but right away, when he arrived at the Knox School, he seemed to appreciate his good fortune. From his first day on the job, Snowman carried even the most timid beginner with the gentle care of a four-legged nanny.
Some horses are born to be teachers, and Snowman had a true vocation for his new profession.
5
A School for Young Ladies
The Knox School, St. James, Long Island, 1957
Bonnie Cornelius probably would have died of sheer boredom at the Knox School if it weren’t for riding in the afternoon; it allowed her to escape from life in the big brick house that served as a combination dormitory, dining room, and classroom building. Everything about the place felt heavy. It looked more like a museum or an old mausoleum than a place for young, vibrant teenage girls.
The paneled double front doors opened into a vestibule hung with heavy curtains that collected dust; dark oil paintings stared from the walls, and an ornate chandelier dripped