LEXINGTON

Spirited biography of a famed thoroughbred.

Wickens, a former attorney and current trainer, explores the life of the steed at the center of Geraldine Brooks’ superb novel Horse. Wickens capably covers a considerable amount of historical ground. To start, she sets a context that may not be well known to readers: the 19th-century American mania for horse racing and its “tests of courage, strength, and stamina.” The stamina part is key; as the author notes, the longest race today, the Belmont Stakes, is less than half the length of the longest courses of the past. Against this picture stands Lexington, who was born in 1850 and came into the orbit of a wheeler-dealer whose racing syndicate made a sizable fortune—Wickens reckons it as being the equivalent of $1,724,000 today—in just seven races. Lexington was then put out to stud, and there his accomplishments were even more profound. “By 1872,” writes the author, “he had been listed as America’s leading sire for eleven consecutive years,” and many of his hundreds of offspring went on to become champion racers themselves. By the author’s reckoning, of the 13 thoroughbreds that have won the Triple Crown, most recently Justify in 2018, 12 of them had Lexington as an ancestor; Man o’ War, Seattle Slew, Secretariat, and Seabiscuit were all in his bloodline. Other of Lexington’s offspring figured differently in history. George Armstrong Custer rode one into battle at the Little Bighorn, and the Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his gang stole several from a breeder’s barn in Kentucky, where Quantrill met his end. As to Lexington’s end, his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian, where for many years it was hidden in an unvisited attic until finally being restored to public view, then later transferred to the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky.

Fans of horse racing and American history alike will enjoy this lively story.