University of Nevada, Reno

Reno at the Races: The Sporting Life versus Progressive Reform

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

By Emerson Marcus

Dr. William D. Rowley/Thesis Advisor May 2015

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the thesis

prepared under our supervision by

EMERSON MARCUS

Entitled

Reno At The Races: Sporting Life Versus Progressive Reform

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

William D. Rowley, Ph.D., Advisor

Elizabeth Raymond, Ph.D., Committee Member

Greta de Jong, Ph.D., Committee Member

Alicia Barber, Ph.D., Graduate School Representative

David W. Zeh, Ph. D., Dean, Graduate School

May, 2015

i

Abstract

The thesis examines horse race betting in the state of Nevada from 1915 to 1931 and how two opposing forces — sporting life and progressive reform — converged as state lawmakers passed progressive gambling legislation. While maybe not a catalyst, this legislation began Nevada’s slippery slope to becoming a wide-open gambling state. It examines how the acceptance of horse race betting opened the door for more ambitious forms of gambling while other states eventually followed Nevada’s lead and passed similar horse race betting law during the Great Depression. While other western states followed suit and legalized horse race betting during the Great Depression, month-long race meetings in Reno disbanded, as Nevada opened itself to wide-open gambling.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments iii I. Introduction 1 II. Gamblers, Turfites, Sports in a Changing State 8 From the Shadow of the Comstock 13

Crisis on the Turf 24

A True Sport 33

III. Nevada: The Sport’s “Only Hope” 43

Prying the Door Open: Horse Race Gambling 45

Oddie’s Governorship, Women’s Suffrage and Reform 50

The “Three Liberal Measures” of the 1915 Legislature 57

The “Loosening” of Nevada Reform 65

IV. Excitement to Obscurity: Horse Racing in Reno 75

Nostalgic Yearnings: Sporting and Gambling Culture 80

Reno at the Races: A Legal Bet 88

Horse Racing Spectacles Leave Reno 96

V. Conclusion 103 Bibliography 108

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Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without help from several people.

Michael Maher and Karalea Clough at the Nevada Historical Society deserve recognition for helping me through George Wingfield’s correspondence collection. Elizabeth

Raymond, Greta de Jong, Alicia Barber, Edan Strekal, Ryan Powell, Guy Clifton, Phil

Earl, Jeff Kintop, Karl Breckenridge, Donnelyn Curtis and Michael Fischer also deserve recognition. William D. Rowley, my advisor, introduced me to my thesis topic and encouraged my work. He helped me immensely along the way. Most importantly, my wife, Sarah Marcus, motivated me and tolerated my absence during many late nights spent researching and writing.

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Chapter One Introduction

Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s 1945 novel City of Trembling Leaves describes horse races at the fairgrounds in Reno during the interwar years as chaotic spectacles where even young children gambled and cultivated a “terrible racing instinct.”1 In 1923, a 30- day Reno race meeting generated more than $1 million in legal bets (more than $1.7 million for the entire year).2 Harper’s Magazine called horse racing in 1925 “the most exciting feature of Reno social life.”3 From 1915 to 1931, horse racing in Reno regularly brought thousands of “beautifully gowned women and racing enthusiasts” to play the ponies.4 Through the pari-mutuel system, regulated horse race betting opened a wedge in the state’s strict 1909 anti-gambling law. During this time of legal betting at the track,

Nevada developed an economy that attracted visitors from outside its borders — the origins of its tourist-based economy. While other western states followed suit and legalized horse race betting during the Great Depression, month-long race meetings in

Reno ended, and Nevada opened itself to wide-open gambling.

While rarely lucrative, promoters held summer and fall races meetings for nearly two decades in Reno because of the state’s permissive stance on betting at the track.

Nevada Governor Emmet Derby Boyle signed legislation into law in 1915 that allowed and regulated horse race betting under the pari-mutuel system with the oversight of a

1 Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves, (New York: Random House, 1945), 70. 2 Nevada State Journal, July 13, 1923; The Nevada Racing Commission’s Annual Report. [Signed by George Wingfield], (Carson City State Printing Office, 1923). 3 Katharine Fullerton Gerould, The Aristocratic West. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 155. 4 Reno Evening Gazette, June 9, 1923

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Nevada Racing Commission. In October 1915, a Kentucky thoroughbred racing publication noted Nevada, Maryland and Kentucky as the only states regulating pari- mutuel betting, along with Canada.5 The track remained a popular gathering for Reno’s business community, gamblers, divorce seekers, sporting men and out-of-state visitors with wagers in hand in the 1920s, but that quickly changed in the 1930s.6 California approved pari-mutuel betting in 1933. Ohio, Michigan and other states, including New

York, did so by the end of the 1930s (thirty states around the nation allowed forms of pari-mutuel betting by 1974).7 By the early twenty-first century, horse racing in Nevada remained relegated to small casino sports book televisions playing far-off horse races for a gambling public.8

In 2014, California Chrome won the first two legs of the Triple Crown at the

Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, gaining national attention and delighting his

Topaz Lake, Nevada owner, Steven Coburn. The Reno Gazette-Journal ran several stories on Chrome before the horse lost at the Belmont Stakes, coming one step short of becoming the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978. One regional news story examined horse racing history in Nevada, reporting that the “only real thoroughbred history in Nevada belongs to Theodore Winters,” the wealthy owner of a freight line to the Comstock and a ranch in Washoe Valley.9 While the historiography of Nevada tends to focus on the state’s vice economy through the lens of casino gambling, prostitution,

5 “Advancement of Racing by Pari-Mutuel Betting,” The Thoroughbred Record, 82, (October 16, 1915), 186. 6 Reno Evening Gazette, July 19, 1920. 7 U.S. Congress, Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling Hearings on Pari- Mutuel Horseracing. [Held March 4 and March 5, 1975], (Washington, D.C.: National Technical Information Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1975). 8 Eric Moody. “The Early Years of Casino Gambling in Nevada, 1931-1945.” Diss. University of Nevada, Reno (1997), 296. 9 Reno Gazette-Journal, May 31, 2014.

3 easy divorce and marriage, many historians and journalists have often overlooked horse race betting’s impact in the state’s evolving policy leading up to its “wide-open” gambling law in 1931. A closer examination shows horse race betting was far less accepted nationally during the Progressive Era — some say even under attack — when

Nevada enacted its track betting law in 1915. Additionally, the sport and betting at the track reached deeper into Reno’s past than the newspaper alleged in 2014.10

In 1915, Nevada’s acceptance of horse racing betting began in spite of attacks upon its association with gambling. As horse racing commercialized in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century, tracks increasingly became dependent on bookmaker licensing fees. By 1910, anti-gambling laws across the country led to the closing of racetracks from the Belmont Stakes in New York to the old Santa Anita track in California. To save the sport, many state legislators discussed pari-mutuel betting as a progressive form of gambling where bettors bet against themselves, not a bookmaker, with odds created based on the quantity of bets on a particular horse.

In Nevada in 1915, sporting types in favor of pari-mutuel legislation included businessmen, ranchers, saloon owners, gamblers and former miners seeking to loosen the reins of reform, especially moral reform. They sought an amendment to the legislature’s

1909 anti-gambling law that prohibited more than 20 card games for money as felonies including horse race bookmaking and slot machines — even making the possession of a deck of cards punishable by fine.11 The pari-mutuel system of betting at the state-owned

Reno fairgrounds offered an avenue to roll back strict anti-gambling legislation with a

10 Mary Jean Wall, How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers and Breeders, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 174. 11 Moody, “Nevada, 1931-1945,” 21.

4 different method of betting that arguably complied with many of the goals of progressive reform.

One prominent Nevadan said the pari-mutuel system “is fair and gives the patron a chance” and eliminated dishonest bookmakers.12 The commission took a percentage of all money bet — which funded track maintenance, personnel paychecks and a small cut for county road improvement projects — while the remaining funds in the betting pool paid winning tickets. Proponents argued racing would generate attention and revenue to fund racing events that determined the best racers through objective competition and, thus, improved the quality of horse breeding for the state’s ranching needs. Under this system of “fair” betting that provided state revenue for roads and encouraged improved horse stock for ranchers, Reno businessmen opened up Nevada’s strict 1909 anti- gambling law.13

The goals of Nevada’s sports and gamblers and those backing progressive reform blended in what could be described as progressive gambling legislation at a time when other western states discussed it, but kept it illegal under anti-gambling laws. Although the 1915 legislation passed in Nevada it appeased reformers by keeping the anti-gambling law in tact. Still, its acceptance was conditional. Some business interests and backers of the sporting life faced a slippery slope defending horse-race betting, but eventually won out over progressive reformers by the beginning of the Great Depression, even to the extent of repealing Nevada’s stringent 1909 anti-gambling law.

12 C. Elizabeth Raymond, George Wingfield: Owner and Operator of Nevada, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 112. 13 William H. P. Robertson, The History of the Thoroughbred Racing in America. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1964), 96-98.

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From 1915 to 1931 in Reno, month-long race meetings produced regional spectacles that catered to horse owners, gamblers, and even members of the city’s growing divorce colony: a cosmopolitan clientele taking six-month sojourns in Reno. The events reflected early-twentieth century American sporting life — a life wherein men with the means and the leisure could indulge in racetrack entertainments and risks similar to their frequenting the gambling tables in the saloons prior to October 1910 when

Nevada’s anti-gambling law went into effect. With sporting life stymied in Reno and myriad types of gambling suppressed after 1910, a push back came in the form of pari- mutuel horse race betting — progressive gambling legislation — at the track, spearheaded by Reno’s richest citizen, George Wingfield.14

Nevada’s alleged bipartisan boss in the 1920s and most prominent banker,

Wingfield embraced this sporting life upon his entrance in Nevada in the late 1890s. A skilled buckaroo and poker player, Wingfield left the family ranching business for the poker table and the racetrack. The Golconda News in 1899 described Wingfield as a

“crack rider,” and successful horseman a decade before he gained a fortune in Goldfield and arrived in Reno at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. 15 Wingfield embodied what it meant to be a “sport,” a popular American term defined: “a gambler or turfite — more akin to our sporting man than to our sportsman.”16 By 1914, Wingfield oversaw a banking empire that wielded political clout, and he openly backed the state’s horse racing bills in the 1915 legislature. Now with great wealth and the organizational

14 Reno Evening Gazette, July 19, 1920. 15 Raymond, “Wingfield,”16. 16 Oxford English Dictionary, XXVI, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1991), 316.

6 structure formed to sustain his empire in Reno, Wingfield sought recreational pursuits in the breeding of fine horses when he incorporated his Nevada Stock Farm in 1914.

Hopes for a horse racing revival in Nevada collided with Progressive Era reform.

Nevada’s desolate intermountain American outback, shifting political environment, anxious economic climate marked by labor strife and peculiar demographics, made it an unlikely place for reform efforts. As the tremendously successful mines in Goldfield and

Tonopah began to play out after 1908, many people moved north to Reno. As they arrived from the mining camps, some enlisted in a burgeoning progressive reform movement in Reno that reflected similar movements throughout the country, but especially in western states moving beyond initial phases of frontier development.

Progressivism did not associate with a certain political party, nor did it develop a comprehensive platform. It included a diverse group of professionals, lawyers, religious leaders, educators and women’s groups, and sought a more responsive government to society’s ills: corruption in politics and business along with a desire to help weaker members of society through social uplift legislation.17

Reformers argued easy divorce, gambling and the ever-present saloon were out of step with the progressive hopes of building a “model commonwealth,” as Nevada’s U.S.

Senator Francis Newlands often put it.18 Although Wingfield identified as a progressive, he saw the suppression of gambling as well as other economic regulation as dangerous for the “undeveloped state” of Nevada. He viewed moral reformers as a radical fringe

17 Ibid; Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965), 372; Moore, William Howard, “Progressivism and the Social Gospel in Wyoming: The Antigambling Act of 1901 as a Test Case,” Western Historical Quarterly, 15, (July 1984), 299. 18 William D. Rowley, Reclaiming the Arid West, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 113.

7 element of the progressive movement.19 Conversely, reformers often saw business arguments backing permissive vice as “artificial stimulants” for the state’s economy.

They alleged the acceptance of these artificial stimulants made Nevada a “laughing stock” in the family of states.20 From 1904 to 1914 reformers in Nevada adopted the referendum (1904), initiative (1912), recall (1912), direct primaries (1909), greatly expanded the role of the state government in the regulatory powers of the Public Service

Commission (1911) and passed suffrage for women (1914).21 Additionally, the anti- gambling law in 1909 and extension of the divorce residency from six months to one year in 1913 displayed the state’s commitment to social betterment and even moral reform of a state dependent on mining, ranching and transportation industries. However, many with mining and ranching backgrounds, especially Wingfield, found women’s suffrage, business regulation, worker protection laws and moral reforms at odds with their business, political and certainly cultural experience. While Nevada’s acceptance of horse race betting in the 1915 legislature included progressive elements with a different kind of betting regulated by a commission, it weakened one of the strictest anti-gambling laws in the nation and started the state on a trajectory toward more ambitious gambling policies.

19 Reno Evening Gazette, February 2, 1915. 20 Reno Evening Gazette, February 3, 1915. 21 Michael Green, Nevada: A History of the Silver State. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015),181- 193.

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Chapter Two Gamblers, Turfites, Sports in a Changing State

The History of Nevada (1913), edited and compiled by Sam Davis, includes a chapter on horse racing titled “The Turf.” The 1,297-page, two-volume history of the state reminds readers “from the earliest time horse-racing was a popular sport in

Nevada,” but in 1913 it had “fallen into disrepute.”22 While trotting, pacing and racing

“speed programmes,” or “speed contests,” attracted large crowds at the annual Nevada

State Fair beginning in 1874, the exhibitions stopped in 1901. Eleven of the next 13 years did not include a state fair. Outside a brief reemergence in 1907 and 1908, the State Fair was almost nonexistent from 1901 to 1913. Many factors played into the state’s inability to conduct an annual fair. Fear of “tick fever” in California districts in 1898 halted the transportation of cattle across state line, 23 but more importantly a dilapidated fairground venue and an overall “absence of the old-time enthusiasm in the matter of arranging for a fair and race” played a role in the fair’s irrelevancy.24

The Comstock mining boom in Virginia City in the 1860s and 1870s, of course, financed the “old-time enthusiasm.” Wealthy Nevadans were known for keeping stables of thoroughbred horses. Alf Doten, the Comstock newspaper editor, wrote numerous times during his travels in California and Nevada on horse races with thousands of

“sporting men” assembled in raucous affairs from San Francisco and Calaveras County in

22 Sam Davis, History of Nevada. Vol. 2. (Elko: The Elms Publishing Company, 1913), 721-723. 23 Mary Ellen Glass. Silver and Politics in Nevada: 1892-1902. (University of Nevada Press: Reno, 1969), 132. 24 State Board of Agriculture Annual Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1914).

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California to Virginia City and Humboldt County in Nevada.25 Theodore Winters was one of the most noted horse owners in the American West with horse stables in northern

California and Washoe Valley in Nevada. From his stable in Washoe Valley came some of the finest thoroughbreds in the nation. His horse racing empire reached beyond Nevada into stables and racetracks in California including one track west of Sacramento in the town of Winters, which bears his name. Winters, who gained wealth from ownership of a freight line to the Comstock mines called the “Winters Express,” was known as the “King of the Turf,” the first Nevadan to breed thoroughbreds with great success and credited by some as popularizing the sport in the nineteenth century American West.26 Winters raced horses at the state’s then-most-popular track in Carson City and eventually around the nation. Although Winters dominated Nevada horse owners, rivalries emerged, especially with Storey County Attorney Charles Bryan, who vowed to overtake Winters as the region’s premier horse owner. He regularly failed even after making extravagant purchases of out-of-state horses, most prominently Lodi and Emigrant Maid.27

In 1864, Winters purchased undefeated Norfolk. Norfolk’s sire, Lexington, was a

Kentucky horse and America’s most prolific sire in the 1860s and 1870s. No stallion in history ever led America’s sire list for more years than Lexington (1861 to 1875). In

1865, Lexington demanded the highest stud fee in the nation at $500. To obtain Norfolk,

Winters paid Kentucky farmer R.A. Alexander $15,001. Eight years earlier, Alexander purchased Lexington for $15,000, supposedly the highest sum ever paid for a horse at that time. He vowed to one day sell one of Lexington’s colts for an even greater sum, and

25 Alf Doten, The Journals of Alfred Doten, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1973), 129. 26 William H. P. Robertson. The History of the Thoroughbred Racing in America. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1964),120-123. 27 Davis, 723.

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Winters paid the extra dollar to make that happen. Along with Norfolk, Winters also acquired Marian — a broodmare — from the publisher of the all-sports newspaper

Breeder and Sportsman. With the combination of Norfolk and Marian, Winters launched his breeding powerhouse. Marian proved to be the greatest mare of the West, producing

Del Rio Rey, who became the nation’s best two-year-old in 1889.28 Sam Davis’ 1913

History of Nevada describes Winters as a respectable and successful sportsman: “He was an advocate of clean sport and never was involved in any trickery or turf scandal.”29

Occasionally Winters disposed great thoroughbreds instead of keeping them in his stables — with some regrettable decisions. Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin, who eventually opened the original Santa Anita racetrack in southern California, made his millions on the Comstock. In what turned out to be a rare unfortunate move for Winters, he sold Emperor of Norfolk, a yearling foal of Norfolk, in the mid-1880s for $2,525 to

Baldwin. Known as “Lucky” for more reasons than the fortuitous acquisition of Emperor of Norfolk, Baldwin spent much of the rest of his life in the racing game, especially after the stallion won 21 of his first 29 races. Baldwin truly lived up to his “Lucky” nickname and earned great distinction as a horse owner. In 1908, he founded the original Santa

Anita racetrack just outside Los Angeles in Arcadia, California.30

After statehood in 1864, Nevada ranchers, farmers and politicians interested in diversifying the state’s mining economy pushed for agricultural and livestock enterprise.

In 1873, the Nevada State Agricultural Society created bylaws, rules and ordinances for the members of the society who met for purposes of promoting agriculture, horticulture

28 Robertson, History of the Thoroughbred, 120-123. 29 Davis, 723. 30 Robertson, 120-123.

11 and stock raising. In 1874, the society created the Nevada State Fair as a way to advertise

Nevada’s agricultural accomplishments. In 1885, the society became a state agency with board members appointed by the governor (Winters served as president in 1889). In addition to racing, thoroughbred horses could also be trained for Nevada rangeland.

Ranchers usually kept between 25 and 100 horses and raised more than they could sell because additional horses proved valuable for riding, teaming and sheep and cattle work.31 Some ranchers collected seemingly endless stock. While Winters raised horses for racing purposes, Vaqueros broke those horses deemed not fit for the track and moved them into rangeland work.32 By the 1940s, celebrities Bing Crosby, Jimmy Stewart and others acquired ranches in eastern Nevada. Crosby said the minerals in grass there helped horse stamina. The Nevada State Journal reported in 1945 that, “among early breeders the theory prevailed that the thin air of Nevada’s higher altitude was conducive to greater chest expansion in horses … breeders are more interested in the minerals found in

Nevada soils — particularly calcium and phosphate — that help produce good sturdy animals with iron-hard, compact hoofs.”33

After two decades of depression at the end of the nineteenth century, Nevada entered the twentieth century not only with a mining boom in Tonopah and Goldfield, but also with visions of bringing water to arid land. As the congressman from Nevada,

Francis G. Newlands worked for the passage of the 1902 Reclamation Act to build western irrigation or reclamation projects with federal dollars from the sale of public lands. Many saw reclamation as the answer to Nevada’s agricultural problems. The

31 Beverly Probert, “Horses in Northeastern Nevada,” The Nevadan [Elko] (Sept. 15, 1974) 32 “Theodore Winters Deeds,” University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections, Reno Nevada 33 “Race Horse Breeders Are Attracted to Nevada.” Gambling Unlimited in Nevada: The Last Frontier State, (Reno: Reno Printing Co., 1945).

12 faltering Nevada State Fair, however, was a symptom of the state’s stalled efforts. In

1901, the State Agricultural Society reported to Governor Reinhold Sadler that the Reno fairgrounds needed “repairs to shed, stables and the grandstand.” The report added that the state failed to expend enough money to support an annual fair. The State Fair dissolved for six years following 1901.34

Horse racing had been one of the most popular aspects of the Nevada State Fair.

