TEMPUS Magazine redefines time, giving you a glimpse into all things sophisticated, compelling, vibrant, with its pages reflecting the style, luxury and beauty of the world in which we live. A quarterly publication for private aviation enthusiasts.
Issue link: http://tempus-magazine.epubxp.com/i/107193
At // At the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, where the fabled Stewball ran, two solitary markers rise in the infeld down the homestretch right beside the sixteenth pole. Beneath one lies the dazzling stallion Black Gold, the "Indian Horse" who ran to glory in the 1924 Kentucky Derby, and whose owner, Rosa Magnet Hoots, was a full-blooded Oklahoma Osage. Beneath the other lies Pan Zareta, a brilliant Texas flly who never lost a race against Black Gold's mother. // It is a saga reaching back a solid century, as poignant as any in horse racing history. When I was a boy, my parents would take me to New Orleans during the winter season at the Fair Grounds. We'd go from Mobile by train, on the old Hummingbird of the Louisville & Nashville line, breakfasting in the dining car, with its steam-fogged windows, linen-clothed tables, heavy railroad silverware, and white-jacketed waiters serving up hot pancakes and syrup. We always stayed at the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street, with its magical Carousel Lounge where the big circular bar still turns ever so slowly on machinery from the 1890s. My father would let me sit beside him and enjoy the ride, sipping Coke or ginger ale through a straw—despite the fact that the legal drinking age in New Orleans at that time was approximately eleven. Out at the racetrack it was always cold. In fact, New Orleans can be the coldest place on earth when a Texas blue norther combines with the thick Delta moisture to chill you to the bone. While my mother and the other wives went shopping, I would sit in the bleachers with my father and his friends in their overcoats and soft wool scarves and felt hats, watching the races through binoculars. Sometimes my dad or one of the others would even place a bet for me. I remember noticing the two small marble tombstones in the infeld and asking about them, but nobody in our crowd knew anything about them. Once we asked some other people in the stands, but they didn't know either. It was just "some horses," they said. Two decades passed before I learned the story. By then I was a young reporter at the Washington Star, and one of the men working the night shift was John Schultz, a gentle and erudite copy editor from Baltimore who had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism and who, in whatever he claimed horse of dubious lineage, with the heart of a Seabiscuit and the courage of a Man o' War. It is a tale of poverty-to-riches-to-triumph, as well as one of malfeasance and indifference—even cruelty. In fact, it is the story of two horses, of how they lived and how they ran, and how they died and came to be buried side by side at a New Orleans racetrack. In 1907, what is now the state of Oklahoma still appeared on United States maps as "Indian Territory," The colt, born in 1921, was named Black Gold, an Indian expression for the oil that was now making some Oklahoma Native Americans wealthy. as spare time, was an inveterate railbird, handicapping horses around the East Coast tracks. When he found out I was from Mobile, he asked if I had ever been to the Fair Grounds and whether I remembered the little gravestone in the infeld. I told him that there were actually two monuments, which surprised him, and that they had always been a mystery to me. That night he told the story of the legend of Black Gold, a small, spindly home of the once mighty Great Plains tribes as well as the so-called civilized Indians—Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles, who roamed the American South before Andrew Jackson banished them across the Mississippi along what came to be known as the Trail of Tears. There, amid droughts, blizzards, and tumbleweeds the size of buckboards that spun across the windy plains, these Native Americans scratched out a living from the Spring 2013 . Tempus-Magazine.com 71