| AKIL
sired 12 foals, including LA PLATA 1243,
dam of JUBILO 2466 for the Drapers' Jedel Arabians.
BABE AZAB produced ROYAL
AMBER 1557, one of the foundation sires at Jedel.
PEP was named after the Kellogg cereal and was the
trick horse at the Kellogg Ranch. KASAR was used at
the Hearst Ranch and sired 19 foals. The best known were ANSARLAH
1281, used at the Hearst Ranch and GAMIL 1427, the
dam of IBN HANAD.
Many
of the eight F.E.Lewis mares also contributed their bit to the Arab horse
of today.
MOLIAH
109 was the dam of ANTEZ, DHAREB
and MUSTAKIM, mentioned above. MOLIAH'S
daughter SANKIRAH 149 produced 14 foals. HANAD 489
was her best known offspring. Two of her better known daughters were KIRAH
551 and MONICA 589. These two mares are to
be found in the pedigrees of many of today's best known horses, such as
FERNEYN, THE REAL
McCOY, FERZON,
DUNES, SOTEP, RAFFERTY,
ROSE OF RASWAN,
ORBIT and many others.
SEDJUR
193, besides being the dam of AKIL, mentioned already,
also produced BINT SEDJUR 1148,
dam of BINT SAHARA, Frank McCoy's
great foundation mare, and from her descended FERSARA,
FERZON, FADJUR, THE
REAL McCOY and the other
great McCoy horses.
HASIKER
268 was the dam of MAKINA 450 who, in turn, produced
ALLA AMARWARD 1140 by STAMBUL
575. ALLA AMARWARD was one of
the leading sires in number of offspring during the 1940's.
When
I went to meet Hoppy for lunch, I took along some pictures of ANTEZ.
When I showed them to him, he said: "Isn't he beautiful! He looks
just like his daddy, HARARA." Hoppy had no
idea what had happened to ANTEZ after he sold him
to Kellogg. I told him what I knew of ANTEZ and his
travels and his fame. Hoppy was very pleased to hear about it.
Hoppy
had bought along a photo album. There were several pictures of LETAN
and HARARA and F.E. Lewis and the ranch. I asked him
to tell me about F.E.Lewis.
Lewis
was born December 26, 1884, in Tarrytown, New York. He came from an extremely
wealthy family. He started coming west when he was a teenager and fell
in love with the country.
He
was a man of many interests and had the money and time to enjoy them all.
One of his early interests was auto racing. He raced both gas and steam
cars. One of his races was from New York City to Buffalo in 1911. Another
of his early interests was boating, and this interest stayed with him all
of his life.
He
spent three years looking for a ranch in the west and in 1916 bought 7,800
acres near what then was called Spadra, California, about 30 miles east
of Los Angeles. He named his ranch Diamond Bar, and today it is being subdivided
for housing and is still called Diamond Bar.
Lewis
got title to the land in 1917. He and Hoppy drove out to the ranch from
New York, leaving in October 1917. They drove a custom-made Cadillac with
37-inch tires, special shock absorbers and a reclining seat. They took
bedrolls and were going to take turns sleeping. There were two other men
going with them in one of Lewis' Stanley Steamers, but it broke down after
100 miles. They shipped the Stanley Steamer by rail and took the other
two men with them. Hoppy showed me pictures taken on the trip -- and it
was sure some trip! In much of the western country there were no roads,
not even bridges. They had to be ferried across the Colorado River.
When
they got to the ranch, the work really began. They built houses, barns,
corrals, etc. Lewis decided to go into the hog business and built a farrowing
house 1,200 feet long. He had a herd of 7,500 Duroc Jersey brood sows.
He found that the cost of raising hogs on grain in California was prohibitive,
so he went into partnership with A.B.Miller of Fontana, California. The
two of them posted a $50,000 bond in the name of C.H.Hopkins and got the
garbage contract from the City of Los Angeles. They ran a spur track into
the Diamond Bar from the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad. Hoppy
showed me pictures of the hog operation. They had their own railroad engine.
They were getting more garbage than they could feed, so Lewis and Miller
bought 35,000 feeder hogs from the midwest and put them in Fontana. Lewis
finally decided to get out of the hog business entirely, so he sold out
to A.B.Miller. Miller made a fortune from the hog operation.