The first Reno racetrack was built on the old Johnson Ranch near present-day Virginia

Street and Plumb Lane in the 1870s. The Nevada State Agricultural Society also held speed contests at Steamboat Springs south of Reno in the 1890s. In 1888, construction of a new racetrack began north of East Ninth Street for the Nevada State Fair. Horsemen of

Winters’ stripe, and fellow members of the Agricultural Society, including Douglas

County rancher Heinrich Frederic Dangberg, Reno newspaper editor C.C. Powning and

Assemblyman Lem Allen favored racing events at the annual fair. Without the fair, and more importantly the wealth in the state before depression in the 1890s, Nevada’s thoroughbred industry and interest perished.

Throughout the state’s history, the fortunes of horse racing in Nevada rose and fell over the years as a luxury item. As one Reno newspaper put it in 1953: “the game of breeding and racing horses always has been dependent upon the fortunes of man, and this sport in Nevada has known peaks of success.”35 Those peaks of success coincided with mining booms just as horse racing’s fall into depletion coincided with mining busts.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, horse racing fell into “disrepute” in

Nevada, but only after the departure of the fair and the exit of wealth and horsemen from

34 State Board of Agriculture Annual Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1923). 35 Nevada State Journal, September 6, 1953.

13 the state, especially those of Winters’ stature who had made fortunes on the Comstock.

While Winters stayed until his death in 1906, many of these men of wealth left the state at this time. With a population of just more than 40,000 by 1900, Nevada for many was a dismal picture and example of a failed western state.36

From the Shadow of the Comstock

During depression in the 1890s, Nevada confronted the politics of silver. The

Silver Party, calling for the re-monetization of silver more than a decade after the

Coinage Act of 1873 (known later as the “Crime of ’73”) mostly eliminated silver from currency. The result: silver prices eventually plummeted. Many Nevadans argued for re- monetization or the free and unlimited coinage of silver by the U.S. Department of

Treasury at a ratio of 16:1. Arguments for what amounted to a silver subsidy maintained that the increased silver price would prompt new silver discoveries and mining in

Nevada. The Silver Purchase Act in 1890 authorized limited coinage, but many eastern capitalists railed against it for its inflationary effect and charged it precipitated the national depression in 1893. President Grover Cleveland, a gold Democrat, backed the repeal of the act that caused the price of silver to plummet even further.37

In 1896, Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan embraced the silver cause, and both Silver and Populist parties threw their support to Bryan. Farmers in the Populist Party argued for inflation to raise agricultural prices and ease access to

36 Gilman Ostrander. Nevada, the Great Rotten Borough 1859-1964. (New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), vi; Michael Green, Nevada: A History of the Silver State. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015), 181-193. 37 Mary Ellen Glass. Silver and Politics in Nevada: 1892-1902. (University of Nevada Press. Reno, Nevada, 1969), 41-70.

14 credit. Although Bryan lost the election to Republican William McKinley, Bryan’s support of the silver standard against the gold standard greatly affected political dynamics in Nevada because it opened the door for the building of the Democratic Party in the state. At the same time an influx of miners to Nevada’s twentieth-century mining boom brought new Democratic voters. The new dynamics of the Nevada political and social scene as well as a dramatic upswing in its economy opened the state to new energies and innovations.38

Nationally, a growing middle class looked with some concern upon the mounting political and economic struggles within American society. Middle-class Victorian society provided “a burst of energy fired in many directions across America” through a “fierce discontent” that hoped to create a utopian society built in their image, according to one source.39 Evils emanated from upper-class opulence and corruption, and lower-class irresponsibility and criminality. One Nevada historian noted that progressives envisioned

“a new, more directive relationship between government and society in the twentieth century” for economic regulation, the expansion of democracy, social uplift and protection for weaker members of society. The progressives were professionals, church leaders, women’s groups and skilled labor — members of an evolving Victorian Era middle class. They spurred reform with bipartisan support. As late historian Richard

Hofstadter wrote, the movement behind change during the Progressive Era in America was not a revolution, but a “strategy for orderly social change” — an “attempt to develop the moral will, the intellectual insight, and the political and administrative agencies to

38 Russell Elliott. History of Nevada. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 233. 39 Michael McGerr. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. (Oxford University Press, 2003), xvi.

15 remedy the accumulated evils and negligences of a period of industrial growth.”40 George

Mowry, a California historian, wrote the Progressive Era restored two words to the political language: “ought” and “should.”41 Nevada reflected many of these political currents and social movements that dominated the national scene.42

Overall, despite policies that contracted the currency to gold, the economy vastly expanded immediately following the nation’s Civil War and during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. America entered worldwide markets, its industrial revolution and flexed military muscle in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. The number of American millionaires rose from 100 in 1870 to more than 4,000 in 1916. The United States, a rural, agrarian nation during its first century, saw its urban centers more than triple in population from 1870 to 1900 (9.9 million to 30.1 million). The chaotic growth resulted in calls for order and efficiency from progressive reformers. As historian Robert Weibe notes, America was a nation of “island communities” with weak communication that

“severely restricted interaction among these islands and dispersed the power to form opinion and enact public policy.” 43 This changed with urbanization. The “Muckrackers”

— as Theodore Roosevelt called them — such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffans of

McClure’s Magazine exposed power and corruption, especially in the nation’s cities, to an increasingly commercialized, attentive national audience.44

40 Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), 3. 41 George Mowry. The California Progressives. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 304. 42 William Rowley, “The Wisconsin Idea in Nevada,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, 34 (Summer 1991), 350-59. 43 Robert Weibe, “The Search for Order, 1877-1920,” (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), xxi. 44 Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, (New York City: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 324-326.

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The progressive community in Reno saw the future of Nevada moving beyond its mining camp past and the reputation for being the most notorious rotten-borough State in the West.45 In addition to the usual progressive reform agenda to bring more democracy to the political process and regulate the captains of industry, state progressives sought to suppress vice and the saloon culture — booze, cards, gambling and prostitution.46 For

Nevada, this all happened during a revitalization spurred by a twentieth century mining boom that added 50,000 miners and migrants to its meager population — doubling the population in a matter of ten years.47

Throughout its first few decades after statehood in 1864, Nevada bore the reputation as a frontier state in the Far West, more accepting of gambling in its large saloon culture than its western neighbor in California and much more accepting than its eastern neighbor in Utah. Two years after gaining statehood, the legislature passed a law for gambling operator license fees paid through each county sheriff. Nevada Republican

Governor Henry Blasdel, who once said, “Gambling is an intolerable act and inexcusable vice,” vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode it. In 1879, the state issued licenses for specific games. In 1889, a “12-o’clock closure law” was passed for saloons and gambling houses. Gambling and anti-gambling factions battled sporadically during legislative sessions as Nevada emerged from its two decades of mining depression into the

45 William D. Rowley, “Farewell to the Rotten Borough: Francis G. Newlands in the Nineteenth-Century,” Halcyon, (Reno: University of Nevada, 1995), 109 46 Elliott, History of Nevada, 233-250 47 Sally Zanjani, "A Theory of Critical Realignment: The Nevada Example, 1892-1908," Pacific Historical Review, 48 (May 1979), 259-280.

17 prosperous years of the first decade of the twentieth century that coincided with the

Progressive Era. 48

By the turn of the century, saloon gambling flourished in Reno as the state where miners, ranch hands and railroad workers spent leisure time. The Reno City Council increasingly relaxed gambling regulations, largely because of the city’s dependence on the business licensing fees and increased demand for establishments near downtown railroad stations. By 1902, Reno supported 48 saloons and 16 licensed betting games primarily along Commercial Row. Reno coffers gained sizable financial benefits by

1905, receiving nearly $50,000 in fees.49 In 1905, Reno approved expanded gambling after it repealed a law prohibiting first floor betting, just as California and other states during the Progressive Era sought greater regulation and restriction. The Nevada State

Journal called the 1905 legislation “the greatest victory the gambling men of Nevada have yet won.” Just two years after Reno’s official incorporation, liquor and gambling interests exercised considerable power in the city.50 On the state level, the Nevada

Legislature passed the first law regulating horse race bookmaking in 1903. Bookmaking on prize fighting and horse racing were illegal without proper licensing for counties with more than 2,000 registered voters, which included Washoe County in 1903. The law applied to all counties after a 1907 amendment.51

By 1905, Nevada, especially Reno, saw the possibilities in out-of-state revenue from visitors, especially at prizefights, horse races, saloon gambling and easy divorce.

48 Eric Moody. “The Early Years of Casino Gambling in Nevada, 1931-1945.” Diss. University of Nevada, Reno (1997), 19-23. 49 Ibid., 20. 50 Alicia Barber. Reno’s Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 73. 51 Moody, Nevada, 1931-1945, 18.

18

The potential for easy divorce grew in Reno after Laura Corey arrived from Pennsylvania to end her 22-year marriage with U.S. Steel President William Corey. She leased the home of a former Reno Evening Gazette publisher for six months at “a very high rent.”

Eastern newspapers revealed her husband’s relationship with actress Mabel Gilman.

Reporters followed Laura Corey to Reno, asking questions about the marriage, which she denied had anything to do with divorce. Nevada’s territorial divorce laws remained intact when it transitioned to statehood in 1864. These allowed divorce for many reasons, but a six-month residency was required. Nevada’s lax divorce law wasn’t completely unique.

Other states, South Dakota for example, had a six-month residency law, but reformers there feared negative effects of “quickie divorce” and extended residency to one year in

1908. By 1910, Reno gained the reputation as “The New Divorce Centre,” according to eastern papers. By that date the popular song by Billy Murray, “I’m on My Way to Reno” made it to a widely distributed RCA Victor recording. Laura Corey left Reno divorced in

July 1906 and moved to a large farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania. 52

Divorce brought a more cosmopolitan — definitely more female — clientele to

Reno, eager for entertainment during the six-month required residency. Divorce colony populations ranged from 10 to 500 at any given time, according to newspaper reports, and indeed a great number of the divorcees establishing residency in Reno were women. This reflected a pattern where men often stayed home because of business obligations and sociological changes started to grant women greater agency to leave in the first place.

Nevada laws required that only one spouse had to establish residency for divorce.

National media attention to Corey’s split with her husband brought an influx of divorcees

52 Barber, Reno’s Big Gamble, 57

19 to Reno. The new residents, regardless of their short-term residency made up a different demographic than transient miners, ranch hands or railroad workers — the traditional makeup of Nevada’s population. As one Collier’s correspondent wrote of the emerging

Reno divorce colony, “Here they are, probably three hundred of them, and three hundred strangers, most of whom have comparatively expensive tastes and money to spend, make quite a stir in an isolated Western city of twelve thousand people.” Nestled in the shadow of the Sierra, Reno became synonymous with divorce and the cosmopolitan community who sought it. 53

On January 21, 1908, Methodist clergyman Reverend E.J. Bulgin conducted a series of revivals in Reno that shook the city to action against its saloon industry. On one winter evening, Bulgin told a crowd inside a Reno church that “the spirit of grace might descend upon Reno and regenerate her during this period of revival, as it had on a number of California communities” — communities he had recently visited.54 For several nights at churches, large gathering halls, high school and the university, his lectures ran the gamut from scriptural interpretations of the 23rd Psalm to “The Unpardonable Sin” and an explanation of hell. Bulgin brought a keen wit, a booming voice and a sense of humor that connected with the crowds; reportedly as large as 1,200 people, “One of the largest religious gatherings in the state’s history,” noted the Nevada State Journal.55 The lectures received wide attention in Reno newspapers and struck a chord with those in attendance who were well aware of the vices of the town’s saloon districts.

53 Ibid. 54 Nevada State Journal, January 22, 1908. 55 Nevada State Journal, January 27, 1908.

20

Two weeks after the revival, more than 1,000 people met in Reno to discuss the prevalence of gambling in the city. After two failed attempts that year, Reno’s anti- gambling lobby consolidated and wrote a petition to the City Council for a special election for prohibition of gambling. Business interests and the Knights of the Royal

Arch, an organization of saloonkeepers and liquor dealers, rallied to defeat the petition —

1,779 to 1,196 — but the progressive anti-gambling tide was growing. It eventually arrived at the state legislature the next year in 1909 when Democratic Assemblyman

George McIntosh of Elko proposed an anti-gambling bill. Reformers in the legislature presented an ominous situation and threat to saloon interests of Reno and their business allies along Commercial Row. Urban Nevada — primarily Reno and Goldfield — sympathized more with gambling interests, mainly because the businesses resided there.

Rural Nevada often sided with the end of gambling in the state.56

Assemblyman Lem Allen, who backed forms of gambling at horse races and was a long-time president of the Board of Agriculture overseeing the State Fairs, said during the legislature that he must side with anti-gambling interests if he expected “to get to heaven.” The Women’s Civic League followed Allen’s statement with a letter containing the words: “Will you please help save our boys? Then stand with Lem Allen and go to heaven?” The debate turned into an argument of heaven or gambling. Several newspaper editorials railed against gambling across the state: the Nevada State Journal, Carson City

News, Reese River Reveille, White Pine News and others. The bill passed in the legislature. Although Reno had supported gambling businesses in the years leading up to

1909, the anti-gambling law that came out of the legislature was more comprehensive

56 Phillip I. Earl, "Veiling the Tiger: The Crusade against Gambling, 1859-1910," Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, XXVIll:3 (Fall 1985), 174-204

21 than in other states where legislators slowly cut into alleged unseemly games over the course of several decades. While it came much later to Nevada in comparison to other states, the Silver State’s anti-gambling law was comprehensive and strict. 57

Signed by Democratic Governor Denver Dickerson, the law criminalized more than twenty card games for money, slot machines “or to buy, sell or deal in pools or make books on horse races.” Violation was to be punished as a felony. The 1909 anti-gambling bill in Nevada crushed Reno’s saloon-based gambling businesses in such a way that legislators gave Reno saloon gambling businesses more than a year to prepare before it took effect in October 1910. When thousands arrived in Reno for the boxing match of

Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries — known as the “Fight of the Century” because of its racial overtones — on July 4, 1910, tourists witnessed what many thought was Nevada’s final gasp of a bygone gambling era. 58

Nevada’s sudden turn against gambling was not based upon a single religious revival. A multi-faceted reform movement was in the air in the first decade of the twentieth century. Nevada’s version of progressivism was an amalgamation of diverse movements backing political, economic and social uplift reform, similar to that seen around the nation and by its neighbors in California. Nevada created tax and public service commissions, passed suffrage for women, adopted the initiative, referendum, recall and direct primaries, extended the divorce residency and outlawed gambling.59

Nevada State University President Joseph Stubbs, originally from Ohio, was an early, active voice against alleged vices in Reno. Stubbs oversaw a twenty-year

57 Ibid. 58 Moody, Nevada, 1931-1945, 21 59 Michael Green, Nevada: A History of the Silver State. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015), 181- 193.

22 transformation of the university until his death in 1914, with an agricultural experiment station, an engineering department, hygienic laboratory and a department of food and drug control, along with twelve new campus buildings. In 1908, a large donation from a wealthy Nevada family altered the course of the university and increased Stubbs’ profile in the community. Clarence H. Mackay gave the university large sums of money to memorialize his father, mining mogul John Mackay, an Irish immigrant who became one of the four Bonanza Kings on the Comstock. “Under the inspiration of these magnificent gifts,” former Nevada governor and state historian James Scrugham wrote in 1935, “the people of the state and the Legislature gained a larger appreciation of the university’s usefulness and showed that appreciation by larger appropriations for equipment and maintenance.” Additionally, in 1907 a reform of the public school system in Nevada led by Superintendent Orvis Ring and University of Nevada Professor Romanzo Adams established a unified state supervision of schools with a state board of education, standardization in classrooms and teacher certification. Educators remained at the forefront of progressive reform. 60

Predictably, Stubbs and other reformers in education saw the rise of gambling in

Reno as a threat to schooling, enrollment at the university, and the moral well being of students. Stubbs said, “It is quite impossible to keep young men in check where gambling is done as openly as Reno.”61 He united local interests to prohibit gambling on street- level floors in 1903, forcing gambling halls to build a second story. Two years later, however, the prohibition of first-floor gambling was repealed. In 1905, Stubbs led area

60 Edited by James Scrugham. Nevada: A Narrative of the Conquest of a Frontier Land. (Chicago: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1935), 475. 61 Barber, Reno’s Big Gamble, 50

23 ministers, the Young Men’s Club, the Twentieth Century Club (a popular women’s club in Reno) and university faculty to back an anti-gambling bill sent to the legislature. The bill died 23-11, but its origins undoubtedly carried over into efforts in 1908 in Reno and the anti-gambling law passed by the 1909 legislature. During the 1909 legislative session, the San Francisco Chronicle reported “the reform wave has struck Reno in earnest.”

Many believed the “wave” had ended Nevada’s gambling heritage that many felt was related to its nineteenth-century mining origins. 62

In the midst of reform in 1909, members of the no-longer-active State

Agricultural Society sought a revival of the State Fair and horse racing. That year the legislature terminated the funding of the State Agricultural Society, but its members created the Nevada Jockey Club to carry on the mission of reviving horse racing in

Nevada. During that summer, the club persuaded a visit from Pacific Coast Jockey Club horses and a promoter, William Murray, from Butte, Montana. Murray was also involved in race meetings in Utah and California that year. A Reno newspaper predicted the 15- day meeting financed primarily by Murray would bring to Reno the city’s first “taste of racing on something like a metropolitan scale.”63 Renovations were made again at the fairgrounds. While the Nevada State Journal heralded the 15-day meeting as the “most successful meeting ever held in the state of Nevada,” it was also reported that Murray

“lost money on the venture, but is fully satisfied that the public will appreciate the efforts he has made to give them a really high class meeting of the best sport in the land.”

Additionally, R.W. Parry, the Nevada Jockey Club president, assured the public that the creation of the club was for sports sake, not for money:

62 Barber, Reno’s Big Gamble, 71 63 Nevada State Journal, July 27, 1909.

24

It is my belief that it is generally understood by all the members that this club was not organized for the special purpose of a money-making proposition, but more with the view of social purposes and advancing the better elements in this special kind of sport to those who may desire its indulgence.64

Without money, however, organized races under the Nevada Jockey Club struggled. The club held a weekend summer meeting in 1910, but plans for a longer meet in the fall, similar to the one held in 1909, failed to come to fruition. It appeared 1909’s race meeting was an anomaly, especially after anti-bookmaking laws took effect in 1910.

Similar anti-racing laws from 1908 to 1913 nearly killed what was one of the nation’s leading pastimes at the end of the nineteenth century.65

Crisis on the Turf

Nationally, horse racing entered an era of unmatched prosperity in the 1890s, gaining great success through commercialization of the sport and a buildup of racetracks from New York to California. Commercialization gave rise to gambling with bookmakers and poolrooms. Bookmakers paid operating fees at the growing number of the nation’s tracks. Some eastern tracks reported 60 to 100 bookmakers working a single race day and paying an average fee of about $100 each. Many bookmakers were dishonest; some known to bribe jockeys or drug and cripple odds-on favorites. Additionally, poolrooms catered to a more wealth clientele at off-track locations with updates from the track sent by telegraph, but even poolrooms gained a reputation for fixing races by the beginning of

64 Nevada State Journal, December 17, 1909. 65 Reno Evening Gazette, July 1, 1910.

25 the twentieth century. At prestigious tracks, bookmakers survived by being honest. By

1894, however, the nation included more than 300 racetracks. Jockey clubs failed to control the growing criminal element as a dependence on gambling brought allegations of fixed races, bribes to jockeys and places that attracted ne’er do-wells.66 Progressive reformers saw recreational horse racing as synonymous with gambling. The integrity of the sport declined as its audience shifted from a planter aristocracy to professional sportsmen, argues Mary Jean Wall in How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of

Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers and Breeders. Many argued for the end of horse racing. Wall wrote:

Early in the twentieth century, when Progressive Era reforms came into vogue, state legislative wallop would pack authoritative power into the escalating outcry to ban all Thoroughbred racing — everywhere.67

This outraged many horsemen around the nation defending one of the nation’s oldest pastimes. In 1908, only 25 of the 314 tracks counted in 1894 before remained opened.68

A brief look at its history shows horse racing was a popular sport dating to colonial times, while constantly attracting the company of gamblers.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, races tested more than a horse’s stamina and speed. It was a way of asserting the upward mobility of those coming into more prosperous circumstances. Virginians depended on horses. But ownership wasn’t simply for utility. Virginia gentry valued the overall presentation of riding horseback. With the races came spectators. Betting was not only confined to “great monied men.” In 1752,

66 David Haugen, Legalized Gambling, (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), 17. 67Mary Jean Wall. How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers and Breeders. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 174. 68 Haugen, Legalized Gambling, 17.

