Race Horse Driver Seventy-Two Years

1916

HUNTING BARNES OF IOWA IS OLDEST MAN IN SPORT.

Started as a Jockey When a Boy in Wisconsin — He's Still Spry at Age of 89.

WEST UNION, Iowa, Sept. 14. — Hunting Barnes of West Union is the oldest racing man now actively engaged in the sport both in age and number of years in the service. He is 89 years old, and is now racing for his seventy-second consecutive year.

Barnes was born in New York State, Oct. 12, 1827. He went to Wisconsin with his parents when a boy and started work at selling fruit on the streets of Milwaukee. Later he began riding horses.

At that time there were few established tracks, the racing being done on the public road, a straightaway course, with the running races generally only a quarter of a mile in length. In 1845 Barnes went across Wisconsin to Madison, Wis., and Prairie du Chien with a party of race horse men. They pitted their mounts against those of the French and Indian half breeds on these impromptu half mile tracks. In 1849 Barnes began driving harness horses.

In 1853 Barnes joined the rush to California, going around Cape Horn, but speedily got enough of it there, returning via Panama, where he rode a mule across the isthmus. However, he later returned to California and after the trip there rejoined his parents, who had moved in 1853 to Fayette County, Iowa.

He hired to two families from Fayette to take them across the Great American desert to the Pacific Coast, and getting other young men to go along they took a bunch of trotters and runners. He remained on the coast, riding and driving until 1865. One of his runners, a mare named Seed Wheat, was run by him there for three years without losing a race.

Barnes has lived in Fayette County since 1865, and in West Union for forty years. He was one of the men who about forty-five years ago, as members of a driving association, surveyed and had graded the first circular track in Fayette County, the one now on the Fayette County fair grounds in West Union.

Barnes recalls an incident of his early driving days that amuses him considerably. He had charge about 1850 or 1851 of a trotter, Badger Boy, that could make a mile in three minutes on a good track on days when he was in good trim. Barnes took this horse to the State Fair at Madison, Wis., and beat everything in sight. The next year he returned, and was barred out of the races, but the officials softened the blow to him by giving him a blanket inscribed "The fastest trotting horse in Wisconsin," and letting him drive around the track with the horse wearing the blanket.

Barnes had his horse hitched to a sulky weighing about 300 pounds, or ten times the weight of the average racing sulky of today. As he passed the stand the [la___*] said to him, "Mr. Barnes, you are [____ and*] spry, but you'll get killed riding in so light a cart as that."

He has raced every season since that time.

—The Saturday Blade, Sept. 16, 1916, p. 8.

*Missing a couple bits here. Possibly "you are young and spry" and "the lady there said to him," but I don't know that "the lady" makes much sense.