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soil, or sold trinkets from the sides of the road until, in 1890, the federal government moved them onto reservations and opened the rest of the state to settlers. One of these settlers was a hardheaded Irishman named Alfred W. Hoots, who knew good horsefesh when he saw it, and always seemed to have something to prove. In 1907, several things happened to affect the fortunes—or lack of same— of Alfred Hoots. First, Oklahoma began to produce astonishing amounts of crude oil, then much in demand by the U.S. Navy. Second, on November 16 of that year, President Theodore Roosevelt, the Navy's self-styled patron saint, signed legislation making Oklahoma the fortysixth state in the Union. Third, also in 1907, a colt was born on an Oklahoma farm, a flly with the eye-catching name of Useeit. sees on racecourses today: long, strong legs and necks, wide muscular shoulders, heavily muscled thighs and quarters. But their most important characteristics are the stamina and athleticism that it takes to carry the weight of a man (and more recently, a woman) on their backs at breakneck speeds near 40 mph around an oval racetrack a mile or more long. There are faster sprinters to be sure; a quarter horse, for instance, can outrun a Thoroughbred any day, but only for a quarter of a mile—which is somewhat like the difference between a drag race and the Indianapolis 500. Suspicious pedigree or not, however, Useeit must have been a thrilling sight to behold when Alfred Hoots frst encountered her at the Fair Grounds racetrack in 1909. As a two-year-old juvenile, she had everything he believed it would take Much to his credit, Black Gold wasn't quirky or fnicky like a lot of racing animals, and showed a willingness to run and a determination to win that endeared him to fans and handlers alike. Useeit's pedigree was dubious at best. Her known lineage went back to the 1860s, and though it has since been questioned, it was not at the time. That is important because the rules require that horses in sanctioned Thoroughbred racing be registered as such, which, as one might expect, makes them a breed apart. Since the breed's inception in the late 1700s, all true Thoroughbreds can directly trace their lineage to one of just three feet-footed Arabian stallions who were named for their owners: the Darley Arabian, the Byerly Turk, and the Godolphin Arabian from Tunisia, who is probably the most famous. These lean, swift runners were brought to England from North Africa and the Middle East to be bred to sturdy British mares, resulting in the spectacular animals one 72 Tempus-Magazine.com . Spring 2013 to become a champion, and to prove his point he made a trade for her with eighty acres of the hardscrabble Tulsa farmland where he and his Osage wife, Rosa, eked out a living raising cows. Thus Hoots not only achieved every Irishman's dream of owning a racehorse, but it turned out he had a damn good notion of what it took to make one, since during the next eight years Useeit won 34 of 122 races on the Southwest "leaky roof" circuits, an impressive record by any standard. Problem was, like so many mares, she could tear up the track for about threequarters of a mile but then ran out of steam, which simply wouldn't do for the longer distances. Among her greatest competitors during those times was the venerated Pan Zareta, who won nearly half of her 151 races, and whom Useeit never managed to best. Hoots, however, convinced himself, and insisted to anyone who would listen, that if Useeit could be bred to a stallion of uncommon endurance, the resulting progeny would, of all things, win the Kentucky Derby, which was then, as now, the most prestigious horse race in the world. But a dilemma kept Hoots from proving it: First, after giving foal, a racing mare is usually no longer a viable candidate on the track; second, Hoots didn't have the money to pay for a stud fee anyway—at least not for the horse to which he wanted Useeit bred. Hoots tried to solve part of the problem himself in 1916 when, perpetually short on cash, he entered Useeit in a claiming race in Juarez, Mexico. Under the rules of a claiming race there is no entry fee, but a price is put upon the horse, and when the race is over, anyone who pays that price can buy the horse. Hoots thought he had the bet covered because of an unspoken rule among horsemen that when an owner enters his only horse, no one will claim it—no matter what the price. But as bad luck (and bad manners) would have it, someone did. Hoots solved that problem by brandishing a shotgun and refusing to hand Useeit over—with the predictable result that both Hoots and horse were banned for life from the racing circuit. In Hoots' case that wasn't very long because the following year he found himself on his deathbed, where he extracted a promise from wife Rosa that she would try her best to come up with the money to breed Useeit to the spectacular Kentucky stud Black Toney, known for his ability to fnish what he started—namely a mile-anda-quarter-long horse race, which also happened to be the running distance of the Kentucky Derby. For two years after Hoots' death in 1917, the banished Useeit languished in the horse pasture until, in 1919, fortune smiled on Rosa Hoots. It arrived in the form of a sho' nuf' Oklahoma gusher of