26 one Virginia lawmaker bemoaned gambling “practiced among the lower class of people” who “follow the examples of their superiors.” Anti-gamblers blamed British traditions and certainly Puritan society in the north frowned on the practice. These significant gatherings and lavish events attracted the upper class and fascinated others with lesser means. The events differed from cockfighting and bare-knuckle pugilism that largely attracted marginal or fringe elements markedly lower on the socio-economic ladder.69

As early as 1802, New York City prohibited horse racing because of its connection to gambling. Horse races continued outside New York state limits in New

Jersey until the New York legislature eventually reversed its decision in 1821. With legalization, horse racing surged in popularity and a push for standardization of races, tracks and meetings followed. Innovation, such as oval tracks and elevated wooden grandstands, became commonplace. By 1829, American Turf Register and Sporting

Magazine were among the publications that emerged to promote the sport. One popular publication, The Spirit of the Times, even printed racing odds. Additionally, these publications posted scheduled race meets — 56 race meets were reported in 1830 — and, more importantly for competitors, race times were circulated in print, which presented owners with a regional glimpse at the best in the field. The New York Jockey Club further standardized the sport under a network of club rules. According to the New York

Jockey Club, responsibility to guide horse racing into a new era fell on the shoulders of

“gentlemen of standing, wealth and intelligence” to avoid a takeover by “lower-class ruffians and ne’er-do-wells.”70

69 Rhys Isaac. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. (University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 98- 101. 70 Richard Davies, Sports in American Life, (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 9.

27

In the mid-nineteenth century, horse racing mirrored baseball’s emergence in many ways; each included clubs, associations and conventions. Horse racing, however, demands more than a bat and ball. It is the “sport of kings,” a nickname gained during the rule of Charles II in England. After Oliver Cromwell banned horse racing, King Charles ushered in a new era of acceptance during the Restoration. It was during his reign that three imported Arabian stallion sires, bred with English horses, are commonly believed to have started the lineage of the thoroughbred. The first North American imported thoroughbred, Bulle Rocke, was an aged son of one of the original sires, the “Darley

Arabian.” Horse racing maintained patrician inclinations — but the spectacle cast its wider appeal. 71

Several American presidents gambled on horse races, including George

Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. America’s seventh president,

Jackson, was particularly interested in breeding and high-stakes races. His expertise and experience on horseback sparked his military career. As a teenager, Jackson was an authorized appraiser of horseflesh and moved west to Tennessee as horse racing grew in popularity in the south. For wealthy Americans, thoroughbred bloodlines served as popular connections to their ancestors across the Atlantic; the original sires crossbred with native English horses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Jackson’s case, he assumed a $1,500 debt to acquire Truxton, sired by English champion Diomed.

Truxton became the main attraction at many Tennessee races. Jackson made a small fortune when Truxton went to stud, and the then-future president eventually acquired a racetrack of his own. One of Jackson’s duels occurred after a horse race that sparked an

71 “Thoroughbred Times Racing Almanac,” Edited by Mark Simon and written by staff of Thoroughbred Times (Lexington: Bowtie Press, 2003), 26-32

28 ongoing feud in the press. The public quarrel with a man named Charles Dickinson originated from a race bet, after a feud that challenged each man’s honor and public reputation. In Antebellum America, horse racing established itself as an institution, and apparently sparked such heightened emotions that the future U.S President killed a man over it.72

Thoroughbred horse racing remained popular in the north and south, even though its epicenter moved to the lusher and warmer climate beyond the Cumberland Gap and eventually Kentucky. In 1863, former boxing champion John “Old Smoke” Morrissey used his prizefight winnings and built a track at Saratoga Springs, New York. Morrissey, a heavyweight champion in 1853 and example of the rising sport of the nineteenth century, accommodated wealthy clientele and members of the Democratic Party’s

Tammany Hall organization. Morrissey constructed a plush gambling parlor, a fancy hotel nearby a racetrack with wooden grandstands. It attracted thousands of wealthy Civil

War era entrepreneurs, including Cornelius Vanderbilt. Thoroughbred racing remained popular among aristocratic life in the North and South, especially New York, the mid-

Atlantic and west into Kentucky.73

While the nation’s elites had the means to buy thoroughbreds, racing all types of horses appealed to the masses. During the mid-nineteenth century, Americans engaged in speed through horse and buggies. Harness racing was said to be a reckless way for men to get from one tavern to another, but it was prevalent. The five-mile stretch of road in New

York from Third Avenue north to Bowery was deemed “consecrated ground” for

72 H.W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. (Doubleday: New York City, 2005), 129-146. 73 Richard Davies and Richard Abrams, Betting the Line: Sports Wagering in American Life. (Ohio State University, 2001), 14.

29

“roadites.” Owners drove horses, not paid jockeys, and anyone with a horse and buggy could participate. They were common stock horses that lacked thoroughbred bloodlines.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once argued horse trotting, unlike races conducted among members of the New York Jockey Club, was a “republican institution” for the multitudes.

In many respects, horse trotting surpassed thoroughbred racing’s popularity, and it held that status through the American Civil War. The New York Trotting Club dates its origins to 1824. Horse trotting, or harness racing, appealed more to people “put off by the snobbery and exclusiveness that surrounded thoroughbred racing.” At least seven tracks opened in New York City and up to seventy elsewhere. The expansion of commercialism and recreation blurred lines of class at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in

New York, then the capital of commercialized horse race meets in America. Horse racing tracks housed a convergence of high class and often-boisterous gamblers where northern jockey clubs revived thoroughbred racing alongside horse trotting meets. 74

Gambling was more than tolerated and, in many ways, was integral to thoroughbred racing’s success, especially as commercialism expanded in America’s urban centers. While horse race betting was not criminalized in New York under its 1895 gambling law, it remained a civil penalty punished by forfeiture of wager. Additionally, sweepstakes were allowed, giving owners the chance to enter races and sweep entrance owner stakes. In 1908, the New York Assembly reformed horse race betting in a close vote, repealing civil penalty enforcement and criminalizing bookmaking and poolselling as a misdemeanor. New York Governor Charles Evan Hughes was a vocal proponent of the new betting law. An additional law forced racetracks to monitor oral bets, and

74 Davies, Sports in American Life, 11.

30 responsible for its enforcement. These laws led to the closure of several racetracks in

New York, including a two-year closure of the Belmont Stakes in 1911 and 1912, the third leg of the Triple Crown. The closure was popularly known as horse racing’s

“blackout.” In 1909, California also passed laws against horse race betting, leading to the closure of the Santa Anita track.75

From 1909 to 1911, purse distribution among horse races in America dropped:

$3.1 to $2.3 million. James R. Keene, Wall Street financier and thoroughbred horse owner, led the most successful stable of the early 1900s. Even Keene, with his record- setting horses Commando and Colin, shipped his stables overseas as anti-racing laws closed tracks across the nation. From 1908 to 1913, more than 1,500 American horses were sent overseas, among them 24 champions. This migration of stables proved so large,

Britain and Ireland horse owner’s feared American bloodlines diluted their thoroughbred bloodlines. Through an English Jockey Club resolution, the Jersey Act of 1913 barred many old American bloodlines — including the famed horse Lexington — from

England’s General Stud Book. British and Irish stables thumbed their noses at American bloodline records and its inconsistencies, allegedly the result of poor record keeping during the Civil War. The Jersey Act remained for decades and represented British elitism in the business of horse breeding.76 These among other fundamental shifts occurred as a result of legislation prohibiting gambling in the United States, which strongly suggested that without legal gambling at racetracks, horse racing simply could not exist as a sport in American life.

75 Robertson, History of the Thoroughbred, 196. 76 Simons, Racing Almanac, 26-30.

31

From 1900 to 1915, the era of anti-gambling laws arising around the country, promoters and track owners introduced a system to replace bookmakers with a more progressive betting formula. In 1908, the Churchill Downs track in Kentucky first implemented the pari-mutuel betting system after laws there outlawed bookmakers.

Under the pari-mutuel system, bettors enter into betting pools against each other. The house always takes a profit through a commission, or “the rake,” at least 10 percent and sometimes much more. Winners collect the remaining money depending on bets placed.

The betting gets more complicated with more complex bets. For instance, trifecta bets on the top three horses in order: win, place and show.77

Kentucky legalized the use of the pari-mutuel system in 1906 with little fanfare.

Pari-mutuel betting existed for decades, a creation of Pierre Oller, owner of a Paris perfume shop in the 1860s. Oller, fed up with shady odds produced by bookmakers, devised a scheme for a more open odds-making system, or “bet among ourselves,” as the term is translated from French to English. Eventually, the pari-mutuel wagering system became the only legal form of racetrack betting in France. American bookmakers adamantly opposed pari-mutuel betting, seeing it as a threat to their jobs. Those placing bets felt the system eliminated skill and impersonalized track betting, and bookmakers were popular among spectators in an increasingly commercialized sport. In contrast, the pari-mutuel system was impersonal and calculated. Pari-mutuel betting appeared in several states in the 1870s and 1880s, but it was not popularly used until states began banning bookmaking during the Progressive Era.78

77 Haugen, Legalized Gambling, 18. 78 Robertson, History of the Thoroughbred, 96-98.

32

In 1912, Maryland followed Kentucky’s lead with its own pari-mutuel betting law. State lawmakers around the country — in the face of anti-gambling laws — introduced versions of it in 1915, based on the Kentucky model, which included a state racing commission, often three to five representatives appointed by the governor with taxes and revenue for local governments. With many states needing more revenue for expanding expenditures to pay for services, legislatures welcomed new tax income.

Backers usually incorporated a double-pronged argument: a removal of bookmakers from tracks and taxes for state revenue. In 1915, one horse racing publication argued that “the pari-mutuel system of betting, by preventing the creation of false odds and interference with the true running of the horses, would do more to clean up the sporting atmosphere of racing than any other one element.”79

In 1914, one year after its reinstatement and the return of the Nevada State Fair, the Nevada State Board of Agriculture began backing the pari-mutuel system as a means to promote the fair. They explained to Governor Tasker Oddie that enthusiasm for the fair was “dormant and lost.” In 1913, in order to bring back the fair, the legislature appropriated $5,000 for the maintenance and $3,000 for renovations at the fairgrounds.

While the main goal of the fair sought the encouragement of agriculture in the state through meetings and awards — whether “best display of high-class swine” or cash prizes for livestock exhibits — organizers informed Oddie that the state’s anti-gambling law had affected the fair’s financial success. In his annual address to the governor, State

Board of Agriculture President R.W. Parry wrote racing and gambling had remained a feature of the fair’s existence for more than forty years and the legislature’s anti-

79 “Bayberry Candle Wins Inaugural Days Feature,” The Thoroughbred Record. Vol. 82, (December 11, 1915), 286

33 gambling law prohibiting bookmaking hurt attendance of the annual event. Parry suggested the pari-mutuel method could help the fair without discrediting the state’s reputation or detracting from what Nevada’s U.S. Senator, Francis Newlands, and other progressives, called a “model commonwealth.”80 Parry added:

The desire to “have an interest,” together with the spirit of speculation, is always abroad in distinct evidence no matter what sport may by patronized. The race horse in the eyes of many is a necessary evil. From the earliest history down to the present time men have raced horses in spite of all manner of opposition raised by fanatics and individuals who seem to hold to the belief that they were created for the sole purpose of directing affairs in keeping with their own narrow and warped ideas.81

If the pari-mutuel form of betting were enacted for state fairs at the next legislative body,

“the action will be generally greeted with indisputable favor,” Perry wrote. He was not the only Nevadan who envisioned racehorse gambling’s benefits for saving the Nevada

State Fair. Many sporting men of wealth in Reno sought the revival of track racing.82

Oddie, on the other hand, was a progressive and opposed track betting.

A True Sport

George Wingfield was a cowboy, a gambler, a shrewd dealer, the “graduate of the faro table … infinitely patient in waiting for things to come his way,” and eventually the

Silver State’s political boss. His “gaze stayed shifty, never steady; his skin showed an extreme pallor in a town [Goldfield] where everyone had sunburn.” Wingfield was “cold

80 William D. Rowley, Reclaiming the Arid West, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996), 131 81 State Board of Agriculture Annual Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1914). 82 Ibid.

34 of manner and taciturn of disposition.”83 That made him a shrewd gambler turned shrewder as a secretive businessman. Before his transition from the poker table to business manager, mine owner and admired figure, Wingfield lived the life of a true sport upon his arrival to Nevada. As his biographer noted:

For two years after his arrival, in 1899 and 1900, he lived the life of a young sport, dabbling in unproductive mining claims around Golconda, traveling frequently to Winnemucca and surrounding areas, and racing horses in Reno and elsewhere.84

George Wingfield stands with one of his thoroughbred horses during his Golconda days. (Nevada Historical Society).

Before he moved to Reno in 1909 and before he made millions in Goldfield,

Wingfield raced horses in Golconda and at the State Fair in Reno in 1899. Wingfield’s

83 Eli N. Richardson and Jeannette Roberts, “Wingfield of Nevada,” NEA Magazine, (1928). 84 C. Elizabeth Raymond. George Wingfield: Owner and Operator of Nevada. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 16.

35 horse, “Incindiator,” placed third in two races in the 1899 Nevada State Fair in Reno.85

Wingfield seemed to arrive in Nevada with “terrible racing instinct” and was described by the Golconda News as a “crack rider” long before he was a shrewd gambler or secretive businessman.86

He was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1876 shortly after his father entered the cattle business in Texas. As a boy, he helped his family round up stock and joined long drives to shipping points. Like most of his era, Wingfield completed eighth grade. He enjoyed the cowboy life and developed a well-practiced poker face as a skillful young gambler. He also developed a love of horses. In the early 1890s, Wingfield left his home briefly for Reno, attempting a career as a jockey. He raced in Golconda and was known as a first-class light among those in the Jockey Club. He made a small fortune from the sale of his horses before leaving for southern Nevada mines. The Tonopah boom by 1900 was too much to keep the young Wingfield in northern Nevada.87

In Tonopah, Wingfield first relied on his gambling skills, as he had in Golconda, but soon invested wisely in property, including The Tonopah Club Saloon. Eventually he started a lucrative partnership with Winnemucca banker, and soon-to-be U.S. Senator,

George Nixon. He initially acted as Nixon’s local agent in Tonopah scouting investment possibilities. Nixon was sixteen years older than Wingfield and was well aware of his junior partner’s gambling talent and growing business acumen. In one letter to Wingfield,

Nixon wrote:

I really believe … as you have told me several times that you wanted to get out of the card business, that the time is

85 State Agricultural Society Annual Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1900). 86 Raymond, Wingfield, 16 87 Ibid.

36

now ripe for you to do it. In this stock business you can do better than any of those lobsters, and I believe if you should cut out the cards, you … and myself can open a brokerage office in Tonopah … and make all kinds of money.88

Wingfield eventually found himself in Goldfield, the most-populated town in

Nevada, boasting more than 20,000 residents, at least three newspapers and luxurious amenities about 180 miles northwest of the small, not-yet incorporated, railroad town of

Las Vegas. Southern Nevada had long been dismissed as a wasteland. Shortly after Jim

Butler discovered high-grade silver deposits in present-day Tonopah, many rushed to

Goldfield and Wingfield was one of the early arrivals. In a three-year span, the town boomed from a population of 36 in 1903 to about 15,000 in 1906, with more than 100 separate mining companies operating in Goldfield.89

Wingfield worked with Nixon to consolidate mining properties and eventually formed the Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company. Legend has it they began an informal partnership one evening at the Tonopah Club and toasted champagne, but they had known each other in northern Nevada. Nixon spent little time in Goldfield and most of his time tending to his political career, especially after winning the U.S. Senate from the Nevada legislature in 1905. He relied on Wingfield to make many business decisions.

Their informal partnership included loans from Wall Street financiers and the acquisition of nearly every mine in Goldfield by January 1907 — the company’s worth estimated at about $50 million was one of the twenty largest companies in the nation. 90

88 Elizabeth Raymond, “George Wingfield’s Political Machine: A study in historical reputation,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, 32, (Summer 1989), 99. 89 Sally Zanjani, Goldfield:The Last Gold Rush on the Western Frontier, (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press at the University of Ohio, 1992), 33. 90 Raymond, Wingfield, 30.

37

In mid-1907, labor disputes threw Goldfield into panic. The confrontation with labor tested Wingfield’s business acumen and savvy, and his determination to keep power at all cost. As the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained influence in the mining camp, claiming to “sweep the capitalist class out of the life of this nation and then out of the whole world,” Wingfield used its radicalism to taint other unions in the town and prompt fear in Reno and Carson City. When workers held strikes, Wingfield said,

“Compromise be damned.” His ideological positions on business, government and labor relations developed on a grander scale and even a national audience drawn to the events in Goldfield. Citing worker violence and unrest, Nevada Democratic Governor John

Sparks requested federal troops to stop “domestic violence and unlawful combinations and conspiracies.” President Theodore Roosevelt sent 300 troops from the San Francisco

Presidio. Roosevelt sent a commission to investigate, finding the activation of federal troops unnecessary, a heavy-handed request from business owners, but Wingfield got his way, as he often did, and the union powers in Goldfield were crushed by the end of

December 1907. To replace federal troops, the Governor called a special legislative session for January 1908. As labor troubles subsided with the unions broken and the mines played out, Wingfield moved to Reno. The lines between politics and business increasingly blurred after he moved to Reno where he eventually controlled hotels, 12 banks, an alleged political machine and the Nevada State Racing Commission (not established until 1915) out of his downtown Reno office.91

Wingfield attracted more national attention after he declined a U.S. Senate appointment offered from Republican Governor Tasker Oddie following Senator Nixon’s

91 Elliott, History of Nevada, 221.

38 death in 1912. Some speculate Wingfield declined because of his past, although he would not have been the first man with a tarnished history to enter the Senate. Wingfield said his power belonged at home and in business where he could accomplish much more for

Nevada’s development. Although Wingfield was often described as a political bully, a man whose power reached from his downtown office known as “The Cave” to every nook and cranny of the state. His decision to stay in the state — rare for a man of power and wealth in Nevada — increased his reputation as a man loyal to Nevada who saw the problems of an “undeveloped state.”92

In 1912, Wingfield took control of a banking chain in Nevada following Nixon’s death. They were located statewide: the First National Bank in Winnemucca; the Nixon

National Bank in Reno and the Carson Valley Bank in Carson City. He already controlled one bank in Goldfield. In 1914, Wingfield was named the vice president of the American

Bankers Association for Nevada. Once Nixon’s domain, banking became Wingfield’s empire. It was perfect timing. In 1913, the Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company had fallen so far that it was removed from the New York Stock Exchange. Wingfield never dropped his mining interests, but his focus shifted from mining in Goldfield to banking in

Reno and statewide. Additionally, his organization of the Reno Securities Company — originally started as a holding company to organize the purchase of the Hotel Golden in

1916 — quickly expanded to other properties, such as the Riverside Hotel in the mid-

1920s. It proved to be one of his most enduring investments.93 Although in 1914 he stood far from the political power he wielded in later years, he was recognized as the man who crushed workers and their unions in Goldfield the 1907-1908 strike. The event haunted

92 Raymond, Wingfield, 106. 93 Ibid., 114.

39

Nevada labor history. Those who felt wronged often voted for Independent and Socialist party candidates because both Democrats and Republicans favored law during the special session supporting the creation of a State Police force, which was seen as a strike-busting organization. Key Pittman, a Democratic State Senator and eventual U.S. Senator, said in

1913 of Wingfield: “He has ambitions to control the State for his own aggrandizement and has already started his work.”94

While Nevada experienced important aspects of progressive reform, progressives and Democrats had “no effective progressive leadership with a firm program.”95

Wingfield, as the potential powerhouse of Nevada politics, leaned Republican on most issues facing the nation, siding with private business over government regulation — especially in what he called a sparsely populated, “undeveloped state.” Early on, however, Wingfield’s party allegiances were rarely cut and dry. In 1910, Wingfield backed Democratic congressman George Bartlett. He wrote in a letter to the congressman, “I am not in politics and am free lance and can split my ticket any way I see fit as I am not with the ring on either side.”96 While his loyalty to the Republican

Party remained “absolute and unwavering,” many felt Wingfield stoked a bipartisan operation, a machine by the 1920s, as the owner and operator of the state, or “king” of

Nevada.97 Throughout his career, Wingfield retained Democratic lawyers, such as George

94 Ibid., 90. 95 William Rowley. Into the Narrows of Nevada History, Halcyon: A Journal of the Humanities (1981), 127. 96 Raymond, Wingfield, 103. 97 Ibid. 196.

