Chapter One
NAMES
Names. Tod Sloan had a lot of names(and very little of anything else).His father, cruelly, called him"Toad" because he was so small. Hisreal name, "that which I was christenedby," was James Forman Sloan. There was agrander version, too, James Todhunter Sloan, whichsomeone, "I forget who," hung on him. It turned outto be important because it was eventually shortenedto Tod, the name everyone called him by. For a numberof years he even had a different last name—Blauser—thename of the people who raised him asa boy.
His upbringing was as random as his names,marked by the casual harshness of the lives of ordinarypeople of the time and place, Bunker Hill, Indiana,twelves miles from Kokomo, where he wasborn on August 10, 1874. Tod's father had movedthere after serving in the northern army during theCivil War; and made his living as a barber and real estateagent, shaving his neighbors both ways. When Tod was five,his mother died. In his own book, Tod Sloan by Himself, writtenlong after these events and far away from these places, he saidnothing about it, other than to record it. And he said nothingabout what happened to the rest of his family—he had two olderbrothers and a sister—after it occurred. He didn't even mentionhis mother's name or explain why he had been given to theBlausers. Maybe he didn't know. His history in these years, so obscureto us, may have been equally unknown to him.
Tod Sloan by Himself is the source of most of what weknow about his early years; its tone is noncommittal about thestories put in, and the ones left out. It is matter-of-fact, offhand,poker-faced, "imperturbable as a gravestone," the style adoptedby sportsmen of the time. In its pages the pains of childhoodand youth are unrecalled, though very occasionally somethingdeeper flashes out, as in the simple reference to being farmed outto the Blausers "when I was left alone by those I have never ceasedto grieve for." A lament for the dead mother, surely, but also forthe father who abandoned him? Anyway, that event fixed the patternof how he perceived his relation to the world: a little guy, onhis own, calculating the odds, taking his chances. Tod Sloan,alone, Tod Sloan, by himself.
With the Blausers, however, Tod apparently lived a life thatreflected one of the prevailing American cultural archetypes, thatof a carefree childhood lived in harmony with nature. This idea,at least as old as the Greeks and Romans, had been given renewedvitality by the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century,with its emphasis on the innocence of childhood as contrastedwith the corruption of social institutions. It wasn't onlyAmericans who invested nostalgic capital in this idea, but it floweredwith special luxuriance in the United States because of thenation's recent experience of wilderness and frontier. In the1870s and 1880s, when Tod was growing up, artists of all kindsillustrated this theme. Winslow Homer painted carefree childrenfrolicking in the fields and meadows, released from captivity inthe one-room schoolhouse. James Whitcomb Riley evoked thisHoosier idyll of blameless boys roaming the countryside andsharing innocent amusements. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's novel of1888, The Story of a Bad Boy, was a bestseller. (He wasn't reallybad, just mischievous.) This idyllic picture of childhood wasonly half the story, however. There was also a harshly antiromanticview. In a popular form it was to be found in George W.Pecks bestseller Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa. Hennery Peck, the boy,was mean-spirited and sometimes brutal in dealing with parentsand peers. He was truly and naturally bad.
Behind and well beyond the imaginative grasp of eitherJames Whitcomb Riley or of George Peck was Mark Twain's vision,in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn (1884), which combined elements ofboth these views. Twain mordantly depicted the depravity ofboth young and old in the slaveholding civilization on the riverbanks.But he also captured the freedom, or at least the dream offreedom, to be found in a life in nature, on the Mississippi. Muchof the novels' beguiling power rests on their rapturous evocationof life beyond the constraints of the culture.
Huckleberry came and went at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather, and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master, or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious, that boy had.
Authority could be, must be, deceived and evaded. When thepressures of encroaching culture proved intolerable, Twain'syoung men survived by tricking people, Tom Sawyer's way, or byrunning away, Huck's. But no one could run away forever;it never crossed Hennery Peck's mind to try it. And Twain,sometimes reluctantly and always with difficulty, was realistic;whether in the territories of the West or on the mighty river, lifewas lived within society.
