Wimpy P-1

On 19 May 2020 the American Quarter Horse Association issued registration number 6,000,000. Six million horses, each with a certificate, each with a name of twenty characters or fewer, each with a number that goes up by one from the horse before. I have written about the breed and I have written about its rulebook more than is probably healthy, but I had never stopped to ask the obvious question, which is who was number one, and how on earth you decide.

The answer is that they held a horse show.

A Room in Fort Worth

The association was born on 15 March 1940 at the Fort Worth Club, during the stock show, when a young man called Bob Denhardt gathered seventy-five ranchers and breeders in a room and presented a charter he had modelled on the one used by the National Horse and Mule Association, which I mention only because I enjoy knowing that the world’s largest breed registry started out as a photocopy of the mule people’s paperwork. The purpose was to collect, record and preserve the pedigrees of a horse that had been doing ranch work for a century without anyone writing any of it down.

They had to decide what a Quarter Horse was, and the minutes from that April are wonderful: all Quarter Horses must be able to run a quarter mile in twenty-three seconds, or show that they are capable of Quarter Horse performance under ranch conditions. That is a breed standard. Run fast or be useful. The name itself comes from the quarter mile, the distance colonial farmers in the Carolinas and Virginia raced their horses, usually down the main street of whatever village they were in, and I had already repeated that origin on this blog before I found the registry’s own page saying so.

Then they did something clever. Nobody had a number yet, and ranchers are not natural joiners, so the founders announced that registration number one would be held back for a year and given to whichever stallion was grand champion at the Fort Worth show in 1941. Bring your horse and you might go home with the first page of the stud book. In the meantime they registered 347 horses in that first year, every one of them inspected and approved in person, so the first horse registered was never going to be the first horse numbered. That is a distinction I find oddly satisfying.

The Class

Fort Worth, 1941. The judge was Jim Minnick. The ring steward was Bob Denhardt himself, which tells you how small the whole thing still was. Fourth into the ring came a 1937 chestnut stallion from King Ranch, led by a man called Lauro Cavazos, and his name was Wimpy.

Nobody seems to have written down why. He stood 15 hands and weighed 1,200 pounds, so it was not that. King Ranch had bred him by putting a stallion called Solis to a mare called Panda, and both of those were children of the ranch’s foundation sire, Old Sorrel, which made Wimpy Old Sorrel’s grandson on both sides at once. The ranch was so pleased with the result that they wrote it up in a genetics journal and put the inbreeding at 12.5 per cent, which is the kind of thing a ranch does when it has a lot of horses and a scientific turn of mind.

Minnick placed him first, over Silvertone, Red Jacket, Little Joe Jr., Top Flight and Silver Dawn, and the P-1 was his. The P stood for Permanent, as opposed to T for Tentative, which was the registry’s way of saying we like your horse but we have not finished checking. The distinction was abolished in 1962 and every horse since has just had a number. The show’s own records of the class were destroyed the following year when floodwater got into the coliseum offices, and the man who went looking for them was told they had turned to mush. So the first page of the stud book rests on the memory of the people who were there, which is roughly how the whole breed had worked up to then.

Nineteen Others

Number one was a prize. Numbers two to nineteen were handed out to stallions the founders thought best represented the type, and became known as the foundation sires: Rialto, Joe Reed, Joe Bailey, Chief, Oklahoma Star, and so on down to Yellow Boy at eighteen and Tomate Laureles at nineteen. Number twenty went to the first president’s own horse, a stallion called Pancho, which is the sort of thing a first president is entitled to. King Ranch had three of the twenty, all Old Sorrel’s, and the first stud book, published in 1941, listed 537 horses in total.

Old Sorrel deserves his own paragraph. In 1915 Bob Kleberg sent his cousin Caesar to a neighbour called George Clegg to buy a colt, and Caesar picked a sorrel by a horse called Hickory Bill out of a Thoroughbred mare. The price was $125, and Clegg walked the mare and foal the twenty-five miles to the ranch headquarters himself. The Kineños, the Mexican ranch hands, just called him el Alazán, the sorrel, and when he got old, el Alazán Viejo. Kleberg said he was the best cow horse he ever rode. In 1921 they put him to fifty of the best working mares on the place to see what would happen, and what happened is that a hundred and ten years later every horse on King Ranch still descends from him, and a bronze of his grandson stands at the bottom of the steps outside the registry’s front door in Amarillo, where people drop off their paperwork.

What Happened to Wimpy

He went home and did the job. A hundred and seventy-four registered foals, most of them kept on the ranch, which is what a King Ranch stallion is for. In 1958, when he was twenty-one, Kleberg gave him back to George Clegg as a present, a tribute from one horseman to the one who had sold him the grandfather forty years before. Clegg sold him on a year later to an oilman called Rex Cauble, and the registry’s own account says he sired a few more foals and then died at 22, knee-deep in clover. He is buried in Leon County, Texas. His last foal was registered as P-139,515.

One to a hundred and thirty-nine thousand in a single horse’s lifetime. The first million took until 1974. When the second million came round in 1983, King Ranch went and bought the certificate, because, as Tio Kleberg put it, since they had number one they ought to have the next milestone as well. The filly was named Two Million, and on her mother’s side she traced back to Wimpy. There is no number 1,000,000, by the way. The committee held it back, and the horse after 999999 is 1000001. I do not know why and I have decided I do not want to.

The Name Is Taken

Which brings me to the paperwork rule I enjoy most. Twenty characters, including spaces, because, the registry cheerfully admits, its computer systems are not programmed to allow more. The most storied naming tradition in western riding, the one I wrote about in the Metallic Cat post, fits its family trees into twenty characters because somebody set a field width in a database in Amarillo and nobody ever changed it.

And the original rule said a name could never be used twice. Living or dead, if a registered horse had carried it, it was gone. That was softened years ago: a name can now be reused once the horse is dead, provided it never showed, never raced, never won anything and never bred. The registry’s own article explaining the change ends with a sentence I have read several times for pleasure. Don’t get your hopes up, it says. Wimpy P-1 is not available.

Six million horses, and one name they will not give back. I think that is exactly right. I would also very much like to know whether King Ranch has already put a deposit down on number seven million, and I suspect I know the answer.