40

Thatcher, who served as attorney general 1912 to 1918 before entering private practice with attorney William Woodburn.98

Additionally, Wingfield acquired two livestock outfits, one in Lander County,

Nevada and the other north of Reno, the Pyramid Land and Stock Company. In 1910, he purchased a 320-acre ranch near Honey Lake he called “Meadowbrook Ranch,” a summer resort and setting of many of his bear hunts. While livestock outfits and agricultural ventures in Churchill County (the Churchill Creamery) represented a steady industry compared to mining, his Meadowbrook Ranch was simply pleasure. For pleasure or business, ranching and agriculture brought Wingfield back to the land and, in his opinion, helped the development of the state.

During the years Wingfield purchased land for agriculture, cattle baron William

H. Moffat developed a ranching empire in Nevada just as World War I broke out in

Europe. He joined other — such as the Miller and Lux operations — who owned lands and ran cattle in northern Nevada.99 The son of a San Francisco meatpacking mogul,

Moffat worked in Nevada and California as a buyer, shipper and traveling representative while the family business expanded. Working out of a Reno office as early as 1903,

Moffat developed a large ranching empire that stretched from Mason Valley to Elko

County in Nevada. By 1915, Moffat held an office in Wingfield’s Reno National Bank

Building on the third floor.100 Moffat sat on the board and was president of the Nevada

98 Ibid. 159. 99 David Igler, Industrial Cowboy: Miller and Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1-19. 100 There is little saved correspondence between Geroge Wingfield and William Moffat. Their paths crossed throughout their careers dating back to 1905 when both served as board members on the “Bullfrog District Electric Light, Ice and Cold Storage, Co.” (Paperwork at NHS) They also shared nearby offices in the Reno National Bank Building, both served long tenures on the Racing Commission and one newspaper article reports both were hunting partners.

41

Agricultural Society, which owned the fairgrounds and the Reno racetrack. He also served on the Nevada State Racing Commission with Wingfield and Jim McKay in the

1930s.101

In January 1915, then-chairman of the State Board of Agriculture, Moffat publically backed pari-mutuel betting for horse races, just as the board had under previous R.W. Parry’s leadership the year before. In 1914, the board cited a need to boost attendance for the State Fair. Moffat took the argument another step forward in 1915. He said oral betting was “indulged” in during the 1913 State Fair and these bookmakers at the track employed “jobbery.” He furthermore called gambling inevitable at the fair’s horse race meetings because of inherited feelings that the state must “have betting at our fairs and race meetings.” According to Moffat, pari-mutuel betting would deter the bookmakers and place gambling at the track under state regulation. He continued:

Conceding that the bettors comprise a vast element of our citizenship, none of whom wish to be classed as open violators of the law, and admitting an inability to frame a law which will eradicate the practice of betting in any form, will it not be better to surround this element of society with a protection in the form of legalizing the ‘iron men’ under restrictions and supervision, thus insuring every man an ‘even break’ so far as it may be attainable and the association a source of revenue to help meet the vast expenses of conducting a fair or race meeting?102

Moffat also alluded to the possibilities of tourism, especially with similar anti- gambling laws across the border in California. Horse race betting was seen as a potential way to generate revenue from out-of-state visitors looking to place a bet. Additionally, ranchers such as Moffat supported the legalization of betting because it would improve

101 Kenneth Scott. He Fenced ‘Em In. Tahlequah, Oklahoma [Publisher not identified), (1965), 14-16; James Young, Cattle in the Cold Desert, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002), 12-17. 102 State Board of Agriculture Annual Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1915).

42 the quality of horses in the state and for Nevada’s stock work. Furthermore, Moffat argued the desire to place a bet was deep-rooted in men. He argued:

(Charles) Darwin has said that ‘Man was distinguished from all other animals in that he laughs.’ He might have added that the civilized man is distinguished from all other men in that he will bet on a horserace.103

103 Ibid.

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Chapter Three Nevada: The Sport’s “Only Hope”

In February 1915, “the millionaire Nevada mine owner and sportsman,” George

Wingfield, told a crowd in San Francisco of plans to organize a thoroughbred horse racing circuit in his state. The announcement came days after Nevada Governor Emmet

Boyle approved legislation for a racing commission and anti-gambling amendment to allow horse race betting through the pari-mutuel system. The proposed circuit included

Reno, Las Vegas, Goldfield and other Nevada towns. Wingfield told reporters racing could start as early as May that year with larger race meetings in August or September to avoid time conflicts with popular races and attract eastern horse entries. He predicted a revival of horse racing throughout the American West while emphasizing his main intention was to elevate horse breeding in Nevada.

My participation in the thoroughbred racing game will be simply that of one who loves horses. My interests in the revival of the game in Nevada is not in the role of promoter, but a horseman. I am working for the advancement of livestock breeding of all kinds, and I believe that it is essential to have racing to create a better grade of horses in general. My only object in wishing to get through the pari-mutuel bills was that the public’s interest in the horse is attracted when there is a chance to place a wager.104

Regional headlines and editorials heralded the reorganization of the Nevada

Jockey Club as the possible replacement of the California Jockey Club, the then- preeminent western club. The Sacramento Union said that Reno was set to become the

104 Nevada State Journal, February, 21 1915.

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“Great American Monte Carlo.” Reports around the nation endorsed Wingfield’s vision at a time. One newspaper saw Nevada as the new home for the sport of kings:

The revival of the sport of kings has its only hope in Nevada. The state has the spirit which invariably go with the frontier life, and it is dominated by a comparatively small number of men. These men, in large part, made their money mining and stock raising, and with keen sporting instincts would naturally back the racing game.105

Nevada appeared as a different state, with different businesses and different demographics. Much of its predominantly male population’s “sporting instincts” stood rooted in the nineteenth-century West unfazed by morally-inspired reform movements.

Yet, a reform movement gripped Nevada squeezing out the “sport,” the gambler, and the

“turfite.” In the eyes of many progressives in the 1910s, gamblers at racetracks were thought of as “cheap sports” yielding “evil profits.” A large segment of the population, however, maintained a memory of horse racing as a popular and high-class pastime with a history that spanned centuries in America and western European nations. This gave the sport a more complex distinction as an institution worth saving.106

Nevada attracted the sporting “gamblers or turfites” or sports during its mining boom in Tonopah and Goldfield. Certainly George Wingfield fit the mold. To Wingfield, and other sports, reformers threatened the economic lifeblood of an “undeveloped state.”

The “sporting culture” permitted in this different state came under attack when reformers passed the anti-gambling bill in 1909, when women’s suffrage occurred in 1914 and the possibility of prohibition lurked in the years thereafter, along with the increased divorce residency in 1913 from six months to one year. Heading into the legislative session in

105 Carson City News, February 17, 1914. 106 Frederic Paxson, “The Rise of Sport,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (September 1917), 147.

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1915, however, Wingfield argued that the sporting aspects of horse racing could be accommodated by progressive reform through “regulation.” Furthermore, Nevada’s undeveloped economy demanded the accommodation. As Wingfield said:

I don’t think that if horseracing is allowed under the pari- mutuel system, under which system it is regulated by a commission, that it is going to interfere with the people who are opposed to such things, and I don’t think it is going to breed any crime in Nevada that the state is not encumbered with at the present time… Nevada is an undeveloped state and it will not stand the reforms that might apply to states of a very large populations.107

Prying the Door Open: Horse Race Gambling

In 1914, Wingfield purchased land south of Reno hoping to establish a horse stable. The purchase of land was formerly part of the deceased former Nevada Governor

John Sparks’ Alamo Ranch. In 1898, Sparks was credited with keeping the Nevada State

Fair alive as long as it did after the 1893 depression with his “generous display of livestock” at the event.108 Wingfield sought the establishment of an even grander stock operation. He spent more than $40,000 on thoroughbred horses that year, most from out of state.109 Additionally, that same year, Wingfield financed and incorporated the Nevada

Stock Farm. He told the Reno Evening Gazette in 1914, “I am not going into the racing business, but I do admire thoroughbred horses in this state.” He added: “If (racing) can be done there will be a large amount at every meeting and an immense amount of money

107 Reno Evening Gazette, February 2, 1915. 108 Nevada Board of Agriculture Annual Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1898). 109 George Wingfield’s financial statements, year ending 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada

46 will change hands.”110 In correspondence with his attorneys, Wingfield requested that the corporate charter include “the power to race or run horses in all states” but that he “would rather that this be not mentioned in the articles of incorporation.”111 The incorporation mentioned land and water rights, along with cattle raising and the ability to “breed, raise and deal in horses.” It added:

Both thoroughbred horses, work horses, race horses, and each and every other class of horses, and to carry on a general horse breeding business … to do … everything … as is usually done by the owners of such classes of horses. 112

Even though he told the press, “My participation in the thoroughbred racing game will be simply that of one who loves horses,” Wingfield was already betting on his own horses by 1914. Bernard Baruch, the eastern capitalist who helped finance the merger of the Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company in 1907 and who maintained a lengthy correspondence with Wingfield throughout his life, entered bets, most likely oral bets, for

Wingfield at New York race tracks. One month before the 1914 election, Wingfield wrote Baruch:

From time to time, I may wire you to put down a bet on some of these horses myself if it is not too much trouble to you but if it is, please be frank to say so. I would not bother you with such matters but I do not know anyone else there who can take care of it as well as you can. If you have someone who can do this it is all right but if you have to do it personally, I do not want to bother you.113

110 Raymond, Wingfield, 112 111 George Wingfield to Hoyt, Gibbons and French Law Office, August 31, 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada 112 Nevada Stock Farm Incorporation Papers, September, 14 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada 113 George Wingfield to Bernard Baruch, October 10, 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada

47

Baruch obliged. Wingfield further requested Baruch to “please do so in such a way that none of it will get on the track” — so no one knew he was funding the bets. Horse race betting increased in New York in 1913 after a New York State Court ruled horse race bets were legal when made orally (prohibiting the practice was an infringement on freedom of speech), making it possible for Baruch, or someone who worked for him, to make a bet on Wingfield’s behalf.114

In the 1914 election year, Wingfield was careful not to reveal his intentions of entering the racing game on a national level. Additionally, it would have been premature for him to do so before legislators met in 1915 to discuss the legalization of horse race betting. In 1914, Wingfield quietly began the creation of what he hoped would be an acclaimed horse racing stable in the West, something along the lines of Theodore

Winters’ popular stables a few decades before.

Even with his money, Wingfield, 38 years old in 1914, mostly avoided opulent living and remained “aloof from the social whirl.” His wife at the time favored opulence, preferring San Francisco, which largely contributed to their long-time separation before eventual divorce. As his biographer Elizabeth Raymond wrote in George Wingfield:

Owner and Operator of Nevada, the Nevada Stock Farm was Wingfield’s “plaything” that remained one of his “principal hobbies outside hunting” — the “opulent revival” of an old love from Golcanda, a link to his sporting days predating his accumulation of great wealth. Wingfield understood horses better than almost any owner in the nation. Preston

Burch, one of Wingfield’s trainers and a member of the Thoroughbred Racing Trainers

114 Ibid.

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Hall of Fame, said his boss “knew more about horses than anyone he had ever worked for.” Horse racing, however, was not what attracted Wingfield to the sport of kings. The sport itself attracted Wingfield long before he had the wealth to pursue it on a grand scale. Wingfield’s horses entered national races and he eventually expanded his Nevada

Stock Farm to a second breeding farm in Louisville, Kentucky where Burch’s work produced General Thatcher who placed third at the 1923 Preakness Stakes.115

Regardless of how wealthy and powerful he got in business and banking,

Wingfield connected with his roots where good horseflesh was prized and gambling on races was a mark of the sporting society in which he thrived. Wingfield’s passion for the thoroughbred horses shined through early and was evident in the money and time he expended. As early as March 1914, Wingfield sent his stock farm superintendent, M.P.

Guilliams, on horse-purchasing trips to Lexington, Kentucky and overseas. Before long, his correspondence with trainers traveling the continent buying horses increasingly became correspondence with Nevada Stock Farm horseman updating him on his horses’ performance at eastern tracks. During these trips, Wingfield kept up a keen interest, demanding constant communication. In one instance, Wingfield’s secretary, C.F. Burton, attempted to remind trainer, Harry Hamilton, of Wingfield’s interest:

Burton to Hamilton, June 27, 1914: “Mr. Wingfield would like to hear from you a little oftener…I think it would be well for you to make it a rule to write to him at least twice a week.”

Hamilton to Burton, July 1, 1914: “Now I write occasionally when it is necessary and get no answers.

115 Raymond, Wingfield, 113

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Remember this is not a pleasure resort. I am busy from 4 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. Have always wired when it seemed necessary … If Mr. Wingfield insists I will write him twice a week, if not I will write when it is necessary … just layoff — I have troubles enough.”116

Four days later, on July 5, 1914, Wingfield wrote Hamilton directly: “You had better write about twice a week giving me what general information you can … I am trying to tell you what I want and of course, I expect you to follow my instructions.” Two months later, Hamilton is noted in Wingfield’s correspondence with Baruch as discharged as a trainer, replaced by a growing number of trainers traveling the nation under the flag of the Nevada Stock Farm.117

While Wingfield pursued his own enterprise and entered the racing game, he publically argued for its broader benefits to Nevada. His argued competition and racing benefitted the breeding of Nevada thoroughbreds. This was not a completely disingenuous tactic to skirt suspicion of Wingfield’s building horse racing enterprise. One of Nevada’s major businesses was the livestock industry, and many ranchers felt the racing would benefit the state’s horse stock. One rancher noted in a letter to the editor of a Reno newspaper that he didn’t approve of racing thoroughbred horses, but examples of these horses raised with “cold-blood” horses of Nevada created much more efficient freight teams. The rancher wrote that “clean contests” could “determine the value of the animal, and prove the superiority of his blood and giving to him his true commercial value.” The writer contended:

116 C.F. Burton to Harry Hamilton, June 27, 1914, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada 117 George Wingfield to Bernard Baruch, October 10, 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada

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Picture Nevada raising such animals as these, giving them their earnings capacity at home, selling them abroad at these fabulous prices, using this capital at home to develop and water our rich soils.118

As the legislative session neared in 1915, ranching, not racing, embodied the backbone argument for a racing commission in Nevada and for an amendment to the 1909 anti- gambling law allowing horse race betting under the pari-mutuel system.119

Oddie’s Governorship, Women’s Suffrage and Reform

While in the governor’s office from 1911 to 1915, the self-proclaimed

“progressive or insurgent Republican,” Tasker Oddie accommodated reform rhetoric and kept cozy relations with business interests. In order to win re-election in 1914, Oddie stoked reformers backing moral legislation heading into the 1915 legislature, firing up progressives and annoying Wingfield. Oddie, born and raised in New York City, moved to Nye County in Nevada in 1898. He assisted Jim Butler with finances and legal advice in 1900 during the origins of Tonopah mining. In 1904, Oddie entered the State Senate.

Speculative “paper” mining companies crushed his fortune made in the mines, and when the New York Stock Exchange was slashed in half following the Panic of 1907, Oddie lost everything, owing $75,000 to Nixon and Wingfield. Failure in the mines convinced him that he was best suited for politics.120

Through it all, Oddie “retained notoriety as one of the legendary figures of the

Tonopah dream.”121 He won the governorship in 1910 with only mild support of the

118 Reno Evening Gazette, February 6, 1915. 119 Reno Evening Gazette, February 2, 1915. 120 Ibid. 25. 121 Edited by William Douglass and Robert Nylen, Letters from the Nevada Frontier: Correspondence of Tasker L. Oddie, 1898-1902, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004), XVI.

51 business community — a tough task for a Republican. Oddie capitalized on the heightened reform climate and got a taste of revenge running as a Republican against some in his own party opposed to reform. It was the state’s first direct primary for governor. The new process denied Wingfield and Nixon the ability to handpick a candidate for the Republican ticket. As Oddie’s biographer noted:

For Oddie, the political path became not only the way to secure a paying job and to regain a sense of self-respect, but also, apparently, a way to seek revenge against Nixon and company [Wingfield].122

Oddie traveled Nevada’s desert roads in a chain-drive Thomas Flyer, cooking meals by campfire with just enough gas to get to the next campaign stop. He won the primary and eventually gained mild support of business interests during the general election as the lesser of two evils. His opponent, Denver Dickerson, the incumbent, was elected lieutenant governor in 1906 and succeeded Democratic Governor John Sparks following

Sparks’ death in office in 1908. Oddie defeated Dickerson, and became Nevada’s first

Republican governor in 20 years, primarily because Oddie was seen as a reform

Republican similar to Theodore Roosevelt, or as Oddie noted, “An insurgent

Republican.”123

Oddie spearheaded significant reforms in Nevada while in office thanks to the cooperation of the 1911 legislature, which included the passage of a tax commission, public service commission, and in what can be interpreted as a no-pimp law at brothels.

In Nevada, two-thirds of private-land property was owned by out of state interests, including the Southern Pacific Railroad. The tax commission lessened the railroad’s great

122 Loren Briggs Chan, Sagebrush Statesman: Tasker L. Oddie of Nevada, (Reno: University of Nevada Press), 42. 123 Ibid. 41.

52 influence over the state and forced valuations up to those equal with smaller owners. The commission was Oddie’s — along with Nevada progressives — crowning achievement.

Additionally, the legislature passed the workman’s compensation act in 1911, railroad safety measures in 1911 and 1913 and a public service commission to regulate rates of utilities and take over the work of the railroad commission in the regulation of transportation facilities for persons and goods. 124

Some reform came with discriminatory attire cloaked in worker’s rights provisions. In 1913, Oddie signed an act limiting the number of non-English speaking persons employed in the mines or other plants for the reduction, concentration, or refining of ores or metals. While mine owners protested, workers groups argued it was a safety measure to guarantee that non-English speakers did not cause accidents, which did occur. The bill meant to protect workers from low-wage competition from foreign labor and “better preserve health and protect safety of those engaged in such work.” Oddie also signed the labor-union-sponsored eight-hour workday law for miners, partly to prohibit foreign-born miners from exceeding those limitations and mine owners from taking advantage of them. 125

In 1914, Oddie based his re-election campaign on maintaining morality legislation in the face of threats to repeal them. In the 1913 legislature, he supported the extension of the residency for divorce to one year and very publically backed the anti-gambling law.

From this position, he attacked his opponent, Emmet Boyle, whom he accused of failing

124 Elliott, History of Nevada, 249. 125 Chan, 56; Russell Elliott, Growing Up in a Company Town: a Family in the Copper Camp of McGill, Nevada, (Reno: Nevada Historical Society, 1990), 80.

53 to take a forthright stand in order to draw anti-reform support to his campaign. Oddie noted:

The paramount issue in this campaign is whether wide-open gambling and easy divorce will again be legalized. Mr. Boyle declares that these are dead issues. Meanwhile the corpses of these dead issues are wandering through every street, alley and by-way of every city, town and hamlet of the State enthusiastically rallying their advocates and whispering the name of Boyle as the candidate who, if elected, will not veto any gambling and easy divorce bills the Legislature may pass.126

If the middle-class members of the Progressive Movement sought to dispel evils coming from upper class corruption and lower class sin, Oddie’s re-election platform focused more on the latter. Oddie lost re-election by a little more than 1,000 votes, prompting his supporters to deplore the faltering support for progressive reform. 127 Oddie lost to Boyle again in 1918 before fixing his relationship with Wingfield and other political kingmakers and was elected on the Republican ticket to the U.S. Senate in 1920. He held that seat until 1932.128

Progressives gained a great victory in 1914, however, when the state’s voters approved women’s suffrage, but the vote for suffrage highlighted changes in Nevada’s urban areas, specifically Reno. While Nevada’s loudest progressives were in the state’s urban center, its growing saloon interests resided there as well. In 1914, Nevada’s urban counties, including Washoe, Storey and Ormsby (Carson City), voted against women’s suffrage fearing it would bring prohibition and closure of drinking establishments. The

126 Chan, Oddie, 65. 127 Issued by Dean Heller and edited by Renee Parker and Steve George. Political History of Nevada, Eleventh Edition, (Carson City: Nevada State Printing Office, 2006), 371. 128 Douglass and Nylen, Oddie Papers, XVI.