All his life Tod Sloan combined Tom and Huck. In hisearly years he was Huck. Roaming the Indiana countryside withhis dog Tony, he stayed away from school, took up smoking, became"crazy for firearms of all kinds," a passion he couldn't gratifyuntil he was older because in those unenlightened days gunswere not readily available to everyone. "I would go out in thefields with Tony and fish, fish, all day long." At other times hewas Tom, tricking fellows older and bigger than he was, learningwhat he could get away with. "Sometimes I got near getting alicking, but I suppose I was too small for them to take very seriously,although I could sting them a bit with my tongue, whichwas bitter even then." (He always could talk, and one day hewould dictate a book.) Later, there were stories that portray himas less a victim of size and circumstance, less innocent. It was saidthat by age nine he was already fond of man-sized cigars, that"his exploits and adventures knew no limit," that he preferredthe company of grown men, that "nothing was too dangerousfor him to attempt."
The Blausers put an end to this freedom by threateninghim with school. Todd sought refuge twenty miles away, "withmy real mother's sister." His aunt let him stay with her for a dayor two, but "she kept putting questions, asking me this, that andthe other about my schooling and what I was going to do for aliving." It was the Widow Douglas civilizing Huck. "She was agood church-woman and never could hold with my not beingthe same as all the other folk she knew." Tod wasn't the same, andnever could be. So he trailed back to the Blausers' house only tofind that he couldn't come home again. He had no home. Mrs.Blauser, "without letting me in the front door," asked "whetherI had come for my trunk." Tod, who had no trunk and barelyenough clothes to fill a small bag, got the point. "There was noquestion the situation spelt W-O-R-K." At age thirteen, Tod Sloanhit the road. He was on his own.
After leaving Kokomo, Tod had to be Tom Sawyer, calculatingthe odds, cutting corners, scrambling to survive. JamesWhitcomb Riley didn't sing idylls about this Indiana. Gonewas harmony with nature. Gone was childhood. (Adolescencehadn't been invented yet.) Soon to go was innocence. Their placewas taken, abruptly, shockingly, by learning from the experienceof ordinary daily life. Tod went to work in the nearby gas and oilfields, was injured in two explosions, treating his burns with linseedoil and lime water, which "seemed to shrivel me even smallerthan I was before." He went back to Kokomo and did a "sort ofgeneral utility turn" in a livery stable but was fired because he wasso puny. "Although I was willing enough they were always tellingme about my helplessness." He looked up his real father, who wasnow living near Marion, Indiana, and had a new family, but hisfather did nothing for him. He was unwilling, or too poor, orboth. Work turned up in a carriage factory for a while, then in asaloon—sweeping up, attending to the glasses, learning newswear words from the customers. "But it was the same old cry—`toosmall,'" so he had to beat it from there. "It was a bit of aknock-out for I used to put in a lot of elbow and wrist work forwhat my back couldn't do."
Family (and nonfamily), local culture, class, poverty, allthese institutions and social conditions were working on TodSloan in his wanderings. Nevertheless, the most important thinghe had to learn to deal with in these years didn't come throughexperience or observation and was dictated by nature, not society:his size. Fully grown, he was under five feet in height. Heweighed fifty or sixty pounds as he was growing up; in his twentieshe weighed about ninety pounds. He wasn't a dwarf; hewasn't ill or disabled. But his small size was inescapable. Therewere some obvious roles for a very small man: he could work ina circus, become an entertainer, ride horses. In Tod's day therewas the historical memory of Napoleon, diminutive but immenselypowerful, and of Stephen A. Douglas, the "little giant,"Abraham Lincoln's rival from nearby Illinois. Small consolation.What life made clear was that little people had always to look up,and had better look out, for themselves.
In his meanderings Tod met "Professor" A. L. Talbot, a balloonist,a self-described aeronaut, who traveled about the countrysidewith various sideshows. He was a bit of a con man—theidentification of the title professor with something bogus was apersistent aspect of nineteenth-century American culture. ButTalbot saw more in Tod than anyone else ever had, so Tod joinedup and went along with him. When balloon ascensions didn'tdraw, the two of them hustled to earn their keep by making toyballoons, which Tod sold. "I tell you I was some salesman, andoften think I could have managed a department store if fatherhad taken me by the back of the neck and forced me into business."Tod might indeed have made a good salesman. Wordsnever failed him. Salesmen—"drummers" they were called—epitomizedthe aggressive, slyly knowing, corner-cutting, anddealmaking commercial culture of the time. An American journalistof the 1890s described these graduates of the Drummers'University, the school of hard knocks: "They know all stories, alljokes, all railroad routes, all hotels, all trades, all games. They areafraid of nothing. They take chances and jump at every opportunity."
