Windt im Wald Farm
Geauga County, Northeast
Ohio
since 1995
Articles of History:
A Teenager's Dream
TRIPOLI
by Pat Payne of Asil Arabians, Chino California
all right reserved
Arabian Horse News August 1972
Last February, at our Arabian Horse Association
of Southern California meeting, I received a real surprise and
treat. Bill Ainley showed us some movies one of his relatives
had taken at the Kellogg ranch in the mid-1930's.
Here were those old time greats *RASEYN
597 under English saddle, FARANA
708 going through his stock horse routine,
RALET 759 free
jumping, ROSSIKA
659, the trick horse, pushing her baby carriage, and the liberty
drill team spelling out "K E L L O G G
"
As much as I enjoyed seeing all these
long gone greats, my real thrill was seeing
JADAAN 196 with his rider in Arabian
costume. JADAAN
brought back memories of my first visit to
Kelloggs well over 30 years ago.
During those depression days of the 1930's
we had horses -- the $50 kind. One of our friends had a half-Morgan,
and that was a big deal. The total of all registered Arabians
was less than 1,500, with about half of those dead. You can
see how rare a real Arabian was in those days. Some of the circuses
were still calling spotted horses Arabians. The general horse
public had very little real knowledge of Arabian horses.
The Kellogg ranch did a wonderful job
of introducing the Arabian horse to the southern California
area. You couldn't be involved with horses for too long without
hearing about Kelloggs and their Arabians.
When I was nine years old, I made my
first trip to Kelloggs. I was very excited about seeing real
Arabian horses. I don't know what I expected, but somehow I
was disappointed to see what looked to me like regular horses
doing the same things I had seen other regular horses do at
horse shows and circuses. Oh, sure, they were fat and slick
and they seemed to carry their tails much higher than most horses
I had seen, but they didn't look like the paintings.
JADAAN
restored my faith that there really was such a thing
as an Arabian horse when he came charging into the ring with
robes flying in the air. He looked like what I thought an Arabian
should look like. I didn't even notice whether the rider had
on glasses or a wrist watch; I knew I was seeing a real Arabian
horse.
We made many trips to Kelloggs over the
next few years. I came to appreciate the fact that these other
regular horses were also Arabians and had those characteristics
distinctive to the breed.
I then learned that the ancestors, for
the most part, of these former regular horses, had come from
England, while JADAAN's
sire had come from the desert of Arabia. I knew I had
been right all the time. JADAAN
was a real Arabian and those regular horses were imposters.
How could Arabians come from England? To a 10- or 12-year-old
kid this was a confusing state of affairs.
As I became more interested in Arabians,
I found that our Arabians in America had come from many places,
including England, France, Poland, Spain, Egypt, and that there
also had been an importation of 27 horses direct from the desert
of Arabia to America in 1906. This importation was made by
Homer
Davenport and thus these horses are referred to as "Davenports."
I would recommend Homer Davenport's book, My Quest of the
Arabian Horse, to all those who are interested in the background
of the Arabian horse. I find this book very interesting, as
Davenport goes into considerable detail as to just what qualities
the Bedouin horse breeders valued in their horses. These comments
are invaluable to those who want to produce the authentic Bedouin-type
Arabian horse.
During the 1940's I was in my teens and
growing up with horses. When we had visitors to our ranch such
as Carl Raswan, John
Douthit or Jimmy Wrench, the talk always got around to the Davenport
horses.
Carl knew many of the original Davenport
horses, having purchased from
Peter Bradley, the man who financed Davenport's trip, a
group of these pure Davenports, including JADAAN.
Carl also purchased two more groups of pure Davenports
from F. E. Lewis which included LETAN
86 and ANTEZ
448. These horses all came
to California in the early 1920's and that is why most of the
present-day pure Davenports trace to California breeders.
By the 1940's most of the pure Davenports
were scattered across the country and either no or very little
attempt had been made to perpetuate the pure Davenport breeding.
John Douthit had GAMIL
1427 (Kasar 707 - Schilan 706). GAMIL,
one of the most beautiful of the pure Davenport mares,
produced IBN
HANAD
4165. Jimmy
Wrench was trying to collect a herd of pure Davenport horses.
While Jimmy was able to get a few mares, he never was able to
find a stallion that suited him.
In those days, things Arabians were far
different from what they are now. We had no Arabian magazines,
not even Arabian shows until 1946. Breeding Arabians was more
a matter of convenience then. Very few people could take the
effort to trailer a mare any distance to a stallion. Of course,
during the war years, there was the problem of gasoline, and,
even after the war, horse trailers were not at all as common
as they are today. In order to locate horses of a particular
bloodline, such as pure Davenports, you would take the stud
book and start with the imported horse and check all their offspring
and their offspring's offspring, making certain that the horses
they were bred to were of the desired bloodline. We did have
one advantage, though. All the horses were in one stud book.
Jimmy Wrench was the best tracer of Davenport
horses, as his job kept him on the road, and Jimmy always had
time for a side trip to see horses. Jimmy knew almost every
pure Davenport horse in existence, but the problem then was
getting the owners to sell. If it was a mare he wanted and couldn't
get the owner to sell, he would often try to get the owner to
breed her to a Davenport stallion.