54 rural communities across the state voted for suffrage. This change in Reno was noticeable to Anne Martin, arguably the city’s most prominent suffragette. In 1911, after more than a year in England participating in Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political

Union, Martin noted the presence of a saloon element and how Reno had changed to “a glaring Midway Plaisance, tempting young and old day and night, a crime ridden place.”129 Pugilism, particularly the Johnson-Jeffries fight in 1910 left an unsavory legacy and “precipitated race riots” around the nation. Reno, however, where the fight was held, remained calm. Martin’s biographer, Anne Howard, wrote that Martin, born and raised in northern Nevada, “suffered a strong culture shock on her return to schizophrenic Reno, a town whose respectable citizens could blink, for money’s sake, at what the world called sin and vice.” For Martin and other progressives, there was little doubt that Wingfield’s move to Reno reinforced the influence of the saloon crowd in the town.130

In 1914, some newspapers alleged Wingfield was buying the Reno Evening

Gazette and “preparing for the campaign.” After hearing the news that Wingfield was running for State Senate in 1914, E.E. Roberts, Nevada’s congressman and staunch proponent of the socially “liberal measures” expected to be proposed in the 1915 legislature, was exuberant:

“…if ever a State Legislature needed good, strong, fearless business men, Nevada does, and your coming out at this time will inspire other business men … your election should be unanimous and I have no doubt but what the other parties will hesitate about putting a man against you. …I have mentioned the fact of your candidacy among the national leaders and they thought it was a shrewd political move in the line of higher things in the future, and that a

129 Anne Howard. The Long Campaign: A Biography of Anne Martin. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1985), 78. 130 Ibid. 78.

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man who would turn down the offer of a United States Senatorship without opposition and make a race in his home county for State Senate for the purpose of upbuilding the state by enactment of sane business legislation, was too big a man to be overlooked in national affairs.”131

Roberts believed in Wingfield’s assertion that Nevada was, indeed, an undeveloped state where suppression and regulation of vice-related activities hurt the economy. Wingfield, however, was not excited about running for political office. Still, the announcement reveals his increasing attention to the upcoming 1915 legislature. In a letter to the editor of his Goldfield Tribune, Wingfield wrote, “To tell you the truth about it, I think I shall be senator from Washoe County and furthermore, I do not like the job at all but somebody has to go and I suppose I am the goat.”132 Wingfield wanted that seat no more than he wanted the U.S. Senate seat he declined in 1912. He dropped out of the running two months before the general election. Wingfield stayed out of public office until a 1927 appointment to the University Board of Regents. He won election in 1928. That was the extent of his career in public office.133

Although he did step down as a candidate in 1914, Wingfield’s political influence was everywhere. Suffragists, including Martin, identified Wingfield as an opponent during the 1914 campaign for women’s suffrage, and he made no secret about his opposition to Martin and her cause in Nevada. Social concerns, according to Wingfield, obstructed economic progress and placed a burden on business. In May of 1914, as he was quietly entering the horse racing game, Wingfield feared federal measures to bring

131 George Wingfield to E.E. Roberts, August 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada. 132 George Wingfield to V.L. Ricketts, August 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada. 133 Raymond, Wingfield, 249-250.

56 about women’s suffrage and prohibition. He wrote letters to Roberts, Newlands and

Oddie (each identical): “As a citizen of Nevada I wish to enter my protest against the interference of the Federal Government with questions of prohibition and equal suffrage.

It is a matter that should be left to each state and I do not believe the people of Nevada are in favor of either.”134 In one story that entered national news wires, Wingfield threatened to leave Nevada if women gained suffrage. For Wingfield, suffrage “has been farcical everywhere” and “unproductive of the results claimed by the fanatics who agitate the minds of womanhood … The State’s development is proceeding slowly and conservatively, and the interests behind this conservative and consistent development are warranted in avoiding radical innovation.” In the “undeveloped state” of Nevada,

Wingfield argued, that reform backed by women threatened the state’s progress. After women gained suffrage in 1914, Wingfield’s threat to leave the state proved empty and was one of the few times his famed “luck did not hold. 135

Progressives showed little interest in dropping the banner of social reform as

Nevada approached the 1915 legislature. On Jan. 28, 1915, a rally to support moral reform drew a large crowd at the Majestic Theater in Reno. Those in attendance argued that two recent reforms should be defended to keep Nevada on the progressive path: the one-year divorce residency and anti-gambling. The Reno Evening Gazette reported that the Women’s Civic Club of Reno organized the meeting, “but the women did not out- number the men to any great extent.” The discussion focused on “principles” and

“humiliation.” Only a couple weeks removed from the Governor’s Mansion, Oddie told

134 Wingfield to Roberts, Newlands and Oddie, September 1914, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada. 135 Howard, Martin, 90.

57 the crowd that those outside the state rarely focused on Nevada’s redeeming characteristics. “At a meeting in the YMCA in New York, when I was introduced as a speaker, a general laugh resulted at the mention of the name Nevada,” Oddie was quoted as saying in the Reno Evening Gazette. “We have taken a step forward and Nevada is looked upon as a state that has been cleaned up. Let’s stay cleaned up.”136

Oddie’s “cleaned up” phrase referenced progressive gains under his one term as governor, but he alleged evils lurked to reverse the progress. Easy divorce undoubtedly commanded the attention of the meeting. Many felt Nevada’s liberal divorce law had promoted immorality making it the “laughing stock of the country.” Repealing the one- year residency reform would be a step backward. During the protest meeting, Reno attorney Samuel Belford spoke for the progressive community: “We want to see our business institutions flourish, but it isn’t necessary to promote immorality to secure that prosperity … The people of Nevada must make up their minds that artificial stimulants cannot keep up prosperity.”137 The robust gathering occurred days before the new legislative session with a new governor at the helm of state government, Emmet Boyle.

Fearing a roll back of progressive achievements, those reformers assembled and prepared for a legislative battle that pitted progressives versus business leaders and “sports,” or the sporting types, seeking a revival of horse racing in Nevada.

The “Three Liberal Measures” of the 1915 Legislature

136 Reno Evening Gazette, February 3, 1915. 137 Ibid.

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Discussions about taxes and state revenue, commonplace at most legislative sessions, especially pressed upon legislators when they met in the 1915 session. The state underwent a restructuring of its tax system after the authorization of a state tax commission by the 1911 legislature. Nevada was one of the last states to centralize assessment and taxation on property under a commission. In response to its population more than doubling in a decade, Nevada’s state expenditures exceeded one million dollars for the first time in 1914.138 Before the creation of the commission, Nevada’s

Board of Assessors set property assessment rates. The board failed, Boyle argued, to keep up with increased property valuation with property set at a fifth of that required by law.

Boyle called this practice unacceptable and further noted:

The Board of Assessors absolutely ignored the needs of the state in the matter of state revenue, and it is significant that, during its regime, the state treasury was depleted as a result of its failure to provide an adequate assessment to produce needed state revenue by the means clearly at its disposal, and at its disposal alone.139

Opening the legislature, Boyle called Nevada’s situation “peculiar” because of its vast area, low population — “a state of small and isolated communities.” He added: “These conditions in themselves place an unusually heavy burden upon our taxpayers.”

We are entitled to enjoy all the advantages flowing from a good and modern government, and we are too progressive to accept less from our government than progressive people are demanding elsewhere. But our public servants must realize that the very nature of things here requires of them an unusual degree of consideration for those upon whom the cost of government falls.140

138 Appendix to Journals of Senate and Assembly, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1915), 6 139 Ibid. 8 140 Ibid. 4

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When Boyle asserted “the very nature of things here” and the need for an “unusual degree of consideration for those upon whom the cost of government falls,” his language paralleled Wingfield’s argument that progressive regulation was dangerous in the undeveloped state of Nevada. As Wingfield argued, horse race betting, along with reducing the divorce residency back from one year to six months, could increase revenue and attract business from out of state. Moral legislation became a distraction as constituents focused attention on more pressing matters, specifically improving the

141 business climate.

Clark County Assemblyman Peter Buol, Las Vegas’ first mayor, sought compromise with reformers when he backed legislation to amend Nevada’s anti- gambling law to permit horse race betting and the establishment of a racing commission.

The compromise was to use revenues from horse racing for state improvements. Under the proposed bill, the governor would appoint a five-member commission. The commission members must be “experienced horseman and stock raisers.” Under the pari- mutuel system, the Racing Commission took eight percent of all money bet as a commission, with remaining money placed in a pool and distributed to winners. That money — a large reason for the pari-mutuel system’s acceptance because the house always takes a profit — was to fund race meetings and pay track personnel. One-sixth of the commission, however, was to be funneled to the state treasurer and distributed to

142 counties for road improvements projects, according to the proposed bill.

With backing from the university and religious groups, several women spoke at the 1915 legislature on the dangers of horse race betting. Their arguments addressed two

141 Ibid. 142 Nevada State Journal, January, 25 1915.

60 points: morals and economics. That money for road improvements could not make up for the tragedy of poor men losing paychecks at the track. They also rejected rancher arguments that horse race betting encouraged a better crop of horses in the state.

If it is good for a state to pass such a race track bill why is it not sanctioned in such states as New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Illinois? If it is good from a business standpoint to pass laws that tend to corrupt the morals why have not other states set the pace? No stock breeder would permit diseased stock to enter his herds, because it would not be good from a business standpoint, so why should Nevada encourage undesirable characters to flourish in the state by legislation that will permit them to survive?143

In an even more heated debate, Nevada’s repeal of the one-year divorce residency split the Senate. Only a “political deal” ended the standoff. In exchange for a vote to repeal the one-year residency, a Fallon Senator demanded the State Fair be transported from Reno to Fallon. This brought back the six-month residency, to the joy of Reno’s business community, but removed the State Fair from Reno where horse races were held at the fairgrounds still owned by the State Board of Agriculture. While the deal seemed to benefit both Washoe and Churchill counties, it created rivalries between the agriculturalists of both towns that continued between leaders and organizers of the State

Fairs in Fallon and the exhibitions in Reno.144

The bill creating the racing commission passed easily in the Senate, 14-8. It was even more successful in the Assembly, passing 40-10,145 but only after an amendment seeking to eliminate corruption seen in bookmaking at tracks:

143 Reno Evening Gazette, January 30, 1915. 144 “Clarence. J. Thornton: Entrepreneur: Agriculture, Business, Politics,” UNOHP, 68-69. 145 Senate Journal of Nevada, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1915), 91.

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It shall be unlawful for any person or persons to bribe, influence, or have any understanding or connivance with any jockey, owner, groom, or any one connected with any of the stables, horses, racing, or races at any race meeting, and any one violating this provision shall be guilty of a felony and upon conviction shall be imprisoned in the State Prison for a period of not less than three years or more than ten years.146

While moral arguments eventually lost after the passage of the racing law and divorce residency, Nevada’s racing commission and how it regulated the races were shaped and amended largely by progressive arguments. Horse race meets remained under the thumb of the commission, which prohibited betting on races outside the commission. Race meets were not to exceed 30 days. Races were not to be held on Sundays or between sunset and sunrise. Additionally, Reno lost the State Fair as the setting for races, forcing its business community to come up with another venue.147

One more of the 1915 legislature’s “three liberal measures” remained. To ensure that horse race betting was conducted under the pari-mutuel model, Nevada legislators proposed an amendment to the 1909 anti-gambling bill. Originally, and surprisingly to some, the amendment omitted the buying, selling or dealing in pools, or making books on horse races. It also left out several card games from the anti-gambling law of 1909, including blackjack and panguingue. One Nevada lawmaker called it the “work of a very clever man, or a burglar.” Those games were struck from the bill, for being “too doubtful a class of game.” In the end, the Assembly kept the law as it was with the amendment to allow betting at horse racing events regulated under the Nevada Racing Commission.

Under the amendment, games like faro, roulette, twenty-one and many more remained

146 Statutes of Nevada, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1915), 23 147 Ibid.

62 punishable by felony. Buying, selling or dealing in pools, or bookmaking remained against the law.148 In the end, the amendment to the 1909 anti-gambling law allowed betting conducted through the commission and the pari-mutuel system. Violation was punishable by felony conviction and imprisonment of not less than one year, no more than five years.149

Calculated odds under the pari-mutuel system offered a “fair” and an objective system that always “gives the patron a chance,” Wingfield said in support of the amendment. In an anti-gambling climate, pari-mutuel betting and regulations eliminated crooked jockeys, bookmakers, and served as a compromise between progressives and members of Reno’s business community wherein the persistent saloon crowd continued to push for a liberalization of the anti-gambling law.150

If there was any doubt who was behind the horse racing bills, Anne Martin let it be known that it was one man: George Wingfield. In a letter to national suffrage leader

Anne Howard Shaw in May 1915, Martin wrote that the legislature “lay in the hallows of his hand.” Martin said Wingfield accomplished the passage of horse race betting, along with the shortening of the divorce residency, through a “system of trading votes.” She wrote: “He is the open and acknowledged instigator of the race-track gambling bill, because he wanted gambling legalized for his race horses.” She added: “Wingfield’s hand is in every one of these measures.”151

148 Statutes of Nevada, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1915), 462. 149 Nevada State Journal, March 17, 1915. 150 Raymond, Wingfield, 112. 151 Anne Martin to Anne Howard Shaw, Nevada Equal Suffrage Papers, May 17, 1915, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada.

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Backers of the horse racing bill were quick to point out that it also provided revenue for road improvement projects in a state that faced immense challenges with wide-open spaces and sparse population to pay for a much-needed, extensive road system. The issue wasn’t new in Nevada. For years, it had been seen as a problem.

Additionally, Nevada increasingly sought to keep pace with other states and welcomed the transcontinental Lincoln Highway nearing completion. In 1913, the Lincoln Highway

Association incorporated with hopes that an “ocean-to-ocean highway would open the

West to economic development.”152 That year, Nevada adopted a constitutional amendment earmarking proceeds from the poll tax to roads. With the advent of the automobile, Nevada and the nation increasingly sought ways to fund federal and state highways. The issue was particularly pressing in Nevada with its great distances and limited tax base as a source of funding. With the need for state revenue and a growing desire for road improvements, the Racing Commission emerged as a means to an end.

Governor Tasker Oddie spoke often on the need for “good roads” before he left office.

He suggested using prison labor (and did for a short time) and even possibly using the recently created state police force to help with construction of roads. He wrote:

Good roads are no longer to be considered luxury, but as a necessity, by any progressive community. Nevada has an unenviable reputation for possessing bad roads, and as a result we are losing a large source of business revenue derivable from automobile tourist travel. The conditions in this state are such, as a general rule, that good highways can be constructed and maintained at a minimum cost and expense. California is expending millions of dollars in perfecting a system of highways throughout the State.153

152 Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers who Created the American superhighways, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 32. 153 Scrugham, Nevada, 452

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In 1915 and 1916, altogether, more than $24,000 went to the county fund from revenue generated at race meetings across the state. This accounted for about half of the state revenue generated for roads. The other source of revenue, the Automobile License

Act, contributed just more than $25,000 for roadwork from the poll tax collected with license fee. Roads weren’t simply for local utility. They served a business purpose, linking Reno out of state and to Lake Tahoe, as Oddie noted:

The work of its construction will devolve upon the States, and we should as rapidly as we may complete our portion between Utah and California, with branches traversing all sections of the State. Such a system should be laid out by the State Engineer and the cost of its construction devolve upon the several counties, except as state aid may be required where the conditions are extraordinary.154

Defenders of moral reform unsuccessfully debunked the good roads argument for the horse racing bill. In their views the revenue would not compensate for the wrongs of gambling. One woman asserted at the legislature, as quoted by a Nevada newspaper, “I would much rather be bumped on rough roads than to have my conscience bumped by assuming the responsibility for the evil that will accrue by the passage of this bill.”155

Oddie’s successor, Governor Boyle, had little time for discussion about the moral aspect of horse race betting. Days before Boyle signed the bill into law, he announced to the press why he was for the legislation:

My mind on these measures has been made up …my action has been influenced largely by an investigation I have made of the results from economic standpoints that have accrued in other states and in foreign nations where the pari-mutuel system of betting on horse racing is in vogue.156

154 Ibid. 453 155 Reno Evening Gazette, January 30, 1915. 156 Reno Evening Gazette, February 19, 1915.

65

OULD any parson ask for more delightful weather than Reno is enjoying at Ute present time? If this section of Nevada had no great C resources to boast of it could commercialize its weather and prof it big, as numerous California cities are doing. LATEST EDITION

THIRTY-NINTH YEAR RENO, NEVADA, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1915 NO, 43 GOVERNOR TO SIGN RACING BILLS; IS UNDECIDED YET ABOUT DIVORCE

TWO HUNDRED NEVADANS START FOR FAIR OPENING TRUCK ACTS PANAMA FAIR IS ALL READY The “Loosening” of Nevada Reform BUILDINGS ARE COMPLETE

Wingfield’s efforts paid off. The sports or “turfites” could have their race meets

State Fair Removal Is to Be English Troops Blow Trench Seven-Car Special Leaves for withApproved hopes, but Divorce Bill'ofs Frenc attractingh Steamship Dinora thoroughbredsh Torpedoed without aroundOf Germans Up anthed Captur nation,e but the new legislationPanama-Pacifi didc Expositionot n Fate Is in Doubt; It Will Warning This Morning by German Under- Prisoners; Berlin Claims With Legislators, Official Be Decided Next Wednesday sea Graft; Norwegian Vessel Strikes Mine Victories Against Russia Representatives and Others Chief Executive Is in Favor Near Dover; A m e r i c a n s in F r a n c e Marooned Forces of Allies on Western Ninety Come in From Carson come'Of Referendum without; Says Voters WASHINGTONcontinued, Feb. 19.—All trave protest.l towed into Dieppe.. N"Nevadao mention is made Fron thas Are Strengthene evidentlyd and concluded that it does Onotn Early Morninpayg Extrtoa of Jietween. England an* tiie"cAhtlnent of o,f the loss of airy' «* *** crew. - " 'SJibutif Be f a i v e r i Chance to Europe haa been suspended by the the steam' J British adYniralty until further notice, er below the water line was stove in by War OfficB^ays^Posftib"fis Vi It T.?~Women Among according to advices received today at the torpedo. Nevertheless the Dinorah Express Their Sentiments the state department. The suspension. managed to l8 ANGELES Feb. 19.—Harry rolled the safe-out of the car door a called Representative Farr a "tadpole care particularly, who. performs Have Public Lands Views to Women's Peace Chandler auistant general manager of the train was slowing for the bridg statesman," but the wordy gale sub- the service, priest, pastor or jus- the \M» Angeles Times, son-in-law of and then jumped after it. The helples sided when Representative Farr told tice of the peace, freqently pat- Prepared Delegation messenger rode on, and the robber) ronize the son. The competition, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, and million- the house he had no intention of re- while keen, has caused no ill feel- aire tend owner, was indicted today by waslaws, 'pot discovered ' noAintil afte tenr th flectin commandments,g on the honor or integrity of and no moralSpecial to the Gazett obligations.e WASHINGTON , IfFeb. 19.—SecretarNevaday the federal grand jury In connection train reached Richmond, three hours his colleague. : ing, as the fees are all In the fam- GRAND THEATRE with an alleged conspiracy which had later. Mr. Palmer did not want to continue ily. The word "obey" is strictly CARSON CITY, Feb. iS^Senator Garlson today told .a delegation of the adhered to in the ceremonies of Keddie's joint resolution memorializ- .for it* Object a military occupation of A .train robbery almost within th 'the discussion and the most bitter per- both. women's peace party, headed by Mr«. nm Mottcan territory of bower Cali- gates of the capital stirred up th sonal row the house had seen in the ing congress and asking for a federal Robert M. La Follett*. wife of the TONIGHT policwishese authorities considerably to. .fillpresen thist session wa role,s ended, • it should go the,.: ,whole .{Continued oi> rage TIRO.way) - ., and., (Continue becomed on Pace TwoO. . an 'SPAPERI outright Monte Carlo. Unless it is willing to make this confession 'SPAPERI

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and to fill this place in America, it has made a blunder to take even the short backward step which it has now taken."157

Historically, in both California and Nevada gambling was everywhere in the mining districts and mining towns. But California attacked gambling interests decades before

Nevada, slowly prohibiting games one-by-one in the 1860s and 1870s, and then finally with penalties for those running gambling houses in 1885, along with those playing games in 1891. California prohibited pool selling and bookmaking in 1909, the same year

Nevada passed its anti-gambling law. Gambling prospered in Reno, even into the first years of the twentieth century. In 1909, when Nevada’s moral crusaders got the best of saloon interests, while riding a national trend, they attacked the industry with a broad stroke, arguably giving the 1909 Nevada legislature the distinction of perhaps passing one of the most heavy-handed anti-gambling bills in the nation. In one fell swoop, more than twenty chance games became felonies.158

The mood 1915 legislature was considerably different. Rowell saw it reneging on its extension of the 1913 divorce residency and giving into gambling with horse racing and the pari-mutuel system of betting. Progressive reform in Nevada did not die in 1915.

