Taking a Ride Down Racing's Historical Highway

As the cultural commentator and hardcore racing fan Charles Pierce would say, “History is so cool.” A trip through the list of stakes events to be run across the U.S. this weekend attests to that fact. Horse racing revels in its obsession with historical memorabilia by giving legs to names that otherwise might be little more than obscure regional footnotes. For instance— The San Marcos Stakes (G2T), on Saturday at Santa Anita Park, is named for a Spanish land grant in what became northern San Diego County called Rancho Vallecitos de San Marcos. The first running in 1952 was won by 1950 Horse of the Year Hill Prince, joined later by champions Round Table, Cougar II, and John Henry. “San Marcos” needs no introduction, having his own book of the New Testament. “Vallecitos” means “little valleys,” which were originally inhabited by the Luiseno tribes, a name given them by the invading Spaniards. Slavery and European diseases nearly wiped out the Luisenos, but karma’s attempt at balancing the books finds surviving branches of Luiseno tribes owning successful San Diego County casinos in Rincon, Pauma, and Pala. Also out West on Saturday, 3-year-olds will run 7 furlongs in the San Vicente Stakes (G2), one of the original featured events of the first Santa Anita meet in 1935. The quality of the race has held up well through the decades with winners like Swaps, Majestic Prince, Ancient Title, Silver Charm and, more recently, Nyquist and Nadal. The San Vicente for which the race is named was attached to another Spanish land grant that included parts of the modern Santa Monica and West Los Angeles. History is replete with saints named Vicente, or Vincent, including a horseplayer portrayed by Bill Murray in the 2014 film “St. Vincent.” San Vicente Boulevard is one of the longest, weirdest major thoroughfares in L.A., cutting diagonally across some of the most valuable real estate in North America. On to Aqueduct Racetrack, which will offer the Withers Stakes (G3) Saturday, named for David Dunham Withers, a driving 19th century force in East Coast racing and master of historic Brookdale Farm in New Jersey. Withers is a fascinating fellow with a biography entertainingly condensed in a Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred article from 2013 by Cindy Deubler, which noted that Withers would never name a horse until it ran, and changed trainers and jockeys more often than his socks. Among the riders Withers dressed down and then fired for a losing race was Willie Simms, who was only 20 at the time but on his way to a Hall of Fame career. The name of Simms undoubtedly will be summoned during this African-American History Month, along with those of Isaac Murphy, Jimmy Winkfield, Shelby Barnes, Oliver Lewis, and other Black American jockeys of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There is a lot of good reading on the subject, but start with I Dedicate This Ride, by former Kentucky poet laureate Frank X Walker and go from there. On the face of it, the Suwannee River Stakes (G3T) on Saturday at Gulfstream Park brings to mind nothing more than the meandering waterway of north Florida flowing out of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. The name most likely derived from the presence on the river of the mission San Juan de Guacara—Guacara being the local tribal name for the body of water, and “Suwannee” representing a slurring of “San Juan,” aka St. John of the Gospels. The race was first run in 1947 and has a history dotted with such notable winners as Airmans Guide, Old Hat, Honey Fox, Just a Game, and, just last year, Starship Jubilee. However, it is hard to untangle the name of the river from the Stephen Foster song originally titled “Old Folks at Home,” written in 1851 for performance by white minstrels in blackface. In 1935, by then more commonly called “Swanee River,” Foster’s tune was adopted by Florida as the state song with original lyrics intact. Look ’em up for a right old cringe. Anyway, just as Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” eventually had to be cleansed of its antebellum slave patois to be sung on a big day at Churchill Downs, “Swanee River” underwent a translation that when performed today brings to mind nothing more than your Brooklyn grandmother’s desire to retire to Ft. Lauderdale. Finally, to Oaklawn Park and Saturday’s running of the King Cotton Stakes, a six-furlong race which is not, contrary to popular belief, a tribute to Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s nickname during his career as a center with his hometown Dardanelle High School Sand Lizards. “King Cotton” was the focus-group tested talking point used by the pro-secessionists of the American South leading up to the Civil War to assure skeptics that their primary agricultural crop would support their independence from the United States—as long as it could continue to be generated by slave labor. The South’s leaders rolled the dice hoping England would come to their aid to protect the cotton trade, but that didn’t happen. As a lesson regarding the failed dependency on a one-crop system based on forced labor, maintaining a race named the King Cotton has its merits. That lesson has been pretty much learned, though, so maybe it’s time to shift gears to Sen. Cotton, or just rename it after local star Whitmore. Now there’s a real king.