58 HISTORY OF THE 



TWENTIETH DERBY 1894 



It was Derby Day at Churchill Downs this afternoon, 

 and the enclosure was crowded as it had not been for 

 a long time previous. It was an ideal racing day, the 

 hard rain of the morning thoroughly laying the dust. 

 The rain made the track just a bit slow but this was 

 more than compensated in the absence of dust. The good people 

 of the Falls City were hungry to see a race and they turned out 

 in large numbers, irrespective of color, class or circumstances. 

 A free field made it possible for those who were unable to pay 

 the price of admission to see the racing at little or no cost at 

 all. There was an immense crowd in the infield, and the fence 

 from the head of the stretch to the clubhouse turn was lined 

 with a dense mass of humanity, each moity of which was strug- 

 gling to either gain or maintain his position. 



The Derby of 1894 had not about it quite that glamour an.i 

 fascination that has characterized several former contests for this 

 event perhaps because there was no horse in it of particularly 

 high-class, and of such individual prominence as to attract and 

 absorb public attention for weeks prior to the race, which reaches 

 the public thru the medium of the press. Horses are something 

 like men in that some of them possess a kind of magnetism 

 that draws around them a coterie of admirers, who become as 

 much infatuated with him as does the most ardent admirers of a 

 political leader. Such a horse was Proctor Knott, and never 

 before nor since in the West, was as much written about and a* 

 much attention paid to a horse as was to him. The press teemed 

 with articles about him from day to day, for weeks prior to the 

 Derby of 1889, so that when the great day rolled around thousands 

 of people went to the track impelled by an uncontrollable curi- 

 osity to see the horse that had been written so much about. Well, 



