Book Alert / Crazy Good

Crazy Good -- The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most  Famous Horse in America by Charles Leerhsen, Simon & Schuster '08, $26, 353 pages, ISBN #0743291778. Index, no bibliography or source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

In Meredith Wilson's celebrated Broadway musical, The Music Man, the mesmerizing snakeoil salesman Harold Hill lectures the denizens of River City, Iowa, about iniquities pervading their town and asks whether they'd "Like to see some stuck-up jockey boy sitting on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil, I should say." As a cast member in a community production years ago, I got the sense that Dan Patch was a racehorse but never heard a word about him before or since.

Until Charles Leerhsen came along, that is, to tell the story of the equine who, he claims, was once the most famous horse in America. For in the early years of the 20th century, Dan Patch grew from pulling a grocer's wagon in Oxford, Indiana; to learning he could win horse races at county fairs, to becoming wildly popular as a harness racer.

In spite of a crippled leg that nearly led his owner to euthanize him, Dan Patch was born at exactly the right time, in the heyday of harness racing. A decade later, Indianans would flock to the new Indianapolis Speedway to watch races by machines, not animals. But at a time when baseball's Ty Cobb earned $12,000 a year, making him the sport's highest paid player, Dan Patch earned more than $1 million a year.

Yet Harold Hill may have had a point. Horse racing in those days "attracted hustlers, cheats and touts." Race were often fixed and horses were sometimes drugged with whiskey or cocaine. "Dan's original owner was intimidated into selling him, and America's favorite horse spent the second half of his career touring the country in a plush private railroad car and putting on speed shows for crowds that sometimes exceeded 100,000 people." So quickly did cars replace horses as the national passion that when Dan Patch died in 1916, he was all but forgotten and was buried in an unmarked grave.