John Rarey, the Ohio Horse Tamer Who Performed for a Queen

The idea that a horse can be handled without violence is much older than the twentieth century. One of the people who proved it in public was John Solomon Rarey, who for a few years in the 1850s and 1860s was among the most famous Americans in the world.

Groveport, Ohio

Rarey was born on December 6, 1827, in his father's tavern at Groveport, Ohio. By the family's telling he was working with horses as a boy and had trained his first by the age of twelve. Neighbors came to him with animals nobody else could handle, and while still young he had a business teaching his way of doing it.

Windsor Castle

In 1857 Rarey went to England. British army officers who watched him wrote letters on his behalf, and in January 1858 he was called to Windsor Castle to work in front of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their guests. In a letter home to his sister he described the royal family entering the riding house to watch.

The demonstration ended with a picture that newspapers repeated for years: the tamer lying on the ground beside a quiet horse that had come in unmanageable. A waltz was named for him. English picked up a new verb, to rareyfy, meaning to tame by kindness. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals gave him a gold medal.

Cruiser

The test that made his name was a stallion called Cruiser, owned by the Earl of Dorchester and known as a dangerous horse. Rarey took him on, on a wager, and won. He later acquired Cruiser and in 1861 brought him home to Groveport. That January he showed the horse to sold-out houses in New York.

What he actually did

Rarey was a showman, and his method was not magic and not entirely gentle by modern standards. He described it himself in a book, The Complete Horse Tamer, published in 1862. With a strap he took away the use of a foreleg until the horse, tired and off balance, lay down. Then he handled it all over, quietly, until it stopped fighting and found that nothing bad happened. He insisted on calm and on never punishing in anger, and he taught that fear, not malice, was behind most of what people called vice.

That last idea is the thread that matters here. At a time when the accepted way to break a horse was force, a man filled theaters by saying the horse was afraid and could be shown it had no reason to be.

After

Rarey died in 1866, still in his thirties. He left instructions for Cruiser's care in his will. The horse lived until July 6, 1875, nine years longer than the man, and by the account on the historical marker in Groveport he went back to his old ways without him. When Cruiser died, the New York Times printed an obituary.

Groveport remembers both of them. There is a statue at the recreation center, and the local school teams are the Cruisers.