Richard Ten Broeck, an Albany, N.Y., native who owned and promoted the racehorse Lexington, was as tenacious as they come. He had to be. For every triumph was an equal measure of tribulation.
After Lexington's last race in 1855, Ten Broeck traveled to Great Britain to become the first American to ever race American-bred horses there. He took with him his horses Lecomte, Pryor, and Prioress. He would have taken Lexington had the champion's eyes not failed.
The “American Invasion,” as it came to be known, turned out to be a bust. Recovering from the hellish voyage across the Atlantic proved difficult for the American horses. They arrived in England exhausted and ailing and saddled by the country's damp climate. Pryor eventually died of pneumonia, Lecomte of colic. Apart from England's chilly, wet weather, the American horses were trained for stamina, not speed that was dictating the English tracks. Races were shorter — about a mile, maybe two — not the four-mile heat racing American horses had been trained to run where they had ample time to ease into speed.
England's courses were an anomaly too. Instead of running on an oval that stretched in front of the grandstand — an American design that allowed patrons to see the entire race —England's courses crawled and sprawled over the hillside in odd formations like that at Goodwood where paths curved into loops resembling wires on a kitchen whisk, only to conjoin at an area known as “Accident Corner.”
Speed, shorter races, and the assault of unfamiliar terrain initially proved insurmountable for the American horses. They lost nearly every race that year.
Ten Broeck teetered on the brink of ruin until, oddly enough, he turned to his tried-and-true methods of heat racing in the 1857 Cesarewitch at England's Newmarket Racecourse. The Cesarewitch that year was the only time in its 183-year history that required a run-off to crown the victor. The problem was that race officials scheduled the run-off to occur at the conclusion of the day's races, two hours away. Ten Broeck's mare Prioress and her two British competitors did not return to their stables but instead, waited out the time at the track. To complicate matters, temperatures dropped as rain set in. Britain's two contenders stood unblanketed and unworked in the hours stretch. The old ways of bringing a horse around between heats had been all but abandoned by that country. But Ten Broeck himself wrapped Prioress in flannel and walked her to keep her muscles ready. By the time of the run-off, the British horses were frozen. Prioress, warm and refreshed, won by a length and a half. The total distance run in the 1857 Cesarewitch was four miles and four furlongs, the equivalent of an American heat race.
Earlier that morning, en route to Newmarket, the American turfman had dropped the last of his money on a 1000 to 10 bet for Prioress. After the race, he recovered north of $80,000.
Ten Broeck raced in Great Britain off and on for 20 years. Despite the setbacks of his initial year, he amassed $197,765 in purse winnings in just a ten-year span. That value today approximates $3,357,100. His learning curve was painful, but he paved the path for other American turfmen to race with success in Great Britain.
Work was not the only thing that consumed his days. While in England, Ten Broeck met and married a Louisville woman named Pattie Anderson. They eventually returned to her home city and onto a 536-acre estate she named Hurstbourne. Life was grand there, housed as they were in a Gothic-inspired marble and stain-glassed mansion. Yet all the grandeur of Hurstbourne paled compared to the racing trophies prominently displayed therein — one man's accomplishments, the only items of Hurstbourne that truly could tell a tale. While living in that sublime retreat, Ten Broeck lost his beloved Pattie to cancer. He isolated himself and led a simplistic life surrounded by Hurstbourne's garden sanctuary.
It was during this period of solemnity that Ten Broeck's life was again ineradicably altered. On August 8, 1874, he boarded a train in Louisville. Sitting next to him was a relative of Pattie's named Walter Whitaker, an insane man who had been temporarily committed to a mental institution for committing murder. After the train was underway, Whitaker started into a vitriolic rant with Ten Broeck about family matters. The two men started quarreling to the point that others looked up from their newspapers. At the next train stop, Ten Broeck, rattled and distraught, disembarked. Whitaker followed and aimed his gun, firing three times at Ten Broeck and missing. On the fourth time, Whitaker rammed the pistol's barrel into the center of Ten Broeck's forehead and pulled the trigger. Ten Broeck fell and lay motionless on the platform. Whitaker raised his pistol a fifth time, aiming for Ten Broeck's chest. People on the platform knocked Whitaker down, pinioning him to the ground. Others ran to Ten Broeck. Blood had already pooled around the back of his head. They lifted him and carried him to a nearby tavern where he was placed atop the bar. Someone ran to summon a doctor. Another ran to notify The Daily Courier Journal that Richard Ten Broeck was dead.
A doctor soon arrived, examined the wounds, and proclaimed that they were merely a flesh wound. The ball had run up over the skull, coming out at the back of Ten Broeck's head. A unanimous sigh of relief filled the room and all present settled back into their chairs, less on edge, and definitely in need of a drink. After some length of time, Ten Broeck awoke and began talking coherently to the tavern patrons. By then his friends had arrived to escort him home. They offered him a cigar, which he accepted, and helped him into the carriage. On Hurstbourne's back porch that evening they smoked cigars and imbibed an endless supply of juleps into the early hours of the next day. They undoubtedly talked about life, that crazy man Whitaker, and more than likely, a horse or two.
Love, or at least the idea of it, found Ten Broeck again. On April 28, 1877, he remarried to Mary Smith Newcomb, a woman 44 years his junior. The marriage produced one child, Richard Ten Broeck, Jr., but was plagued by mistrust, incessant arguments, and eventual abandonment by Mary. Estranged from his wife and son, Ten Broeck moved to California, chasing the horse racing scene that was booming in the west.
