How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
overlap or run simultaneously. Their concern was to put racing back on a sound and orderly basis without delay. With so much to consider in their own region, they might not have been thinking at that particular moment about the rise of the sport in New York. It must have seemed an odd paradox when a representative of the Saratoga Race Course arrived at the Cincinnati track to begin taking bets on the showdown between Kentucky and Asteroid, to take place in New York, where the new men of the turf seemed disinterested in the Western sport.
While Alexander attended these important organizational meetings at the Cincinnati race meet, his horses also fared exceptionally well on the racecourse there. This was remarkable, considering that he was only beginning to reorganize his stable after the two raids on Woodburn Farm: one in the autumn of 1864, when thieves took Asteroid, and then the most recent raid, in February 1865. The story of Asteroid’s theft was well known to racing enthusiasts across the United States, as general newspapers and Wilkes’ Spirit had reported on the incident.
In the autumn 1864 raid, thieves disguised as guerrilla fighters had made off with Asteroid along with trotters and other Thoroughbreds from Alexander’s well-stocked stables. With Alexander and others in mounted pursuit, the horse thieves rode into the Kentucky River, situated close to Woodburn, in an attempt to escape. The youth riding Asteroid apparently never knew the animal was the famous, undefeated racehorse. When friends of Alexander’s led by Major Warren Viley and Zeke Clay managed a few days later to catch up with the outlaws and ransom Asteroid for $250, the boy riding Asteroid simply remarked that it was the best horse he’d ever sat on. It turned out the boy was none other than a notorious outlaw who went by a woman’s name: Sue Mundy. A crowd of well-wishers in Versailles, not many miles from Woodburn, cheered Asteroid as he passed through town in the company of his rescuers on his way home to Alexander’s estate.56
The raiders who rode into Woodburn Farm in February 1865 were smarter: they asked for Asteroid by name. In a letter Alexander wrote about the incident to his brother-in-law, Henry Deedes of Chicago, Alexander described how the clever work of his horse trainer saved Asteroid: “In the dusk of the evening the trainer gave them an inferior horse and so saved the best horse in my stable.”57
This raid was much more serious than the first, for the thieves threatened the lives of Alexander and his close acquaintances who were with him at the time in his house. As Alexander recounted, the outlaws held the wife of his farm manager, Dan Swigert, and others at gunpoint inside the main residence while they ordered Alexander to provide them with horses. It is important to point out that these men were not guerrillas or freedom fighters, as Alexander originally thought them to be. They were deserters from their Confederate platoons who were riding with a notorious outlaw from Missouri, William Clarke Quantrill. They rode into Woodburn disguised as U.S. soldiers, but Alexander soon realized that they were the same lot who had robbed him of horses six months previously. The outlaws had also shot and killed a neighbor and fellow horseman, Adam Harper, at the adjoining Nantura Farm. When the column of men disguised as soldiers rode into Woodburn at dusk this February day, the outlaws were holding the elderly Captain Willa Viley, a neighbor of Alexander’s, as prisoner to serve as their guide.
“Alexander for Gods [sic] sake let them have the horses,” Viley pleaded with his friend. But Alexander ignored the old man. He was busy trying to stall the raiders. He went into the residence, where he had told Swigert’s wife and others to barricade themselves in the dining room. He found one of the outlaws pointing a cocked pistol at Swigert’s wife even as she held a child in her arms. Another guerrilla “had his arms full of guns of all sorts which he had got from the stable where Swigert’s and my arms had been put by the Negroes,” as Alexander wrote Deedes. One of the outlaws turned and pointed a pistol at Alexander. It is easy to imagine that, had things turned out differently in the struggle that followed, Alexander might have died and the horse industry in Kentucky would not have developed as it did.58
“I knocked the pistol away from the line of my body and seized the fellow,” Alexander wrote. He saw that the man had been drinking just enough to make him dangerous and realized that he had to incapacitate him before he could harm anyone. Standing close by the door, which opened into a hallway, Alexander reported, “I made an effort to throw him out of the room fearing the pistol might go off and shoot someone in the room.” He continued: “I was unable to throw him out at the first effort, but as I had seized him in such a way that I had my left shoulder against his right shoulder and was thus somewhat behind him, in making the effort I felt his right knee come into contact with my left and it instantly occurred to me that I should trip him.”59
The scuffle escalated in the hallway. Alexander threw the outlaws out of the house and saved Mrs. Swigert and the children from harm. But he could not save all his horses. Nor could he save old Willa Viley. The outlaws took their prisoner with them to another farm, where the exhausted man fell off his horse. He died soon after at Stonewall Farm, the home of his son, Warren Viley.
The raiders took fifteen Thoroughbreds and trotters from Woodburn Farm. Two of the trotters later died: one from a wound in its back and the other, called Abdallah, from exhaustion. Alexander valued the stolen horses at $32,000. Despite that huge loss, it went unsaid that he was fortunate the outlaws had not taken away his breeding stallions, including Lexington, or the undefeated Asteroid. Still, he took no more chances this might happen, sending some three hundred horses by train from Woodburn Farm. He sent many of them to Illinois and did not return them to Woodburn until August 1865, four months after the war had ended. Alexander appeared completely discouraged over the disruption to Woodburn’s activities when he advertised all the Woodburn horses for sale, including Lexington, at war’s end and several times throughout that summer. But, in the end, he decided not to sell. By that autumn, he had Lexington and the other stallions back at his Bluegrass estate.60
In September 1866, more than a year following the running of the Saratoga Cup, when their showdown originally had been expected to take place, Asteroid was preparing for a race against Kentucky at the new Jerome Park in New York when he suffered a serious inflammation known as a “bowed” tendon. His racing career ended with that injury. Alexander sent the horse home to Woodburn Farm to stand at stud.
Kentucky never returned to the state for which his breeder, John Clay, had named him. He won twice more at Jerome Park in September and October 1866 before he, too, retired to stand at stud. Travers, Hunter, and Osgood sold him to Leonard Jerome for $40,000—an astronomically high price at that time but one thought to be a sound investment. “Mr. Jerome, his present liberal owner will find him a better paying stock at $40,000 … than any to be found upon the Broker’s Board,” predicted one racing editor. More surprising than the high purchase price was the location where Kentucky would stand throughout his breeding career. His home would not be anywhere close to Bluegrass horse country, where the leading stallions had been headquartered for some decades prior to the Civil War. Jerome had built lavish quarters for Kentucky close by Jerome Park.61
Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, speaking as always with some measure of pride in New York, heartily approved of this decision. “Nothing about the Park, from the grand stand and club-house to the rustic arbors which surmount the wooded knolls, surpasses Kentucky’s home in taste and style,” the editor wrote. “It stands upon a hill, and the paddocks are on three sides of it, so the great horse can stand at the door of his hall and overlook his mares in the happy valley. We enter by sliding doors his reception hall, 40 feet by 20 and 12 feet high, wainscoted walls and ceiling, and grained in black walnut, with ash and pine panels. The groom’s room is to the left; the feed room to the right. The doors in the center lead to Kentucky’s box, 15 feet square, wainscoted with pitch pine, oiled.” Not a single writer who had visited Woodburn Farm had described Alexander’s barns in such a way as to seem so lavishly appointed. And perhaps they were not.62
Jerome had followed the lead of colleagues,