Tod Sloan learned his lessons about life from the harsh,shadowy culture of the fast-talking salesman, the carnival pitchman,and the racetrack tout, always on the make, always on themove, legal but essentially furtive. It was a culture of illusion, ofsleight-of-hand, of trickery, of seeming more than being. Iteluded neat categories of class. It was too occasional and improvisedfor the discipline of working-class industrial routine; it wasentrepreneurial and wholly dependent on the market, but toodisreputable, in its commonest forms, to be middle class. Thosewho were part of it were disdainful of the pieties of middle-classmorality and in many ways hostile to the established order becausetheir success depended on beating the system. But theyresisted collaboration and were arch individualists, prizinganonymity.
Get-rich-quick-and-easy, something-for-nothing, and taking-a-chancewere the prevailing goals of the carnival, the racetrack,the dreams of the salesman. An American gambler believedthat the average American was especially susceptible to thewiles of the con man and gambler because of his materialism andcupidity, his "insatiable greed for money, more money. TheAmerican eats with it, sleeps with it, dreams of it and lives withit. It is money, money all the time. Go to him with any propositionthat has the least bit of plausibility and he will rush to it withthe ardor of a boy coasting down hill on the snow." It was a cultureessentially Calvinist. In a culture of original sinners, inwhich everyone was out to trick everyone, there was no sympathyfor a victim, only contempt. Given its assumptions about humannature, there was a fitness in cheating the gullible. Joe Weil,a famous con man and swindler known as the Yellow Kid, insistedthat "honest men do not exist." "I have never cheated anyhonest men," he said, "only rascals. They wanted something fornothing. I gave them nothing for something."
Tod Sloan accepted this world. In his memoirs he admittedmistakes but didn't blame himself or others. But for all thematter-of-fact amorality of his narrative, there was in it, betweenthe lines, a vulnerable yearning for a different way, for guidance.Tod Sloan was looking for someone older, wiser, bigger, whowould take care of him, set him straight. Professor Talbot was thefirst of the men whom, in later years, he would identify with hisneeds. "We were quite a happy family with Talbot." The professorhad done a lot of things. He had ridden as a jockey, performedas a clown in the circus, exhibited his equestrian skill by ridingtwo horses, bareback, at the same time. The combative professorfought on the slightest provocation, scrapped for the love of it.Tod later concluded that he hadn't had a hot temper until he metTalbot, whose love of fighting sparked his own. Talbot brawledbut never talked about his brawls. Anyone hustling for a livinglearned to keep his own counsel, to give nothing away. Talkingwas all right when it was just another way of disguising what wasreally going on. Talbot explained nothing—about himself, whohe was, where he came from, where and how he grew up. A. L.Talbot had no history, only a past. In this he is like the innumerableothers who left no records, dictated no books, belongedto nothing, cheated when they could, worked as they had to, andsurvived.
Once, near Cullum, Indiana, they were heating up for anascension. Talbot couldn't always get gas, and when he could itoften cost too much. So he inflated his balloons in the originalway, with hot air. Tod's job was to pile the pine logs and oil barrelstaves that were burned to get enough hot vapor to fill the balloonfor takeoff. On this occasion Tod saw flames burst out justas the other men on the ground were letting the balloon, and theprofessor, loose. "Don't go," Tod shouted, but it was too noisyfor Talbot to hear him and "with the extra heat he went up all thequicker ... and I never thought I should see him alive again." Atabout fifteen hundred feet the balloon was fully on fire; it thencollapsed, and the professor came down even quicker than he'dgone up, landing in a field. Somehow the scraps of the balloon'sframework broke his fall; Talbot wasn't hurt, only knocked out.He was revived, taken round to a drugstore, and given a shot ofbrandy. "He got up about an hour after and went to a dance."The professor was tough.
For the Boonesville, Indiana, fair, Talbot came up with abig new idea. He was paid an extra twenty-five dollars for promisinga parachute act in connection with the conventional ascension.A boy would slip out of the balloon in a parachute. (Talbothad never seen a parachute, but he got a picture of one andcopied it.) One morning he sprang his plan on Tod, who asked:
"Who's the boy?"
"You're the boy."
"Oh, I am!"
"You don't seem to like it, Tod."
"It's all right. But what sort of thing is the parachute, the umbrella thing I am to come down in? Shall I be heavy enough to make it open out?"
"Oh, you'll be all right," said the Professor, just as if he were saying "Pass the butter," but I began thinking it over and the more I looked up at the sky and began to think of having to slip down from the clouds the less I liked it.