The state’s approval of prohibition and 1918 and the temporary closure of houses of prostitution suggested reform continued during wartime. But the motivation and even the objectives changed. After the war, anti-immigrant laws and emphasis upon

Americanization education in the classroom showed another side of racial legislation. In the Progressive Era, however, Nevada’s progressivism lagged Nevada, however,

157 Reno Evening Gazette, February 17, 1915. 158 Index to the Laws of California, 1850-1920, (Legislative Council, California State Printing Office, 1919), 552.

67 lagged.159 Historian Earl Pomeroy argued that states along the Pacific Slope embraced the

Progressive Era equally and often more passionately than eastern states. He notes that the

Far West was more urban that the East, or at least had settlements within reach of urban centers, given the course of settlement in the decades leading up to the Progressive Era.

These western towns in states along the Pacific Slope were more likely within the delivery area of a daily city newspaper, near high schools and towns people “could go to college by riding for no more than a few minutes on an interurban railway.”160

Historian William Howard Moore suggests many students of American progressivism have overlooked the effect of the Progressive Era on the Rocky Mountain

West largely because of their preoccupation with “urban and industrial issues.” He adds,

“Surprisingly strong ties existed with Social Gospel Progressives.” For example, in

Wyoming, social gospel progressives successfully created an illusion to frighten politicians into discussing and passing antigambling legislation in 1902.161 Antigambling efforts also received federal support. Arizona and New Mexico both entered statehood during the 1910s, but they faced congressional stipulation forcing each to enter the Union as antigambling states.162 In Nevada, however, statehood came much earlier in 1864, escaping federal mandates pertaining to gambling. The Nevada situation with its transient largely male population offered little interest in moral reform prior to the twentieth century. The 1915 legislative session in Nevada opened the door for the loosening of

159 William D. Rowley. Into the Narrows of Nevada History, Halcyon: A Journal of the Humanities (1981), 127. 160 Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965), 193; Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives, (New York: Galazy Books), 245-281. 161 William Howard Moore, “Progressivism and the Social Gospel in Wyoming: The Antigambling Act of 1901 as a Test Case,” The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3 (July 1984), 299-316. 162 David Haugen, Legalized Gambling, (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), 13.

68 restrictive gambling laws in a state where ambivalence toward those laws could hardly be denied. Similar legislation in other Far Western states faced higher hurdles.163

Other states also proposed pari-mutuel legislation in 1915. Arkansas’ legislature sought a revival of horse racing in Hot Springs, Arkansas, once home to “the finest racecourse in the southwest” and a “noted racing center.” The bill narrowly passed both houses before Arkansas Governor George Hays vetoed it on March 8, 1915. Hays called pari-mutuel machines “nothing more nor less than a gambling device.” Hays continued:

“No set (signature) of mine, either while in the governor’s office or in the private walks of life, will ever legalize any form of gambling; nor will I ever by my signature permit gambling machines to be operated in Arkansas.” Hays’ veto stymied preparations already made for meets at Hot Springs.164 One week before the Arkansas veto, Colorado’s attorney general halted pari-mutuel betting in that state, saying in an opinion that the pari- mutuel system is, in fact, “gambling, and, inasmuch as this system is the only one that has been countenanced since racing was renewed in Denver, it means that hereafter races at

Overland Park or elsewhere in the state must be conducted without any form of betting.”165 Other states — including Texas, Arizona, Indiana and California — discussed or proposed voting on whether pari-mutuel betting should be permitted. Montana had betting at tracks in 1914, but the governor signed legislation banning the form of betting under its anti-gambling law. In October 1915, the Thoroughbred Record, a Lexington,

163 Elliott, History of Nevada, 70-71. 164 “Governor Hays Vetoes Racing Bill,” The Thoroughbred Record, 81, (March 8, 1915), 143. 165 “Mutuel Betting Illegal,” The Thoroughbred Record, 81, (March 1, 1915), 128.

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Kentucky publication, noted Nevada, Maryland, Kentucky and Canada as governments permitting the pari-mutuel betting system at racetracks.166

In 1915, the saloon crowd in Nevada knew the loosening of restrictive gambling laws faced a new political dynamic: women. The public relations game to win women started even before thoroughbreds made their way to race gates in Reno. Race meetings accommodated women with half off entrance fees. Advertisements and news stories in the paper showed a different form of gambling and public socializing. Horse racing was out in the open, under the sun, as mandated in the law, and pari-mutuel betting excluded bookies and pools. Additionally, most members of Reno’s divorce colony were women who might be persuaded to patronize the race meets. According to news reports, Reno’s first race meeting in 1915 included “Ladies’ Days.” More than 3,000 women attended the first Ladies’ Day in 1915. The Nevada State Journal concluded: “…just about every housewife in Reno is now counted as a regular patron of the amusement at the fairgrounds.” Obviously, some women’s groups opposed horse racing, and contrary to what the Journal wrote, many women remained harsh critics of the racetrack culture. Still news stories asserted the 2 p.m. race start time accommodated a housewife’s “desire to enjoy the racing without in the least neglecting their household duties” before supper time. The Journal described the 1915 “Ladies’ Day” as follows:

Never in the history of Reno, so I am reliably informed, have so many of our mothers, daughters, wives and sweethearts congregated together as were massed as the fair grounds yesterday afternoon. I know of a surety that it has never been my pleasure to view a more attractive picture than was presented by the more than three thousand women who had

166 “Advancement of Racing by Pari-Mutuel Racing,” The Thoroughbred Record, 82, (October 16, 1915), 186.

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seats in the grandstands guests of the Fair and Racing association yesterday. 167

That month news reports indicated that the gatherings at race track in 1915 included men and women from several western states. These crowds watched fast tracks where horses ran for stakes as high as $2,000 and more than $15,000 in wagers.

Spectators came from across the state — Goldfield, Tonopah and Golconda — and others were millionaires from Lake Tahoe and noted men from the San Francisco’s Indoor

Yacht Club. They came to Reno for the first Nevada Derby, making up the largest

“assemblage of people imbued with the sporting instinct” since the Johnson-Jeffries fight in July 1910.168 While several men exulted in the day, it belonged to George Wingfield.

The racetrack in Nevada attracted horses from across the nation, along with sportswriters, affluent spectators, and even Governor Emmet Boyle. The Nevada State Journal wrote,

“The Reno track should be christened Wingfield Park in honor of the Nevada breeder,

George Wingfield, who has done more for the advancement of the breeding of better horses than any other one man in the United States.”169

While newspaper reports celebrated the races as high-class, cosmopolitan events, there were incidents of wrongdoing. In the second week of Reno’s first racing meet, the commission revoked one jockey’s license and suspended two others. Jockey Julius

Washer broke the amendment that was added to the racing commission law, which forbade jockeys from betting on another horse in a race in which they participated.

Washer was permitted to bet on his own horse, under Nevada law, but he bet on an opponent’s horse. His horse finished third and the horse he wagered on finished first. He

167 Nevada State Journal, July 21, 1915. 168 Reno Evening Gazette, July 31, 1915. 169 Nevada State Journal, July 17, 1915.

71 admitted to the crime. Additionally, two jockeys, T. Nolan and Robert Imes, were suspended from the meet for “conduct prejudicial to the best interests of the turf,” specifically “associating with ‘touts’ and engaging in ‘touting’ themselves.” A tout was someone offering racing tips in exchange for a share of bet winnings. The disbarment and two suspensions made front-page headlines. The message was clear: race betting under the pari-mutuel system was not all “square,” as Wingfield had portrayed it. Still, swift justice followed the infractions.170

Overall, the first race meet was a success with betting profits surrounded by an exuberant local press. Positive anecdotes peppered stories with flowery language describing a fast track, fun for both sexes, and the word “gamble” or “bet” rarely appeared in print. For instance, the Nevada State Journal story following the Ladies’ Day at the track never once used the two words. It described bets as an “investment.” While gambling was vile, an “inexcusable vice,” Nevadans were not opposed to making

“investments” in 1915, especially investments taxed for the betterment of roads. The saloon crowd and its now favorable press did more than cloak gambling in the attire of

“investments,” it also presented opponents with a more culturally accepted, respectable manner of betting. The pari-mutuel system was “as simple as the A B Cs, once it is understood, and now that the state has learned to place full confidence in the new method, there is every reason to believe the investments will be heavier as the meeting grows older.” The Nevada State Journal even compared Reno to the great racetracks of

New York, which, even without gambling, were beginning resurgence with legal oral

170 Reno Evening Gazette, July 22, 1915.

72 betting by 1915 after the “blackout” of the sport at tracks statewide in the Empire State.

As the Journal noted:

It will be that way with the Reno races, and the safest wager in the world is a bet that the local meeting will prove as successful as any racing season in any part of America this summer, not leaving the New York tracks out of the running. They may draw a larger crowd, but when it comes to representative, clean people, watch and see if Reno doesn’t take first prize.171

In 1915, more than $770,000 passed through the pari-mutuel machines in Reno during the first month-long racing meet from July 17 to August 14. More than $60,000 was taken as a commission. One-sixth of that — $10,316 — went to county roads, as was stipulated under Racing Commission laws. Track expenses show more than $15,000 was spent to regulate betting at the track, with more than $9,000 on payroll, an additional

$1,049 going to private detectives. The largest crowds usually followed local horses.

Wingfield’s most prized horse that year, Celesta, won a $1,000 stake race on August 7.

One of his other horses, Star Shooter, also won with more than 8,000 in attendance for the race, with local horses attracting easily the largest crowd of the entire meet, even more than the inaugural Nevada Derby. In 1916, as news from the tracks reported that plenty of money exchanged hands, Wingfield became the racing commissioner, a position he held for decades, even after his banks closed in the 1930s and he faced bankruptcy. 172

Although Governor Boyle signed horse racing legislation, he kept a watchful eye, if not a suspicious one, on the business. In 1916, after allegations that bets were being placed outside the fairgrounds at downtown Reno businesses, shielded from the racing

171 Nevada State Journal, July 21, 1915. 172 Nevada State Journal, August 8, 1915.

73 commission’s purview, Boyle wrote Wingfield: “While this is properly a matter for the local police authorities, I believe that the racing commission has perhaps as large an interest as anyone in seeing that the law is upheld and I would be glad to have your aid in any steps that may be necessary to secure its enforcement.” Boyle at least mildly worried about horse race betting in Nevada, even after signing it into law. Wingfield responded three days after Boyle’s letter saying he “investigated” the inquiry and that “the report is entirely false.” Wingfield added:

However, at one time I think the results of the eastern races were taken here, but it is claimed that anything that was taken in in the way of a wager was wired out as a commission to pool rooms on the outside of this State, but this I cannot verify. I want to assure you that should anyone try to wager in any manner upon racing results being conducted on our local track, I shall see to it that the law is upheld to the very best of my ability; but on any wagers that may be wired outside of the State in connection with other race meetings than our own, I do not consider to be within my jurisdiction.173

Boyle agreed out-of-state bets were outside Wingfield’s jurisdiction, but he reminded

Wingfield that any form of illegal horse race betting in Nevada would “discredit” the commission and was a “sufficient matter of interest to justify you in assisting the authorities in securing its suppression.” Boyle’s reminder shows more than his trepidation about horse race betting at the tracks, but also his fear that it would spread gambling in downtown Reno. It also shows a glimpse of Nevada’s future, as Jim McKay and other business associates increasingly entered race wire services in the 1930s, taking bets in

Reno on races at eastern tracks after Nevada approved wide-open gambling in 1931.174

173 George Wingfield to Emmet Boyle, George Wingfield Papers, October 2, 1916, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada 174 Ibid., September 29, 1916 to October 17, 1916.

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In 1917, racetrack gambling did not go unopposed during the legislative session.

Assembly Bill 34 sought again to ban all forms of gambling. One anti-gambling bill, proposed by Elko Assemblyman W.W. Booher, targeted the legalization of horse betting.

It sought to amend the present anti-gambling law by striking out aspects permitting horse racing and the pari-mutuel system. The proposed legislation referenced a report by a committee on public morals that blamed horse racing for rising crime in Reno. According to the committee, crime had risen 25 percent between 1914 and 1915; 32.3 percent from

1914 to 1916; and 38.8 percent from 1914 to 1917. The committee concluded:

The above facts show a continuous increase in violations of law and order, and this increase is so high as to be abnormal…the percentage of increase as shown in the data an intimate connection between racing and violations of the public law and order. Your committee feels satisfied that such abnormal conditions can be accounted for only by the criminal element attracted by such racing.175

In the spring of 1917, United States entrance into World War I subdued enthusiasm and reduced resources for expenditures on entertainments such as racing. The

Racing Commission cancelled its fall races at the track in 1918. The move was voluntary, but it did reflect a serious wartime mood that had little time for frivolous events. Yet, horse racing and betting at the track and other related entertainments bided their time in

Nevada until the end of the wartime emergency when once again a wider gamut of entertainments would resume.

175 Nevada State Journal, November 27, 1917.

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Chapter Four Excitement to Obscurity: Horse Racing in Reno

Katharine Fullerton Gerould was a well-known essayist and literary critic in 1925 when she visited Reno and described the city of little more than 12,000 people as “dull.”

Before her visit, she thought Reno “curious and interesting…with one of those Western situations that break the Eastern heart with envy” — alluding to the romantic nostalgia for the West and frontier life. Upon her arrival, however, Gerould called Reno “a very dull town for the visitor,” especially for a divorce seeker staying in Reno on a six-month residency stay. After choosing legal guidance and giving grounds for divorce at the courthouse, according to Gerould, the divorce seeker moved out of the hotel and into an apartment — usually a flat or room in a private home — and “busies herself as best she can, in ironically domestic ways.” There was one thing that interested a divorcee, as

Gerould put it in her essay, “Reno,” that ran in Harper’s Magazine and later published in a book, The Aristocratic West:

There is, you see, except in the racing season, nothing whatever to do in Reno; and the Silver State Jockey Club has only two meetings a year — early summer and early autumn. …Even if you go to the races every day while they are on — and most people do — the two meetings together do not fill up many weeks.176

For Gerould, horse races were “the most exciting feature of Reno social life,” even though racing there was “not first-class.” As she said, “most of the horses are bound for no more distinguished bournes than Vancouver or Tiajuana [sic.]; they will never be

176 Katharine Fullerton Gerould, The Aristocratic West. (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 155.

76 entered at Saratoga or Belmont Park or for the Kentucky Derby.” Reno’s scenery made up for the class of horses. Spectators looked across the racetrack at the Sierra where, according to Gerould, “never had a race track a lovelier setting.”177

A literary realist, Gerould experienced betting culture at the races that she described as eclectic gatherings and wild spectacles where gambling flourished:

There in front of you are the boxes of the magnates; all round you are collarless farmers and their tight-lipped wives, divorcees painted and unpainted, children in arms, drifting males of every type, a few squaws with papooses on their backs, spectacled Chinamen. Everyone, male and female — except the squaws and the infants in arms — is betting…This is Nevada, where betting is in the blood; and the divorcees bet too, up to the limits of their purses. Sometimes, alas! beyond.178

While gambling and horse racing remained targets of progressive reform in the first two decades of the twentieth century, recreational fun emerged in the face of these reform-minded calls to end popular enjoyments. By the 1920s leisure emerged largely as a product of increased productivity, wider distribution of wealth and shorter workweeks.

The commercialization of leisure and the emergence of recreation as a commodity brought men and women into public spaces together. This commercialization profited from the selling of “heterosocial culture,” as opposed to homosocial experiences in the

Victorian America when public and private spheres were defined along much stricter guidelines. In the pursuit of profit and a growing acceptance of women in public places

177 Ibid. 157. 178 Ibid. 158.

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— especially women in Reno for divorce — horse racing accommodated a growing clientele of both sexes in Reno’s sporting culture.179

Meanwhile, the state’s two main business industries — mining and ranching — suffered setbacks and stagnation in the 1920s after southern mines played out and wartime boom faded. While war enabled the growth of Nevada’s ranching and copper industries, peacetime brought a sharp reduction to the fortunes of stock operations.

Nevadans entered the 1920s with reasons to be anxious. Fewer people lived in Nevada in

1920 (77,407) than 1910 (81,875). A sharp post-war economic downturn (1919-1921) disconcerted a state that had experienced success for the first time since its Comstock origins. Additionally, the Progressive Era came to a close. Nevada and the rest of the nation devoted energies to the war and afterwards to a “return to normalcy.”180

As Wingfield asserted years before, Nevada was an “undeveloped state” where reforms of the Progressive Era, especially prohibition and suppression of vice-related enterprises threatened a fragile economy. As progressivism wound down, a disappointed

Anne Martin, after two failed campaigns for the U.S. Senate (1918 and 1920), left

Nevada for California. When asked to write the Nevada entry for of the Nation magazine’s series “These United States” in 1922, Martin did not censor her critical language about what Nevada had become. She described Nevada as “exploited, undeveloped…a meager and boss-ridden population.” Nearly sixty years since achieving statehood, Martin wrote Nevada along with its political and cultural leaders “could not explain its [the state’s] backwardness and vagaries, her bizarre history, her position as an

179 Kathy Peiss. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Penn: 1985), 186. 180 William D. Rowley, “In the Narrows of Nevada History,” Halcyon, (Reno: University of Nevada, 1981), 123-140.

78 ugly duckling, the disappointment, the neglected step child, the weakling in the family of states.” Martin’s scathing review of Nevada was an unofficial obituary of the state’s reform movement. It ran for a national audience only one year after her departure for

California.181

Horse racing in Reno maintained its popularity in the 1920s amidst an uncertain business climate. Wingfield’s vision, however, of a great Nevada racing circuit, rivaling the eastern tracks and assuming an elite position in the American West, never came to fruition. Still, it experienced success in Reno in the 1920s and attracted tourists. The

Reno racetrack welcomed large crowds, fantastic press coverage and large takes through the pari-mutuel system on betting — exceeding $1 million in the 30-day summer race meet in 1923. Bets made at the track stuffed state coffers with thousands of dollars annually, but Reno never became the “Monte Carlo of the West.” In 1919, newspapers reported Wingfield backed “a move to revive racing in California” as “one of the leaders in a movement to organize a jockey club in San Francisco.” Wingfield maintained a strong interest in horses and racing — around the nation — largely because of enormous investments he made, along with his passion for fine horses and their breeding. As

California newspapers reported, Wingfield had “thousands of dollars invested in fast horseflesh and would be financially benefited by the ‘comeback’ of racing.”182 In

Nevada, Wingfield kept his position as Racing Commission chairman until 1946, but even he eventually focused elsewhere for racing his thoroughbreds. Additionally, in

1918, Nevada’s State Council of Defense asked the Racing Commission, with the war

181 Anne Martin, “Nevada: Beautiful Desert of Buried Hopes,” Nation CXV (July 26, 1922), 89. 182 Reno Evening Gazette, November 8, 1919.

79 raging in Europe, to cancel its race meet that Fall. When the war ended, Americans and

Nevadans celebrated, and the meetings resumed. 183

By 1919, the Reno racetrack became home to an even more extravagant western frontier spectacle: rodeo. The same sporting men who spearheaded the sport of kings’ revival in Nevada bankrolled the rodeo. Wingfield and William H. Moffat, along with others, diversified their portfolio of events at the track, where they invested thousands of dollars in renovations. For Reno the rodeo was a replacement. The Nevada State Fair went to Fallon following the 1915 legislature’s divorce-fair swap. Fallon representatives agreed to restore the six-month divorce residency from one year established by the 1913 legislature, if the State Fair site came to Fallon from Reno. In addition to thoroughbred racing, rodeo arrived with rope contests, bucking horses and allegations of illegal gambling. In Reno, gambling interests — the Saloon Crowd — pushed back against

Nevada’s anti-gambling law at Reno events. They challenged and sought exceptions to a law doggedly defended by progressive reformers, but this defense waned in a state that remained largely supported by mining and ranching industries. Celebrations and gatherings featuring western frontier heritage created festive occasions that often undermined strict adherence to the standards of progressive restrictions on vice. The

“sporting lives,” customs and entertainments of those engaged in the male-dominated mining, ranching, and transportation enterprises of Nevada were difficult to suppress.184

183 H.A. Lemmon to George Wingfield, July 15, 1918, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada. The director of the Nevada State Council of Defense wrote Wingfield directly, asking the racing commission to cease plans for a fall race meeting given the “unusual financial and industrial conditions now prevailing.” The letter warned of a potential “serious injury to the State and the Community” if Nevadans were to celebrate at racetracks while war was raging in Europe. 184 Rowley, Narrows, 128.

