Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5
When an Oxford, Indiana, store-keeper named Dan Messner, Jr., paid the outlandish fee of $150 to have a broken-down mare called Zelica bred to a champion pacer named Joe Patchen, yet untested as a stud, his friends and fellow horsemen thought he’d taken leave of his senses. And when the colt was foaled in April 1896, Messner probably agreed with them. Little Dan Patch—“Dan” for himself, “Patch” for his sire—just didn’t look like a horse with potential. His knees were too knobby, his legs too long, his hocks curved. And unlike his ill-tempered sire, he actually seemed fond of people right from the start, a bad sign in a racehorse.
“I thought all he would be good for would be hauling a delivery wagon,” Messner said years later. “Fortunately, Johnny Wattles, a livery-stable proprietor of Oxford, saw possibilities in Dan as he began to mature. He asked me to turn the colt over to him for training purposes.”
The first two times Wattles harnessed Dan to a racing sulky the horse kicked out the spokes of the left wheel. The trainer and owner wondered if his sire’s temper wasn’t coming out after all. It was Wattles who figured out the cause of the seeming violence: at full stride, Dan’s crooked left hock threw his hoof out too far to the side. Henceforward he pulled custom sulkies with axles eight inches longer than standard, and with a wooden rim on the left wheel, so he would do himself no harm if he happened to kick it.
Once the sulky problem was solved, Dan scarcely needed coaching on his pacing gait. (When a horse trots, the legs on either side move in opposite directions; when it paces, the legs on either side move in the same direction. In turf parlance, pacers are side-wheelers.) Dan required neither hobbles—a kind of equine suspenders used to promote the pacing gait—nor blinders. He was a natural-born pacer.
“Wattles worked wonders with the colt,” Messner said, “but even under Johnny’s careful tutoring, Dan was four years old before I thought he was worth entrance fees in a race. Dan quickly convinced me I was wrong in my judgment by winning a dozen races in fairly fast company.
“It was then that [M. E.] Sturgis offered me $20,000 for Dan, and I grabbed it.”
Sturgis, a professional gambler from Buffalo, New York, owned Dan through the remainder of his brief, amazing, competitive career. Dan started in fifty-six qualifying heats and failed to finish first in only two, and then because of faulty driving strategies. He won nineteen races altogether, with no defeats. When other horse owners refused to race against Dan, and track owners objected to the dearth of betting when he appeared on a racing form, Sturgis and Myron McHenry (the premier sulky driver of the day) pitted Dan against the clock. It