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Author Catharine Melin-Moser recreates the thrilling Gilded-Age Montana era and restores a significant and thoroughly captivating chapter to American Thoroughbred racing history.
In Gilded-Age Montana, three former frontiersmen turned from speculation in minerals to speculation in Thoroughbred horses. Silver baron Noah Armstrong, pioneer banker Samuel Larabie, and “Copper King” Marcus Daly, each pursued his passion for horses studied pedigrees, imported blue-blooded stock and turned them loose on native grasses under Montana's big sky. Where one observer saw "verist madness" in the enterprise, another sports journalist foresaw a not-too-distant day when Montana would "rival the worlds of old Yorkshire and the Blue-Grass region of Kentucky in the fame and celebrity of its racehorses." And indeed, in due time the Montana horsemen were fielding equine stars like Spokane, winner of the 1889 Kentucky Derby; Scottish Chieftain, winner in the 1897 Belmont Stakes; and Ogden, the "Horse of Mystery" that rocked the eastern racing establishment by taking the 1896 Futurity at odds of 150 to 1.
When Montana Outraced the East: The Reign of Western Thoroughbreds, 1886-1900 retrieves the largely forgotten late nineteenth-century golden age of the Montana Thoroughbred industry, when Montana horses won some of the biggest prizes in American horse racing and threatening to reshape the balance of power within America’s oldest sport. Author Catharine Melin-Moser recreates the thrilling era and restores a significant and thoroughly captivating chapter to American Thoroughbred racing history.