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Nostalgic Yearnings: Mining, Sporting and Gambling Culture

Frontier games and rodeo spectacles helped create the mythologized icon of the cowboy, but cowboys did not always symbolize American self-reliance at fairgrounds or on television and cinema. As part of the growing cattle industry of the late-nineteenth century, cowboying appeared with the establishment of cattle herding in the Great Plains from Texas northward. While white men mostly played the cowboy role in Hollywood, many of the real figures were Hispanic Vaqueros and African American. They were not particularly glorified, either, as the 1881 History of Nevada, edited by Myron Angel, noted: “(On the range) cattle become half wild, as do their constant companions, the herders, who are a unique race, with a code of morals and almost a language of their own.”185 Additionally, cowboys and ranching interests created rivalries with the farmer settler frontier that threatened the free and open range. When the frontier era closed, as

Frederick Jackson Turner noted in his famous 1893 essay The Significance of the

Frontier in American History, the cowboy’s evolution from the range to cultural phenomenon was well on its way through Wild West Shows, theater and eventually electronic media. Ranch outfits ended long-standing disputes about who had the best wranglers by entering rope-and-ride contests, mostly in the American southwest. In 1883, an Indian fighter and Army scout during the Indian Wars, transformed western frontier life and settlement into theatrical production for large audiences in eastern states and

Europe.186

185 Angel, History of Nevada, 141. 186 Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 20.

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William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody told news reporters in 1883 that he had

“some handbills” and “sent them out to all the ranches around [North Platte, Nebraska] for hundreds of miles and advertised in the papers that prizes would be given for some fancy cowboy stunts.” Thousands attended Cody’s show, with its horse races, shooting contests, buffalo drives and Native Americans playing the part of attackers on Deadwood stagecoaches. The North Platte event began a three-decade-long tour of American cities and overseas in London and Paris. The Wild West Shows featured great displays of horsemanship, marksmanship games, and Indian battle reenactments. The show entertained journalists, presidents, foreign dignitaries and the wider public. Henry Irving, a soon-to-be knighted British actor, described Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as "an entertainment in which the whole of the most interesting episodes of life on the extreme frontier of civilization in America are expressed.” He continued:

You have real cowboys with bucking horses, real buffaloes, great herds of steers, which are loosened and stampeded in the most realistic fashion imaginable. Then there are Indians who execute attacks on coaches driven full speed. No one can exaggerate the extreme excitement and 'go' of the whole performance.187

As historian Michael Kammen noted, expanded media and commercialization in the twentieth century created a “superficial sense of history as heritage” and guaranteed the popularity of the cowboy in American life. Kammen described it:

Nostalgic yearnings, the peculiarity of disremembering amidst pride in the past, an expanded role for the media in presenting ‘memories’ and the commercialization of tradition supply some of the central themes that have characterized our own time with its strangely superficial

187Mody C. Boatright, The American Rodeo. American Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2, Part 1 (Summer, 1964), 195-202.

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sense of history as heritage — a commodity to be packaged in hundreds of ways.188

Cody’s Wild West Show imprinted the cowboy in American culture. The nostalgic yearnings for the frontier and a created cultural symbol eventually evolved from live shows to the silver screen and rodeos that reminded Americans of what was fast becoming a mythologized West.189

The Wild West Show evolved into a sporting event with rules and standards practiced around the nation. Nevada track racing provided the springboard for the spectacle, often referred to as stampedes, roundups and eventually rodeo. Both rodeo and horse racing in Reno shared the same founders, event location and similar goals, one being the benefit of raising animals for the open range, whether horses to roundup the cattle or cattle to send to market. Additionally, gambling existed near the sporting events.

For horse racing, the pari-mutuel system gained approval and escaped reform efforts that defended the end of all organized gambling in Nevada. Similarly, the rodeo atmosphere encouraged gambling. The event presented a “superficial sense of history as heritage” and frontier gambling. The Reno Rodeo’s adjacent event, “Stingaree Gulch,” a staged area outside the rodeo grounds where gambling games and dance halls drew crowds late into the night. Given the same name of an old Nevada mining town’s red light district, the spectacle proved an appealing form of entertainment to a wide range of people. It connected to an imagined past within familiar surroundings. The rodeos and racing were examples of Reno’s growing event-oriented economy.

188 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. (New York: Knopf, 1991), 5. 189 Larry McMurtry. The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and the beginnings of superstardom in America, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 105.

83

While the departure of the State Fair for Fallon was a setback, it also prompted innovation and the creation of new enterprises in Reno. William H. Moffat, Nevada horse racing proponent and the rodeo’s founder, regretted the legislature’s decision to move the

Fair to Fallon in 1915: “The consensus of opinion generally seems to be that the action of the Legislature in removing the holding of state fairs from Reno to Fallon was an impairable [sic.] error and much to be deplored.”190 After spending thousands of dollars in renovations for the racing meets, Moffat with Wingfield and other Reno businessmen started on the creation of a Reno rodeo to promote livestock. In 1917, the Nevada State

Agricultural Society board of directors that included members of the Reno Men’s

Business Association and Nevada State Racing Commission (Wngfield and Moffat) proposed expanding the entertainment venue in Reno. One member, P.Y. Gillson, suggested, according to meeting minutes:

…that a number of schemes were on foot to increase the general line of amusements and at one of their meetings they discussed the probability of taking over the race meetings…[also] desirous of leasing that part of the Reno Track which was not already leased and it was their intention to hold a four day meet beginning June 30th and ending July 4th.191

The term “rodeo’ was never used in 1917, but two years later in May 1919 a committee for “amusements” met at the Reno Commercial Club with the intention of organizing an event during the week of July 4th that year. The committee named Moffat president of the newly created Rodeo Association and Wingfield as a member of the board of directors. The directors unanimously elected Glen D. Hurst, manager of the

190 State Board of Agriculture Biennial Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1917). 191 Minutes of the Meeting of the Nevada State Agricultural Society, June 18, 1917, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada.

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Grand and Rialto theaters in Reno, as publicist in charge of advertising work for the rodeo. In his first order of business, Hurst consulted with promoters in San Francisco and named the event the “Stampede.” He also visited southern California hoping to hire performers for a night show eventually known as the “Stingaree Gulch.” Just four years after Nevada first regulated horse racing events in Reno, the same men behind its creation acted on ideas for a more boisterous affair to attract out-of-state visitors and revenues to celebrate Nevada’s western frontier heritage.192

The highlight of adult amusement, known as the Stingaree Gulch, opened at the

Reno rodeo with lights reflecting off “miniature mountains, with their mine dumps and gallow frames” making a “realistic setting for a replica of the old gulch of the same name which drew fame to Rawhide,” a town built in 1907 off speculation and extravagant promotion by George Graham Rice, a mining publisher and flamboyant promoter. Few

Nevada towns epitomized boom and bust as Rawhide, which grew from nothing to 7,000 people and back to nothing in under two years, briefly attracting Goldfield miners who fled the labor dispute there in 1907-1908. The Stingaree Gulch also featured Rawhide’s red light district. More than 500 “chippies,” or prostitutes, lived at the Stingaree Gulch during the boom in 1908.193

This creation of the Stingaree Gulch contradicted strongly with what newspapers said was the goal: “to retain the old mining camp atmosphere, combined with the elimination of all objectionable features.”194 Promoters handed out thousands of

192 Nevada State Journal, May 26, 1919. 193 Encyclopedia of Immigration and Migration in the American West, Sage eReference (Online service), (Sage Publications, Inc: 2006); Russell Elliott, History of Nevada, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 220-221. 194 Reno Evening Gazette, July 1, 1919.

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“Stingaree Gulch money,” or bingles, for a price. The fake currency could then be played as the “official coin” of the event. Easily the main attraction of Reno’s first rodeo,

Stingaree Gulch’s doors remained opened from seven in the evening to well after midnight. The Reno Evening Gazette noted:

The geographical setting of the Gulch is one of its biggest drawing cards. The canyon adjoining the famous camp of Rawhide was the model by which Stingaree Gulch was planned and erected. The calico mountains which form the background for the amusements at the Gulch are replicas of the Calico mountains around Tonopah. Among the attractions there are the dance halls of ‘Ragtime’ Kelli and the ‘Rawhide Kid,’ which are proving the big numbers in the amusement line. The aim in erecting the halls was to retain the old mining camp atmosphere, combined with the elimination of all objectionable features.195

The rodeo occurred six months after the state prohibition law — enacted through state initiative vote November 18, 1918 — went into effect. Booze was not permitted, and the gamblers soon found out the fake currency was not allowed either.196

The Stingaree Gulch included crap and faro tables and roulette wheels that a Reno newspaper described as “covered with dust but otherwise in good condition … dug out of cellars, where they have been stored for nearly nine years” after lawmen began enforcement of Nevada’s anti-gambling statute. The games were played until Washoe

County Sheriff Charles Ferrell, a Republican and longtime Washoe sheriff “threw a monkey wrench in the machinery” and stopped the games. In a closed meeting with

William H. Moffat, Ferrell reportedly said the games violated Nevada law. Allegations circulated that prominent Reno men offered the games for $100 a night and 25 percent of profits. Rodeo management denied those allegations. To the press the sheriff was

195 Ibid. 196 Elliott, History of Nevada, 269.

86 apologetic about closing the games. “There was nothing personal in my action,” he told the Reno Evening Gazette:

The law says that gambling games shall not be conducted and as an officer I am bound to enforce the law. If the law is not satisfactory then it should be changed but as long as it is on the statute books I am going to enforce it.197

According to reports, “The directors had gone into this matter very thoroughly and were of the opinion that the games could be operated, as bingles and not money were to be used” and “the big crowd that attended the opening show last night expressed regret that the games were closed.”198

If attendance gave any indication, Reno’s rodeo was a great success. More than

10,000 people entered the fairgrounds. Gates closed an hour after opening on the final day, and the Stingaree Gulch continued without the gambling games. Just as in 1915 during the first Nevada Derby, the newspaper reported crowds were the largest Reno had seen since the Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries fight in 1910, captivating thousands for the three-day stampede. The rodeo gained support from the leaders of Reno’s business community, from Wingfield and Moffat, to Reno Mayor H.E. Stewart and Charles

Mapes, Sr., who participated as one of the four “Old Comstock Boys” for the event.

Reports heralded the rodeo a success, “a magnificent entertainment” with “riders from all over the West” and “if complaints were made, they were few and…isolated…and arose from inexperience and not from intent.” Editorials generally took an apologetic stance for

197 Reno Evening Gazette, July 2, 1919. 198 Ibid.

87 gambling at the Gulch, which didn’t return the following year, replaced by a meeker night carnival that kept within the purview of the law.199

By 1922, rodeo directors moved the event to Labor Day weekend and had high hopes about an invitation to President Warren Harding to attend. Rodeo Queen Mary

Harrington traveled by train to Washington D.C. to extend the invitation. While not accepted, Nevada U.S. Senator Tasker Oddie presented the President with a cowboy hat.

Still, rodeo in Reno faced some insurmountable problems. The 1922 rodeo was the last in

Reno until 1932. The money spent by attendees did not cover expenses. Reno’s Rodeo

Association incurred large debts that mounted over the course of its early years and took years to pay off. At the same time, sizable revenue came from horse racing profits, which, of course, offered gambling. Several horse race days were advertised in local papers as a chance to “enjoy an afternoon of the finest sport and help clear up a debt owed” by the Reno Rodeo Association.200

Nevada’s ranching and livestock business struggled after the war as the state entered three years of drought. After Moffat and his business partner Herbert J.

Humphrey looked to corner the state’s wool market in 1921, prices plummeted from 91 cents to 8 cents per pound. Stockmen around Nevada suffered the brunt of post-war deflation as prices and products declined. The agricultural economy in general during the

1920s never recovered. In 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, former Nevada

Governor James Scrugham wrote that the drop in prices during the early-1920s precipitated a “prolonged depression, in which there have been variations of lights and

199 Guy Clifton. Reno Rodeo: A History — The First 80 Years. (DynaGraphic Printing. Reno, Nevada: 2000), 4. 200 Ibid.

88 shadows, but from which there has been no real resurgence.” While the drought compounded problems during Nevada’s attempt to rebound in the post-war decade, the solvency and lending power of the state’s banks served Nevada well during the downturn.

“I am able to report with peculiar pride,” Governor Emmett Boyle said in 1921, “that

Nevada bids fair to emerge from the period of deflation as the only western state whose banking system will have been 100 per cent efficient in carrying, without a single failure, the burden imposed upon it by the times through which we are passing.” Moffat redounded with the H. Moffat Company, feedlots producing “Moffat Manteca Fed Beef.”

Wingfield and his banks gained praise for carrying Nevada through post-war economic woes. It seemed “Wingfield luck,” as his biographer described it, would indeed carry on into the 1920s. 201

Reno at the Races: A Legal Bet

While Nevada’s economy maintained itself, Wingfield’s Nevada Stock Farm perennially struggled to make profits. Racetrack crowds continued to gather, especially in the mid-1920s. In 1922, the Silver State Jockey Club incorporated and requested a four- year $20,000 contract with the State Board of Agriculture to hold meetings under the

Racing Commission’s guidance. In 1923, more than $1 million was bet at the Reno track during a summer race meet — a record that would not be surpassed in the decade. The commission oversaw the bets and rarely made huge profits based on the nature of the pari-mutuel system, which takes a commission and calculates odds based on what has

201 James Scrugham, Nevada: A Narrative of the Conquest of a Frontier Land. (The American Historical Society: 1935), 520.

89 already been bet, but races served as extremely popular events attended by thousands and often ended with surplus for the commission. Wingfield complained in annual reports to the governor that private contractors managing the meets were not as successful. They didn’t get a cut of the takes from the pari-mutuel machines. In 1928, the Silver State

Jockey Club reported a $19,854.79 deficit. Popular promoters, such as California horseman William Kyne, sporadically returned to Reno for its legalization of pari-mutuel betting, but rarely made a large profit.202

Still, Reno’s 1923 race meeting saw large sums bet at the track. The 30-day meeting included similar attractions to the eight previous years of racing, including free admission for women one day each week. One news story documenting the opening race day described it as an: “Atmosphere! That’s the best word to describe what one saw at the track today…colorful, cosmopolitan, kaleidoscope and such descriptive adjectives pop up.” One Reno Evening Gazette editorial in 1923 lauded horse racing as an upscale event:

There is no more thrilling sight in all sport and pastime than to watch a running race in which thoroughbreds, everyone of them the descendent of a long line of racing ancestors, are competing ... Racing, properly conducted and safeguarded against abuse, is and always will be the greatest of all sports.203

An example of the sports successful public relations campaign also occurred in 1923 when one race day’s profits went to a relief effort for victims of the Goldfield fire. More than 200 families were left destitute in the blaze.204

202 Nevada State Journal, July 13, 1923); Nevada State Racing Commission Annual Report, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1923). 203 Reno Evening Gazette, June 9, 1923. 204 Nevada State Journal, July 8, 1923.

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Gambling at race tracks and rodeo stampedes in Nevada from 1915 to 1920 drew the interest of the general public and investments from its financial community. Moffat and Wingfield, represented the range and cattle industry and the major state banking system. They represented a combination of wealth, class and political influence.

Wingfield wielded influence and power as Nevada’s alleged bipartisan political boss.

Moffat owned major cattle and wool industry holdings; his wife regularly appeared in the lifestyle sections of Reno newspapers for parties held at their Alamo Ranch on South

Virginia Street nearby the Nevada Stock Farm. Wingfield, too, “played the game,” his biographer notes. He did not confine himself to his office, “The Cave,” in the Reno

National Bank Building where Moffat also had an office. “Playing the game,” or prospering in the midst of a struggling state with an uncertain resource base, extended to - shaping of popular culture in Reno and Nevada with horse racing, rodeo, and spectacles.

Such events brought crowds and visitors necessary for an “undeveloped state.”

Some studies argue Nevada’s wide-open gambling law of 1931 was not a “sudden inspiration,” but instead a “result of years of continuing pressure.” Horse race betting confirms the pressure brought to bear following the state’s anti-gambling law during the

Progressive Era. Additionally, horse racing displayed the potential for tourism, and rodeo sought to expand on this success in an attempt to also fill an event void left by the loss of the State Fair to Fallon.205

Horse races continued through the 1920s with millions of dollars bet during the decade. Nevada’s county roads fund reaped some benefit, but small in comparison to federal funds coming into the state from the Federal Aid Road Act (1921) that spawned

205 Eric Moody. “The Early Years of Casino Gambling in Nevada, 1931-1945.” Diss. University of Nevada, Reno (1997), 19-23.

91 the “road building decade,” as Nevada Governor James Scrugham (1923-1927) called it.

The 30-day summer race meet in 1923 produced more than $14,000 for county roads: a respectable some, but small in comparison to assistance that progressively underlined the state’s reliance on federal road money.206

While always making money, race meets and pari-mutuel machines never generated the same take totals seen in 1923. By 1932, the total take from the machines reported by the Nevada State Racing Commission dropped under $600,000. The racing commission reported no meets in 1933 as the Great Depression gripped Nevada and also began taking its toll on Wingfield’s banks.

As may be surmised, especially after E.E. Roberts’ victory in the 1923 mayoral election, opposition to Nevada’s racing law waned in the 1920s. The Nevada State

Journal called for “red lights and prosperity” over the reformers’ slogan “red lights and ruin.207 In his report to the Governor, as the chairman of the racing commission in 1921,

Wingfield wrote, “As more states are following the example of Nevada and permitting of the Paris Mutuel betting on their racetracks under regulations similar to those of the

Nevada State Racing Commission, it appears that our law is satisfactory, and I recommend that no changes be made in the present law.” Wingfield continued his support of socially permissive laws concerning various alleged vices for the sake of business.

Wingfield’s appeals for freer-looser laws on alcohol, gambling and easy divorce became more ambitious as the 1920s progressed, notably his support of the 3-month residency period for divorce in 1927. Arguments portraying Nevada as an undeveloped state ill-

206 Scrugham, 525. 207 William D. Rowley, Reno: Hub of the Washoe Country, (Woodland Hills, California: Windsor Publications, 1984), 52.

92 suited for regulation of personal lives and habits gained credence among larger segments of its citizenry, who cared less about vice in their state as long as it benefited business, specifically Nevada’s growing number of visitors. Even Nevada’s women clubs, politically powerful in the 1910s, compromised their reform efforts in the 1920s for economic stability. As on study notes:

The influence that Nevada clubwomen had built with businessmen and government officials and the vision of the community that they had crafted together were not strong enough to withstand the desire for a stable economy. Middle-class women and men in Nevada had to accommodate some of their middle-class values in order to achieve others, because, as mining camp life had taught them, communities fade away without economic stability.208

In the mid-1920s, Jim McKay worked closely with Wingfield at the Nevada Stock

Farm and resided on South Virginia Street nearby Wingfield’s stables. McKay was part owner of the Bank Club in Wingfield’s Golden Hotel and kingpin in the city’s illegal drug and liquor trade with interest in Reno’s legal and prostitution establishments. He remained active in the state’s horse racing industry, along with racing and gambling south of the border in Mexico. McKay eventually served on the racing commission with

Wingfield. They also entered into horse raising agreements. In 1925, five Nevada Stock

Farm mares were given to McKay free of charge with access to stallions at the farm, but only if McKay raised them and provided Wingfield with 50 percent of interest in their

208 Cydnee McMullen. “Work worth Doing: Nevada Women’s Clubs and the Creation of Community, 1860-1920,” Diss. University of Nevada, Reno (2003), 207.

93 offspring.209 Casinos and racing interests often kept McKay in Tijuana for substantial amounts of time in the 1920s and into the 1930s.210

For a small city, Reno developed a diverse economy in the 1920s. Among other businesses, it was the site of two meat-packing plants, an iron foundry, brickworks, lumber, planning mills and, of course, a divorce colony that helped support retail in the city’s center. In 1927, however, following an embezzlement scandal involving Nevada’s state treasurer, comptroller and an officer of one of Wingfield’s banks, national attention, especially the Sacramento Bee, focused more intently on Wingfield, and how the state was being run. This attention increased after the legislature reduced the divorce residency to three months in 1927 and again to six weeks in 1931. Although saloon crowd interests in Nevada introduced wide-open gambling in the 1927 legislature — the bill failed — it passed in 1931 nearly word-for-word as the one four years before. As Wingfield’s biographer noted:

Amidst hard times produced by the national depression, which was already affecting Nevada’s livestock industry, the measures shored up the tourist-based economy of legalized or tolerated vices that Wingfield and others had been developing in Reno since the 1910s….Both gambling and the divorce trade were touted as part of the state’s frontier heritage and they offered in addition the boon of a new source of income for beleaguered local governments.211

In 1931, expensive renovations were made at the state fairgrounds in anticipation for a fight between Max Baer of San Francisco and the “Basque Woodchopper,” Paulino

Uzcudun. Only months after the wide-open gambling law, McKay, Bill Graham and

209 George Wingfield to Jim McKay, June 23, 1925, George Wingfield Papers, Nevada Historical Society 210 Ibid. 211 Raymond, Wingfield, 194

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Wingfield organized the bout to take place at the racetrack on July 4. Reno’s most prolific architect, Frederic DeLongchamps, was hired to design a new clubhouse and arena expected to seat up to 20,000 spectators. The renovations included a clubhouse, arena and refurbished racing track. Earlier that year, former boxing champion, Jack

Dempsey, arrived in Reno “for rest” at request of Mayo Clinic doctors, weeks after the legislature dropped the divorce residency to six weeks. After initially denying divorce rumors, Dempsey filed for divorce from his wife. Dempsey had lost millions after the banking crash of 1929. “With the effects of the Great Depression,” Reno journalist Guy

Clifton noted in Jack Dempsey in Nevada, “Reno was bustling with the divorce trade and legalized gambling business…there was money to be made.” Dempsey stayed and entered into an agreement to promote a fight on July 4 in Reno (1931); an unofficial, extravagant celebration of the recent gambling and divorce legislation.212

The fighters arrived in Reno weeks before the bout and quickly attracted crowds, especially Uzcudon and his large Basque following — including author Robert Laxalt and future Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt — set up the team’s training camp 10 miles south of Reno in Steamboat Springs. Baer, on the other hand, focused on fun, and attracted the “pretty blonde members of the divorce colony.” The Chamber of Commerce asked homeowners with extra rooms to open their doors for visitors. Additional trains moved from San Francisco, Los Angeles and eastern states. Hollywood stars made appearances, including Edward G. Robison, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and W.C.

Fields. As the fight approached, horse races were held, including the Paulino Cup, Max

Baer Cup and the Jack Dempsey Cup. The festivities, included the start of a 28-day race

212 Phillip Earl, This Was Nevada, (Reno: Nevada Historical Society, 1986), 161.

95 meet, as a wide variety of visitors arrived for events illegal outside Nevada.213 As the

Nevada State Journal reported:

Gay Reno — caught in a tidal wave of merrymakers — experienced the most colorful, crowded and generally noisy night in its history…Mothers with babies in their arms, flappers, grandmothers, milled with the crowds, elbowing their way in the midst of men of all description—well- dressed business men, bankers, film celebrities, cowboys, miners lumberjacks and “bums.”214

Perhaps not completely unexpected, a wave of national criticism followed

Nevada’s public announcement of open gambling and six-week divorce residency law in

1931. Reno’s Mayor Roberts declared Nevada “about the only free state left,” and

Governor Fred Balzar planned to write a book titled Nevada Liberalism.215 As the promotion of Nevada continued, outside media reacted to the state’s new vice-fueled economy. The New York Evening Graphic published a 20-part series on Reno, which alleged Nevada was an “outlaw state. George Wingfield is its king.” For the first time since mining strikes in Goldfield and Tonopah, Nevada gained major national attention

— all-be-it mostly negative attention.216

Gambling did not save Nevada in the Great Depression. While the state’s economy felt the effects of the financial crises later than other states, it certainly felt it by

1932. Wingfield’s banks crashed and he focused his attention away from horse racing.

The Nevada Racing Commission failed to organize a meeting in 1932. The commission did not oversee another large-scale race meeting in the 1930s following the one held in

213 Guy Clifton, Jack Dempsey in Nevada. (Reno: Jack Bacon & Co., 2007), 55. 214 Nevada State Journal. July 5, 1931. 215 Raymond, Wingfield, 195. 216 Paul Hutchinson, “Nevada—A Prostitute State,” The Christian Century, (December 2, 1931), 1519- 1520; “Reno’s Divorce Mill,” The Christian Century, (December 9, 1931), 1557-1559; “Can Reno Be Cured?” The Christian Century, (December 16, 1931), 1592-1594.

96

Reno in 1931. In November of 1932, Wingfield sold the remaining thoroughbred horses at the Nevada Stock Farm — the “act of a despondent man.”217 The expensive hobby embraced during the good times of his wealth became too expensive. Wingfield entered bankruptcy in 1935. While never at the same level of wealth or political power he wielded before the Depression, Wingfield did regain capital in the Getchell Mine in

Humboldt County during the late 1930s. With that money, he again purchased horses, this time quarter horses, and raised them on his Spanish Springs Ranch north of Sparks.

By the mid-1950s, he owned about 50 horses there, just before his death on Christmas

Eve 1959.218

Horse Racing Spectacles Leave Reno

From sporting culture to progressive gambling legislation and spectacles at the track, horse racing opened a glimpse into the mood of Reno and much of Nevada before wide-open gambling in 1931. Its dissolution in the 1930s, however, also revealed

Nevada’s dependence on attracting revenue from out-of-state sources for vice and other pleasures not allowed across the border. Historians note the “One Sound State” campaign in 1935 to lure wealthy millionaires to the state with the slogan: "no income tax, no inheritance tax, no sales tax, no tax on intangibles, but with a balanced budget and a surplus."219 Horse race betting in the 1910s and 1920s in Reno is one of several examples of an emerging border economy; other examples being low taxes in 1935 and wide-open gambling and divorce in 1931. Aspects of it can be seen as early as 1915 when George

217 Raymond, Wingfield, 215 218 Ibid. 219 ”Greetings from Nevada, The One Sound State,” Nevada State Archives, Carson City, Nevada.

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Wingfield described Nevada as “an undeveloped state” that “will not stand the reforms that might apply to states of a very large population.” Horse racing belongs in any conversation about what might be called “border economy enterprises,” not simply for its origin, but also how it quickly vanished when other states, especially nearby states in the

American West entered competition.220

One prominent California racing promoter profited from horse race betting in

Nevada and eventually lobbied legislators to enact a pari-mutuel law in the Golden State in 1933. William Kyne entered the horse racing business in 1904 as a clerk at a track in

Emeryville, California near San Francisco. He also promoted boxing bouts. In 1915,

Kyne established a racetrack in Tijuana alongside prominent horse owner James

Coffroth. A flood ruined the track, however, and Kyne entered the U.S. Navy during

World War I. Upon his return, Kyne purchased a string of thoroughbreds. These horses experienced far greater success than those of 1915.221 He promoted races from Phoenix,

Arizona to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in Reno. In 1923, he helped organize the Silver State

Jockey Club in Reno. It managed the 1923 summer meeting in Reno — the most successful of all race meetings in the city’s history.222

Kyne was described in a newspaper story as the last “easy touch” of the sports world, a term used to describe a man who was known to distribute money to track-goers without thinking twice about it. As one Nevada State Journal tribute piece days after

Kyne’s death in 1957 reported, “Kyne never cared how much money he had or made —

220 Reno Evening Gazette, February 2, 1915. 221 Oakland Tribune, February 16, 1957. 222 Nevada State Journal, February 16, 1957.

98 just so he had plenty to give away and enough to live on.”223 Kyne was one of the greatest horse promoters in the West. His charisma, reputation and connections in nearby

San Francisco lured horse owners to Reno. One newspaper alluded to Kyne’s reputation in Reno:

The popularity of Mr. Kyne in Nevada and California is a magnet in itself with many week-end parties planning to attend the races on opening day and then to motor to the Lake Tahoe country to spend Sunday.224

Kyne did not serve as the general manager for every race meeting in Reno in the 1920s.

The race meetings he did promote, however, were among the most attended in the state’s history (1923 and 1928). As a Bay Area resident for most of his life, Kyne’s connection to the area certainly enhanced his ability to promote races and attract San Franciscan turfites to nearby Reno for betting on horse races. Throughout the 1920s, Kyne and other

California horsemen argued for the legalization of pari-mutuel betting in their state. In

1926, those interests failed at the ballot box following an initiative petition. Arguments for the pari-mutuel system pointed to other “vacations centers,” such as Florida, where pari-mutuel betting was then legal, and argued that California was missing out on an easy source of income. Without pari-mutuel betting, California was at an economic disadvantage, according to those lobbying for the initiative in 1926.225 One wealthy

California horse owner argued, “Thousands of tourists now going to eastern and southern resorts would come to California if we had horse racing.” He continued:

We who are behind this movement are against bookmakers, but we love horseflesh, and under the pari-mutuel system,

223 Nevada State Journal, February 19, 1957. 224 Reno Evening Gazette, August 8, 1928. 225 Nevada State Journal, August 11, 1925.

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we think conditions would be such that horse racing could be enjoyed throughout the state.226

In 1933, eight years after California voters defeated the pari-mutuel bill, Kyne knew the political climate was much more accepting of track betting in the state.

In the grips of the Great Depression in 1933 and only weeks into Franklin Delano

Roosevelt’s presidency following his landslide Democratic victory, 20 states around the nation proposed forms of pari-mutuel betting during legislative sessions. Only months before the passage of the 21st Amendment repealing prohibition, anti-booze law was not the only form of morality legislation on its last legs. An Associated Press survey reported that 20 legislatures had “turned to the race track and legalized betting as a possible contributor” to “replenish depleted treasuries.” One headline proclaimed: “U.S. Blue

Laws Being Wiped Out.” As a reason for the sudden shift in policy change, the

Associated Press reported:

Proponents of the various measures, especially in states where racing is allowed either by law or official sufferance, point out that betting is being carried on by some system or other wherever racing is allowed and that the state might as well be getting some revenue from it.227

Kyne remained confident in its passage even before lawmakers brought it to discussion.

Kyne told reporters he felt the bill was “a sure winner.” He added: “All factions are working in harmony for the measure.” That January, Kyne leased a 125-acre tract in

Contra Costa. He made public his intent to spend $250,000 for a one-mile track and grandstands for 10,000 spectators, contingent on whether pari-mutuel betting became law. Not all 20 legislatures passed pari-mutuel betting law in 1933, but at least five did,

226 Ibid. 227 The Bakersfield Californian, March 9, 1933.

100 including Nevada’s neighbor to the west, California. Washington also allowed pari- mutuel betting that year. California citizens voted pari-mutuel betting into law through ballot proposition on June 27, 1933.228 The bill resembled Nevada’s in that it set up a three-person board to supervise racing and betting. The difference with the Nevada law, however, came in the form of a $5,000 salary for each California member. Four percent of the betting pools supported state, county and district fairs and other “state institutions and unemployment relief measures.”229 After voters approved the new law in a landslide, many newspapers applauded lawmakers in a similar fashion to Nevada newspaper editorials nearly 20 years before.

While respecting the honest opinion of those who are opposed in principle to the practice of horse racing and of betting, even under the pari-mutuel system, we cannot help but feel that the conduct of the track under state regulation will be something entirely different from what we have been led to expect by past experience … it [a race track] will prove a valuable asset to the county, not only from an advertising standpoint, but because it will attract here a high class clientele including hundreds of leading horsemen and horse-women from all over the United States.230

Kyne’s Bay Meadows Racetrack opened in 1934 and remains in operation into the twenty-first century. After his death in 1957, newspapers remembered Kyne as the

“father of California horse racing.” Those same obituaries also mentioned his ability to get pari-mutuel betting legalized in California as the “big project of his career.”231 In

1974, a congressional hearing announced that the pari-mutuel system of betting on horse

228 Woodland Daily Democrat, June 28, 1933. 229 Oakland Tribune, June 28, 1933. 230 San Mateo Times, January 5, 1934. 231 Oakland Tribune, February 16, 1957.

101 races was “the most geographically widespread form of legalized wagering in the United

States today.” The hearing called it a $13 billion industry in 1974.232

As a result of the Great Depression and the fall of Wingfield’s banks, along with the acceptance of pari-mutuel betting in other states the Nevada State Journal reported in

1953 that the sport “hit the doldrums and was active in only a small way at fairs and rodeos.” In anticipation for the Washoe County Fair that year, which was to have thoroughbred stallions featured, the Nevada State Journal reported: “About this time (the

1930s), horse racing was legalized in California and such large purses were put up in that state that it was a serious blow to racing in Nevada.” The sport in Nevada simply could not survive the California competition. Additionally, the rise of news services, especially

Moe Annenberg’s Daily Racing Form fed an insatiable appetite for up-to-the-minute racing news through telegraph services. While anti-racketeering prosecutors may have desired an end to Anneberg’s business in order to stop an estimated 15,000 bookies operating nationwide, primarily because of the telegraph service, it was deemed news, and completely legal.233

In 1941, as wire services expanded and became more accepted, the Nevada legislature legalized out-of-state race wire betting. As California Attorney General Earl

Warren increasingly cracked down on gamblers in his state, many moved to Nevada, specifically to Las Vegas, where gambling was legal. Nevada’s 1941 race wire bill sought to eliminate debate on the legality of bookmaking operations in casinos as the telegraph service became increasingly popular. Opponents to the bill felt it would endorse

232 Hearings on Pari-Mutuel Horseracing, Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling, (Published by National Technical Information Service, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1975). 233 Richard Davies and Richard Abram, Betting the Line: Sports Wagering in American Life, (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2001), 35.

102 racketeering in Nevada gaming and bring undesirables. Their assertions were mostly correct. Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who in 1940 was making money taking bets at the

Santa Anita racetrack in southern California through wire services there, came to Las

Vegas because of its potential for betting on out-of-state horse races. While Governor

Edward Carville vetoed the legislation in 1941, siding with county district attorneys’ fearful of racketeering, he also defended the sport inside Nevada, saying “wide open bookmaking would hurt all racing inside the state.” After a similar bill failed in 1939, legislators overrode Carville’s veto in the 1941 legislative session. 234 In the early twenty-first century, Nevada remained without major horse racing tracks seen in neighboring states, but off track betting continues as the visible form of horse racing in the state.

234 Moody, Nevada, 1931-1945, 296

103

Chapter Five

In Conclusion

Oddly enough, the Great Depression proved more of a blessing than a curse for horse racing in America. Between 1929 and 1941, 24 new racing tracks were built nationwide.235 In 1936, representatives from 16 of the now 21 states permitting pari- mutuel betting met for the third annual National Association of State Racing

Commissioners. The annual meeting was held in Miami, Florida. The association argued

“liberal laws” legalizing the pari-mutuel system had ushered in a “golden era of racing.”

Furthermore, it lauded the benefits of horse racing to state finances:

This is truly the golden era of racing, proven by the widespread popularity that it enjoys. The sport has grown to great proportions throughout the country…it has become a factor in our recreational life, supplying employment to thousands, and contributing in no small way to the state finances. 236

The commissioners reminded operators they must avoid scandals that plagued the sport’s history, alluding to bookmakers at the turn of the twentieth century when anti-gambling sentiment reached a fever pitch. This sensitivity to public perception was even more imperative as horse racing was now a predominantly “public supported sport”:

Racing is on the threshold of a lasting future, or complete oblivion as a public supported sport. Its future rests in the hands of those who are directly interested, those who have invested great sums of money in its promotion, and who

235 William H. P. Robertson. The History of the Thoroughbred Racing in America. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1964), 330-350. 236 “Proceedings of the National Association of State Racing Commissioners,” Third Annual Meeting at Miami, Florida, (January 13-18, 1936). Secretary’s Office of the Association in Lexington, Kentucky.

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operate it. Indifference to public reactions and good-will will prove fatal.237

Licensing standards and stricter enforcement of saliva tests to end horse doping were only two of several issues debated at the 1936 meeting. While these potential scandals threatened “complete oblivion” of the sport in states with larger populations and lucrative horse farms — California, New York, Kentucky and Maryland — economic challenges and overwhelming out-of-state competition killed the sport in Nevada. Nevada’s racing commission members, George Wingfield and Jim McKay, were invited to the 1936 association meeting in Miami, but they did not attend. The Nevada Racing Commission had not presided over a race meeting since 1931. Similar to how Nevada opened the state to general gambling in 1931 as a response to the Depression, other states permitted horse race betting for corresponding reasons. Consequently, the spectacles of Reno at the races disappeared from the Nevada scene.238

Purse distributions quickly regained and surpassed pre-Depression levels at horse races around the nation. In 1936, even Reno horseman A.A. Baroni greatly benefitted from a $100,000 payoff for his winning horse, Top Row, at the Santa Anita racetrack in southern California. After emigrating from Italy, Baroni was a ranch hand and cook as a youth in Dayton. He entered the slot machine business in Reno in 1915 and eventually purchased a string of horses from Wingfield in 1921. Newspaper reports said Wingfield told Baroni to, “Get out in the open and save your health; I’ll give you a horse.”239

During the 1920s, Baroni represented what it meant to be a sporting man in Reno. He maintained stables through the Depression. In 1934, he claimed Top Row at a Rhode

237 Ibid. 238 Ibid. 239 Nevada State Journal, March 28, 1941.

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Island track for $3,500. Top Row earned Baroni more than $200,000 in his career, including the $100,00 payoff at the 1936 Santa Anita handicap. By 1941, fifteen years after Wingfield got him into the game, Baroni had earned more than $800,000 in horse racing, but he had moved his stables out of state.240

In 1938, Seabiscuit and War Admiral entered into one of the most popular rivalries in the sport’s history. The undersized Seabiscuit gave those recovering from the economic downturn a symbolic underdog to relate with and root for against the supposedly superior breeding of War Admiral. After months of anticipation, the horses met in the “match race of the century” at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore,

Maryland. Seabiscuit shocked many racing prognosticators when he won the match race.

The rivalry invigorated interest in the sport only years after widespread pari-mutuel betting kindled curiosity at tracks around the nation. In 1941, national tallies of purse distribution hit a record high of more than $18 million, two million dollars more than

1940, the previous record high. During the war, the operation of horse race meetings were subject to the overseeing powers of the federal War Manpower Commission, but the tracks opened to wide enthusiasm when the war ended.241

In 1949, the Nevada Racing Commission began overseeing dog racing in the state, but to a far lesser extent than horse racing in the 1920s. The Las Vegas Downs

(now known as the Las Vegas Motor Speedway) held a 13-day horse race meeting in

1953, but it proved a costly endeavor for track managers. The event closed before the race meeting was set to end. The following year, it held quarter-horse races, but soon

240 Reno Evening Gazette, March 27, 1941. 241 Robertson, History of the Thoroughbred, 339-360.

106 focused sights on automobile racing.242 In 1993, the Nevada legislature eliminated the

Nevada Racing Commission and transferred horse and dog racing responsibilities to the

Nevada Gaming Commission.243 A century after legalized horse race betting in 1915, the sport in Nevada served purely a gambling purpose on races out of state.244

The sport of kings in Nevada proved easy to forget, but at one time spectacles at the Reno racetrack brought men of sporting culture and all classes of society together for a chance to place a bet and do something prohibited in neighboring California and throughout much of Progressive Era America. In the 1910s, Nevada started to turn away from the mining camps of Goldfield and Tonopah. Its major urban center in Reno saw the possibilities of an event-oriented economy. In order to lure out-of-state business, commercial leaders sought out ventures that offered vice prohibited across its borders.

Along with easy divorce, and more than a decade before wide-open gambling, horse racing fit this draw in Reno, the train stop less than a dozen miles east of California’s

Sierra border.245 This culminated with a wide-open state that transformed Nevada’s economy for the twentieth century and beyond. While the progressives reformed the sport, the sport lived on.

During the roaring 1920s, stakes races were popular around the nation often for the simple pleasures of spectator sport. While many of these tracks outside Nevada included opportunity for oral betting, they had yet to establish it as a publically supported

242 Mark Aumann, “From Horses to motors, first Vegas track a disaster,” Retro Racing, (February 26, 2009), Web, 3 May 2015. 243 Senate History, (Carson City State Printing Office, 1993), 161. 244 Reno Gazette-Journal, May 31, 2014. 245 Elizabeth Raymond, “George Wingfield and Nevada’s Peculiar Institutions,” Halcyon, (Reno: University of Nevada, 1992), 183.

107 industry. This propped up the enterprise in Nevada with a competitive advantage passed in the state’s legislature in 1915. When the bordering state of California duplicated

Nevada's racetrack wagering, it doomed the enterprise in Nevada illustrating the fragility of the state's border economy.

Nearly two decades before California legalized pari-mutuel betting at racetracks,

Nevada adopted and promoted it throughout the 1920s for large race spectacles. Reno lawmakers and business leaders saw the possibilities and began campaigns to create the

“world’s playground” in the foothills of the eastern Sierra. Nevada jumped out of the gate ahead of most of its neighboring states in 1915 to regulate and open betting at the track.

246 Yet, when other states followed suit during the Depression, Nevada sought a wider gambling base to support and create a peculiar border economy.

246 William D. Rowley, Reno: Hub of the Washoe Country, (Woodland Hills, California: Windsor Publications, 1984), 52.

108

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