 |
Out of Left Field |
|
The Mystery of Paul Revere’s Horse |
 Was Paul Revere riding "Silver," "Trigger," "Champion," "Rosinante"? The quest for truth continues... |
Do you recall the name
of the nag he rode to fame?
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
During this week of the 128th anniversary of Paul Revere’s
famous ride my thoughts turn anew to what has long been a burning
question for me: What was the name of Revere’s horse?
Think about it. We celebrate Stymie, Citation, Secretariat and
such as Trigger and Silver, but we don’t know the name of
this great horse. Hence the pursuit here of the name of an important,
yet overlooked figure in the history of the republic.
For those not quite up on the details of this significant matter,
a pause for a review.
Revere was an on-call messenger for the American colonies. As
immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul
Revere’s Ride” (it is full of inaccuracies, but it
is a helluva public relations coup for Revere) our hero was a
40-year-old silversmith. He was taken in a rowboat on the night
of April 18, 1785, across the Charles River from Boston to Charlestown.
He took off on a borrowed horse of Deacon Larkin and rode almost
13 miles toward Concord, warning colonists along the way that
the British were coming. He was captured outside of Lexington
where a British major ordered him to give his horse to a sergeant.
“I dismounted,” Revere wrote in one of his three diaries,
“the Sarjint mounted on my horse…and they told me they
should make use of my horse for the night, and rode off down
the road.” The noble beast disappeared into the British
army and was never heard from again.
We know from the diaries that he “got a horse of Deacon
Larkin…I set off upon a very good horse,” he wrote.
That’s all we know. My research has not nailed down the
name of the horse, but it has disproved names that were made
up out of the cloth or mistakenly handed down through the years
with no particular verification.
Scheherazade was a name given to the horse in a children’s
story that had no basis in fact. Sparks comes from the lines
in Longfellow’s poem noting “the spark struck out by
the steed that night.” Dobbin was used by one lazy historian
hardly worthy of his craft. Peg and Thunderer also have been
ruled out as having no documentation.
My pursuit has taken me to various venues. I felt I was almost
in the horse’s mouth when I visited the Massachusetts State
Archives in Boston. They told me that the name of Revere’s
horse was the question most often asked by children.
The people there gave me a pained look when I mentioned Revere’s
horse. I was turned over to Leo Flaherty, the head archivist.
He said, “If only people would pay as much attention to
important matters as they do to unimportant ones.”
This did not go down well with me you can be sure. I said, “Gee,
if kids can get interested in history by learning the name of
Paul Revere’s horse then they could go to the so-called
important things.”
I have learned that not only kids want to know the name. James
A. Rhodes, the onetime mayor of Columbus who went on to become
Governor of Ohio, wrote these lines when he was mayor:
“Deep under the sod of New England’s hills,
Historians are sleeping with tongues so still;
Silent by time are these lifeless lips;
To us they willed a million manuscripts,
That honor a man and worship his deed,
His ride they record but forget his steed,
Wake up historians! Have you no remorse?
Tell us what became of Paul Revere’s horse.
Tell us what became
of this gallant horse
After he finished his courageous course.
Can’t you recall or remember his name,
Or tell us his color from tail to mane?
How did he die or where was he buried?
To your grave these secrets you have carried.
If you historians cannot trust his source
We Americans will call him
‘Freedom’s Horse.’ "
My pursuit led me as well
to the Public Record Office at Kew outside London. I came upon
the handwritten diary of the “Sarjint” who had taken
Revere’s horse. It was a bit of a trial to decipher his
handwriting on the parchment, but I could conclude that he made
no mention of being given a name when handed the horse by Revere.
Upon thinking about it, that was a logical dead end because the
horse was a borrowed one. It was unlikely Revere would have known
its name and even if he had been told it by Larkin, it is unlikely
he would have passed the name on to the British.
The trail led back to the Deacon Larkin, the owner of the horse.
He, if anybody, would have known the name. That led to the one
legitimate claim for the name of the horse. That name is: Brown
Beauty.
This comes from a thin book entitled “Some Descendants of
Edward Larkin” (Knickerbocker Press, 1930) by William Ensign
Lincoln. It states, “Samuel Larkin, born Oct. 22, 1701,
died Oct. 8, 1784; he was a chairmaker, then a fisherman and
had horses and stable. He was the owner of Brown Beauty, the
mare of Paul Revere’s ride…The mare was loaned at the
request of Samuel Larkin’s son, Deacon John Larkin, and
was never returned to her owner.”
The book was called to my attention by George Vincent, now deceased,
I think, and I was able to read the citation from the book which
is at the New York Public Library.
Historian David Hackett Fischer in his book “Paul Revere’s
Ride” makes a strong case for Brown Beauty. He calls Lincoln,
“the genealogist of the Larkin family” and relies on
the thin book I noted above. He said it was “an excellent
specimen of a New England saddlehorse--big strong and very fast.”
That should be the end of it, shouldn’t it? But the name
Brown Beauty…. Doesn’t that ring a little too pat,
too much like Black Beauty?. At one point the name came up as
Brown Betty, which the historians ruled out as a typo for Brown
Beauty.
Maybe it is Brown Beauty. But a little part of me says it is
not quite time to quit this pursuit. I shall continue to ride
off in all directions if necessary to run down any more leads
to the name of the great horse.
I must confess there was one person who didn’t give a damn
for the horse or Paul Revere. That was Joe E. Lewis, the pixieish
comedian and degenerate horse player. He said he disliked Revere
because he “gave one of history’s bad rides. He took
the horse wide at Lexington.”
©2003 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Stan Isaacs. To send an
email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |