Strub had created the race at the perfect moment. States all over the nation were relegalizing racing under the parimutuel system, resulting in a 70 percent increase in the number of tracks. Racing was rapidly becoming far and away America’s most heavily attended sport. From 1934 on, millions of new racing fans turned their eyes to Santa Anita to see who would claim Strub’s pot. The hundred-grander became an overnight classic. Everyone wanted to win it. Including Charles and Marcela Howard.
Perhaps it was Giannini’s urging, perhaps the example of Bing Crosby, who was investing heavily in racehorses, or maybe the spellbinding vision of the track their money had built. Whatever the reason, the Howards, especially Marcela, hung their hearts on winning the big race. In 1935, shortly after San Francisco’s new Bay Meadows Racecourse opened, Howard assembled a group of modestly talented racehorses and hired a crack young trainer named Buster Millerick to condition them. The stable was registered under Marcela’s name. She designed the silks that would become legendary: crimson-and-white cap, white sleeves, and a crimson vest emblazoned with the Ridgewood cattle brand, an H inside a large white triangle. The horses were fairly good, but Howard had his sights on better things. That summer, he and Marcela bought fifteen yearlings at a Saratoga, New York, auction. In keeping with his love of lost causes, Howard bought only the worst-looking horses at the sale, animals who lingered in the ring, attracting few, if any, bids. Millerick was a very good young trainer, but for his new yearlings and the hundred-grander-caliber horses he planned to have soon, Howard wanted the best. In 1935 he went looking for him.
Several hundred miles south of Charles Howard’s estate, an old horseman named Tom Smith was spending 1935 at a Mexican racetrack, living on a cot in a horse stall. He was a stark man, square-built, with a hard mouth. Ever since he had materialized at the track from somewhere on the frontier—no one knew exactly where—none of the racetrackers had known what to make of him.
As a general rule, Smith didn’t talk. He had a habit of walking away when anyone asked him questions, and he avoided social gatherings because people expected him to speak. A journalist who had watched Smith for years described him thus: “He nods hello, shakes hands goodbye, and hasn’t said a hundred words in all.” One man swore that he had seen Smith accidentally chop off his own toe with an axe; the sum of Smith’s response had been to shake the amputated digit out of his boot and say, “My toe.” The men on the backstretch assumed that anyone who made such a point of saying so little had to have something to hide, something shady or, perhaps, something immodestly valiant. They filled his biographical vacuum with suitably large Wild West myths: knocked-over banks, rodeo stardom, daring exploits in the Indian wars. None of it was true, but it made for good, salty rumor, and it made Smith pleasingly terrifying. The truth about Smith was a lot more interesting, but he never let anyone in on his secrets.
He was fifty-six but he looked much older. His jaw had a recalcitrant jut to it that implied a run-in with something—an errant hoof or an ill-placed fence post—but maybe it was the only shape in which it could have been drawn. He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility. On the rare occasions when he took off his gray felt fedora, you had to look hard at his threadbare head to tell where his gray hair ended and his gray skin began. When photographed hatless, he had an unsettling tendency to blend with the sky, so that his eyes hung disembodied in space. Some photographers gave up and drew his head into the picture by hand, guessing at his outline. When they were lucky enough to catch him head-on, all his features but that big shovel of a jaw vanished in the shade of his hat brim, so that all that appeared above his mouth were his spectacles, the lenses reflecting the photographer’s image back at him. Smith almost never looked at cameras anyway. He was always looking at his horses.
He appeared to have reached the end of the road. His training stable consisted of just one horse who would never be better than ordinary. The old cowboy ate his meals alone in the track kitchen and spent the rest of his time with the horse. For a time he provoked a smattering of discussion over ham-and-egg breakfasts on the backstretch benches. Eventually, the racetrackers grew accustomed to his silence, and he was forgotten.
In Tom Smith’s younger days, the Indians would watch him picking his way over the open plains, skirting the mustang herds. He was always alone, even back then, in the waning days of the nineteenth century. He talked to virtually no one but his horses, and then only in their vernacular of small gestures and soft sounds. The Indians called him “Lone Plainsman.” White men called him “Silent Tom.” People merely brushed up against him. Only the horses seemed to know him well.
They had been the quiet study of his life. He had grown up in a world in which horsemanship was as essential as breathing. Born with a prodigy’s intuitive understanding of the animals, he had devoted himself to them so wholeheartedly that he was incomplete without them. By nature or by exposure he had become like them, in their understatement, their blunt assertion of will. In the company of men, Smith was clipped and bristling. With horses, he was gracefully at ease.
His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow. He came from the prairies, where he had tamed countless mustangs for the British cavalry’s effort in the Boer War. Before that, his career with horses stretched back to boyhood, with stints as a deer hunter, sheep-ranch foreman, mountain-lion tracker. In childhood, he rode in the last of the great cattle drives; at thirteen, he was already a skilled horse breaker. The wheres and whens are lost, but always there were horses and empty land. He had a wife, but her presence seems to have been detected only by inference: A son named Jimmy turned up later in Smith’s company, prompting his friends to conclude that the boy “must have come from somewhere.”
As the century turned he rode out of the wilderness and into Grand Junction, Colorado. He was in his early twenties. The British cavalry didn’t need him anymore, so he had been forced to leave the mustangs and find a new job. He and his horse strayed onto the vast continuity of Colorado’s Unaweep Cattle Range. He had heard that a ranch needed a foreman.
He won the job and stayed for twenty years. He was a jack-of-all-trades, breaking the sturdy little cow ponies, treating their injuries and illnesses, trimming their hooves, and bending over an anvil to forge their shoes. He lived day and night in their company, warming himself against their skin as he wandered over the range, sleeping at their feet under the Colorado mountains.
Change was coming. As Smith passed his days in the Unaweep, the West that had formed him was making a long, painful retreat. Modernity, led by the automobile, was perforating the frontier. Horses, and all the ways of life that had grown up around them, were slowly being pushed out. Perhaps on his rare sojourns into civilization, Smith had passed the Howard Automobile Company dealerships springing up. He didn’t need to see them to know that there was less and less use for skills like his. All around him, men were redefining themselves for the new world, and a vast pool of knowledge and tradition was evaporating. A myth of what the frontier had been, the Wild West legend, was taking hold in the popular imagination, and it would not be long before people defined Smith by it.
People around him moved on, but Smith stayed where he was for a little longer, quietly becoming a relic. He knew no other life, and probably could imagine none. His mind had been shaped