There he bought five acres in San Mateo, on the outskirts of San Francisco, and built a modest home he named “Hermitage.” In the kitchen, a small wood table with one chair functioned for meals. His bed propped against a wall in the same room. On a nightstand, books piled high telling of horse racing stories and statistics. The only grand items — fitted so oddly in this dilapidated structure — were the silver and gold racing trophies that had followed Ten Broeck his entire turf career.
Although he had bought a few horses, he did nothing with them. He chose instead to allow them to contentedly graze as he watched from the comfort of an oversized chair he had dragged onto the porch. From there he spent hours leafing through the sporting pages or writing “to do” lists for his hired help — lists he constantly revised. As quiet as his life had become, so uneventful and absent from important happenings, Ten Broeck was happy deep in that little valley on the planked porch of his Hermitage. Writing to an English friend, he said it was “a place where a man might live forever.”
The burdens of survival and financing Mary and his son soon set in. His once great wealth had now been depleted by his previously lavish lifestyle, years of high-risk gambling, and promotion of racehorses. To keep himself afloat he purportedly wrote turf opinions for The San Francisco Call. If so, he never affixed his name to the reports. Now, elderly and alone, and lacking funds to hire help, Ten Broeck cooked his own meals, washed his clothes on a scrub board, and tidied the home the best he could. One by one he sold his horses, taking them away from their meadow and walking them solitarily down the road. He still sat on the porch, but the smattering of newspapers no longer spread around the foot of his chair. His vision had clouded, and he found his way by fumbling and feeling for the sanctuary of familiar objects. He likely never read the sporting pages of the Call wherein his long-ago jockey Gilpatrick recalled Lexington: “He was a better horse than Boston, just because he was quite as rapid and had a good deal better temper. He was one horse in a million.”
On June 27, 1892, at the age of 80, Ten Broeck stood alone on a street corner in San Francisco near the Palace Hotel. He held two books showing them to passersby who hurriedly brushed him aside as a lunatic panhandler. These were valuable books, he said, in which he had scribbled notes about how to race horses. Ten dollars, he mumbled over and over, just ten dollars. A fellow turf writer saw him there, approached him, withdrew the money, and gave it to Ten Broeck. Reportedly, tears welled in his eyes as he handed over the books, turned and walked away.
One month later on July 31, Ten Broeck ambled into an appraiser's store in San Francisco and arranged to have his racing trophies inventoried. The last of his valuables. Irreplaceable items. Surely these trophies could fetch him enough money to live for a year.
On August 2 in the late morning, Ten Broeck took off his coat, and folding it neatly, laid it on his oversized chair on the porch. He stepped inside his Hermitage and without closing the front door, lay down on his bed. At eleven o'clock in the morning, the trophy appraiser arrived, and seeing the coat on the chair and the door half open, called for Richard Ten Broeck. Hearing no answer, he entered the small home and found the turfman dead and cold, his hands crossed peacefully over his chest.
The pioneer turfman whose exploits once thrilled the American press was again recognized fondly and with appreciation. Articles appeared daily over a two-week span across the nation and in Great Britain. All from people who knew him, who chose to remember him in his prime, who wrote about his “unblemished character as a sportsman,” and who recalled with gratitude all his endeavors to elevate the sport of horse racing.
The Louisville Courier Journal wrote, “Richard Ten Broeck was a man who would hold on at any time against the frowns of fortune, and so he stayed until two nations were electrified by his victory in the Cesarewitch.”
The Charlotte Observer wrote: “He was easy, graceful, and erect in form and figure. He might have been a commander of an army or occupant of a throne for wherever he appeared he was easily the master of the situation.”
Eight days after his death, Ten Broeck's remains arrived by rail in Louisville. A single horse-drawn hearse delivered him to Christ Church Cathedral on South Second Street. The casket was placed under the rays shining down through the stained-glass dome and adorned simplistically with red and white carnations. There was no homage to his orange and black silks. No racing paraphernalia, silver trophies, or portrait of Lexington propped on an easel. What little funds remained Ten Broeck paid for his transport, funeral, and burial. He lay there alone.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, the sidewalk in front of Christ Church was barren except for the single-horse hearse. Inside, Rev. C.E. Craik walked to the pulpit and looked out at his audience. Despite the fact Ten Broeck's life and successes were so newsworthy, less than 30 people sat sporadically in the pews.
After the ceremony, the hearse took Ten Broeck to Cave Hill Cemetery. Pallbearers hovered over his casket and spoke parting words of their friend's integrity and courage, and, as Ten Broeck would have expected, a few humorous stories about his fantastic life.
At Cave Hill, the grave lies on a hill surrounded by incredible beauty. Higher up, directly behind his grave, stands a life-sized, bronzed elk, oxidized now to mint green patina. The elk was placed there on May 17, 1891, as a dedication to members of the local Elks Rest Lodge. The Shawnee Native American tribe call the elk “wapiti.” According to them, the wapiti symbolizes the courage to walk directly into another phase of life. To the Lakota tribe, elks symbolize endurance, perseverance, and strength. This bronzed elk stands majestic in frozen form, his head held high, boldly facing whatever has eternally roused his attention.
About the Author
Kim Wickens grew up in Dallas, Texas, and practiced as a criminal defense lawyer in New Mexico for twenty years. She subsequently turned her attention to writing, which she studied at Kenyon College, and has devoted the last several years to researching this book. She lives with her husband and son in Lexington, Kentucky, where she trains in dressage with her three horses.
Read more about Ten Brocek and his great horse Lexington in her book LEXINGTON: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America's Legendary Racehorse, available via Ballantine Books.
The post Owner Of Famed Stallion Lexington Survived Brush With Death, Paved The Way For American Runners In England appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