ANTEZ 448 was
about the only pure Davenport stallion in southern California,
and he met an untimely death in 1943.
My folks went to Texas in 1945 or 1946
and bought HANAD 489
(*Deyr 33 - Sankirah 149). HANAD
was pure Davenport and equally as well known as
ANTEZ.
We have owned several well-known Arabians such as
*RAFFLES 952,
*RASEYN 597,
and *AZIZA 888,
but to me there was always something special about
HANAD.
He had been at the Kellogg ranch in the early 30's and was trained
to jump rope, Spanish walk, and other dressage gaits. Somewhere
in his travels he had broken one of his front legs. He stood
with this leg bent at the knee. When we would put a halter on
him and bring him out, you would forget all about his broken
leg. He was all show horse. He reminded me of Jim Kline's *TALAL,
gentle as a kitten in his stall, but all fire and 20
feet tall when you showed him off.
Many of the people who had pure Davenport
mares brought them to HANAD,
and some beautiful foals were produced. Best known, of
course, was IBN
HANAD.
I could only dream about owning an Arabian
mare. Even though prices were much lower than today, my income
was even lower.
One day we had a visitor at the ranch,
a Mr. Alvin Yoder of Corcoran, California. Mr. Yoder had had
Arabians for years but was now wanting to retire. He had an
old mare that he wanted to find a home for. He would sell her
at a very reasonable price. Her name was POKA
438. We looked her up in the stud
book and found she was pure Davenport. She was by *HAMRAH
28, the leading sire of all the
Davenport horses. *HAMRAH
was imported from the desert in 1906. She was out of
SHERIA 110,
who was by *ABBEIAN
111 (the sire of Jadaan) and out of *URFAH
40, the dam of *HAMRAH.
As far as I was concerned, this was the cream of the
Davenport horses. Mr. Yoder told me she wasn't in very good
condition and was 25 years old.
I bought her sight unseen, a mare that
was seven years older than I was, to breed to a stallion who
was six years than I was. Even though the price was reasonable,
$250, it was still 25% of my annual income.
I drove to Corcoran to pick up
POKA. She
was showing her age. Her worst problem was her eyes. They were
irritated, and the lower lids were swollen. We would bathe her
eyes several times a day, and that seemed to make her more comfortable.
I bred her to HANAD
in early 1947. She presented me with a stud foal on February
28, 1948. The baby was very weak and had extremely crooked front
legs. I was sick about his legs, but everyone told me they would
straighten and, sure enough, they did.
Carrying the foal and feeding him was
hard on POKA
and she died shortly after we weaned the baby. She was
a very sweet dispositioned mare and a good mother.
I named the foal TRIPOLI,
a name that had stuck in my mind from the North African
campaign of World War II.
In the summer of 1950 the North Koreans
attacked South Korea, and I found myself in the Army. I lost
my interest in horses and asked my Mother to sell
TRIPOLI.
Twenty years later the flame of my romance
with the Arabian horse was rekindled. I visited
Charles Craver in southern
Illinois, the man who had purchased TRIPOLI.
Charles is without question the most knowledgeable person
concerning the Davenport horses I have ever met.
It is a funny thing that my time in the
service resulted in my losing interest in horses, while Charles
found his interest in the Davenport horses as a result of his
time in the service. Charles was in the Navy during the Korean
War and was stationed in the San Francisco Bay area. On his
free time he would visit Arabian breeders. On one of these visits
he met Jimmy Wrench and came under the spell of the romance
of the Davenport horses.
In the summer of 1970 I visited Charles
Craver and TRIPOLI.
It was a gratifying experience to get to talk to Charles
and to find that he values TRIPOLI
for the very same reasons I had in mind when I bred him.
TRIPOLI
had been produced with due regard to the family strains
of the parents and with a desire to produce a pure Davenport
offspring. It was my hope before the mating had been made that
the foal to be could play a part in the continuation of the
pure Davenport horses. The key part TRIPOLI
has played in the continuation of the pure Davenports
was beyond my wildest expectations.
Another interesting aspect to the story
of POKA
and the Davenport horses is that today all but three
of the horses on our ranch trace to POKA.
My Mother started, like most breeders, with a very divergent
group of horses. Not only did we have many different types of
Arabians, but very diverse bloodlines. We had Polish, Egyptian,
English, South American--you name it and we had it.
A few years ago I talked to my Mother
about the fact that she had eliminated all those other lines.
She told me that for her purposes of extremely intensive inbreeding
to SKOWRONEK
through *RAFFLES
and *RASEYN
she had found her Davenport bottom lines the most dependable.
One of the values of the Davenport horses,
in my opinion, is their closeness to the desert in terms of
generations. From what I have read and observed, our western
ideas concerning the appearance of an Arabian horse are sometimes
in conflict with the ideas of the desert Bedouin. What I am
saying is that some of us may value short speed, size, high
leg action, an extended trot, color, etc., while in the desert,
as the Emir Abd-el-Kader says. "Color counts for nothing,
size for little, and blood is everything."
Many of the travelers to the desert criticized
the conformation of the Arabian horses and the breeding ideas
of the Bedouins, but most of them were astounded by the soundness
and endurance of the Arabian horse. And, after all, it is we
who value their horse and not the other way around.