Tod began to think how he could get out of it. Sometimebefore this he had learned that his brother Cassius, "Cash," wasin the neighborhood. So he told the professor that he wanted toleave. Talbot was sporting about it. "Perhaps you're right; go andjoin your brother." That was the last they saw of each other.
Tod set out to look for Cash and eventually found him. "Isaw a little fellow ahead of me, hiking a mile down a railroadtrack as hot as a furnace, carrying a pail of water in each hand.He had a long, peaked trotting driver's cap on, and looked thefunniest guy I'd ever seen. I walked up behind him to see who hewas, and I heard him whistling—and then, of course, I knew itwas Cash. We embraced like brothers should. I was glad to seehim and he me. We sat down by the track and talked things out."
Cash was a jockey for a stable of horses near St. Louis, andhe put Tod to work doing odd jobs. He learned how to rub downhorses, to feed and care for them. Work around stables was oftendirty, but it wasn't hard. The next step was to become an exerciseboy, riding horses to warm them up, then to become a jockey,like Cash. The problem for stable boys who wanted to becomejockeys was in getting a chance to ride and gain experience. Therewas no formal schooling, no apprenticeship; boys learned if theywere quick-witted and observant, watching, watching what theothers did. Tod's size made him a natural candidate as a featherweightjockey. But there was a special problem. Horses terrifiedTod Sloan. He said that his fear of them was connected with achildhood incident; at a funeral he had climbed up on a horsethat ran away, out of control. Death and horses got mixed up inhis mind. He tried to shake off this fear when working with Cash,but every time he mounted a horse he got thrown, which onlymade things worse. He hated the whole thing. Still, he remindedhimself that trying to ride horses was better than jumping froma balloon; he still had balloon nightmares, "dropping down fromthe sky with a parachute just out of clutching distance."
Then Cash lost his job with the stable. The two brothersknocked around for a while, moving from place to place, endingup in Denver, where Tod tried riding again, only to be thrownonce more. He kept trying because there wasn't anything else.When he was fourteen he and Cash went to Chicago, stayingwith their sister. Cash supported them by working as a carpenterand, on weekends, as a barber. "Of course little Tod couldn'tbe out of it," and he helped his brother by standing on a stooland putting in "some fine fancy work," lathering the faces ofCash's customers. In Kansas City he worked for a trainer namedJimmy Campbell, a kindly soul who insisted that Tod could becomea success as a rider. Campbell took him east, to New Jersey,where he had his first glimpse of eastern racing. With Campbell'shelp he began to do what was necessary to overcome hisfear—to understand horses. Tod's (or Campbell's) guiding insightwas that horses "didn't want to be bullied." It was no goodkicking and pulling at them. A rider had to find out each horse'speculiarities and then play up to them. This worked especiallywell with horses that had a reputation for being bad temperedand sulky. Tod's way with such a horse was Tom Sawyer's waywith people; in the struggle between horse and rider for controlit was necessary to fool the horse. "I would tug at his bridle a bitthen I would relax. That made him think I had given it up—thestruggle I mean—and he would strike out for all he was worthunder the impression that he'd conquered me." Such a horse thendid his best— "an his own account."
So Tod started riding professionally. There are differingaccounts about when this occurred. In one, "enamored of theturf and the sight of billowing silks," he haunted the barns andstables of a track in St. Louis and got his first mount in 1890.The editor of his memories, who ought to have known, wrotethat Sloan "made the acquaintance of race horses in 1886,"whatever that might mean. Sam Hildreth, later a notabletrainer, encountered Tod in 1886, at the Latonia, Kentucky,racetrack; he was twelve and weighed sixty pounds. "He remindedyou of a midget as he squatted on a horse's back." Hildrethgave him a mount, and though Tod's horse "finishednowhere," he handled himself well. Tod remembered his firstrace as in New Orleans, on Lovelace; he finished third, rode infour other races, and was out of the money in all of them. "If aman didn't want his horse to win, all he had to do was to sendfor Sloan." No doubt he exaggerated, consciously or not; itmade his rise to fame more dramatic. But other people's accountsdo suggest that he was not exaggerating when he wrotethat "I hated myself for I didn't seem to improve at all." Tod wascertainly not precocious. His vagrant rovings in these years—St.Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, a brief eastern visit—are thefitful gropings of someone trying to find his way. He insistedthat he had decided to give up riding but was dissuaded by wordsthat kept ringing mysteriously in his ears: "You may be able toride some day."
And then, in 1892 or 1893, he went to northern Californiafor the winter racing, and that day came.
Copyright © 2000 John Dizikes. All rights reserved.