Lewis
also had a herd of grade cattle. When the Country Fair of 1919 was closed
because of the influenza epidemic, he had the opportunity to pick up seven
purebred Hereford bulls. With these bulls he upgraded his herd and ran
up to 1,500 head of cattle. The Diamond Bar was a real working cattle operation
and Lewis enjoyed it. He lost two joints off three fingers from dally roping.
This is the type of roping where the rider's end of the rope isn't fastened
to the horn, but after the steer is roped, the rider dallys it around the
horn.
Will
Rogers was a great friend of Hoppy and Lewis. He loved to rope cattle and
would come to the Diamond Bar whenever there was branding to be done. Hoppy
said when it was time to eat lunch they would ask Rogers to come with them,
but he would decline, saying he would rather rope. I asked Hoppy if Will
Rogers used the Arabs for roping and he said: "Oh, gosh, no, he
was too rough on the horses." When Will Rogers crashed in 1934
with Wiley Post in Alaska, Hoppy and Lewis went to Point Barrow aboard
Lewis' boat to visit the memorial. I didn't realize where Point Barrow
was, but as I looked at the pictures and the map I was surprised to find
its location. It is through the Bering Straits and perhaps 1,000 miles
east on the Arctic Ocean. I asked Hoppy about Lewis' boats, and he said
Lewis had boats all his life. One of them was over 200 feet long and had
a crew of 52.
For
personal reasons, Lewis sold the Diamond Bar in 1943 and bought an island
north of Vancouver in Canada. He felt California was getting too crowded
for him. He bought a warehouse building in Newport Beach to store his personal
things and also as an office for Hoppy. Lewis died in Canada on March 6,
1963. Hoppy bought the building from the estate and still maintains his
office there. After lunch, Hoppy and I visited his office to look at more
pictures. The calendar on Happy desk is turned to Wednesday, February 17,
1943 -- the day escrow was closed and title was transferred on the Diamond
Bar.
Here
are a few things Hoppy told me about the horses:
Lewis
always liked western horse. His wife had gaited horses, but he didn't care
for them.
Hoppy
didn't visit Hingham or know how Lewis found out about the Arabs. The horses
were shipped to California on an express car. It was a hard trip on the
horses, and one mare died shortly after the arrival. She was blind and,
as he remembers, one of the 1906 importations. He doesn't recall her name.
He
says HARARA was beautiful, and the pictures he showed me certainly confirm
that. HARARA was sold to Central Agurerra Sugar Company
in Puerto Rico and shipped from L.A. harbor.1
LETAN
seemed to be Hoppy's favorite. He twice used the same words about him --
once at lunch and later in his office: "handy as a pocket knife.
Quick, would turn on a dime." This seems to carry on in many of
LETAN's progeny, as many of the great Arab stock horses
are descended from him. Hoppy also told me they never used anything more
severe than a snaffle on LETAN when he did stock horse
work. He felt LETAN and HARARA
were equal as sires. Lewis usually rode LETAN.
Albert
W. Harris visited them several times and was interested in endurance rides.
He recalled Harris' ranch in Chino. Mr. Harris was president of the Arabian
Horse Club in later years, and I can remember his visit to our place and
his letters concerning our participation in endurance rides.
Hoppy's
personal riding horse was the gelding HAMEK 445 (Harara
- Samit). The name "Hamek" is Kemah spelled backwards. Kemah
was the name of one of Lewis' early boats and the name of his personal
corporation. There was also a mare named HEMEKA 420
(Harara - Adouba).
One
morning Hoppy was told there was something wrong with LETAN.
When he got to LETAN's corral, his neck, chest and
forelegs were covered with blood. They found LETAN's
upper front on the ground, all in one piece, apparently torn out on the
fence. They saved the teeth and kept them in alcohol at the ranch for many
years. LETAN wasn't able to graze after that.
Once
Hoppy got a letter from a man named Kellogg in Michigan, inquiring about
a stallion for a riding horse. Hoppy was busy and forgot about answering
the letter. Several months later, Mr. Kellogg arrived at the Diamond Bar
and good-naturedly kidded Hoppy about not answering the letter. Mr. Kellogg
still wanted to buy a riding stallion. Hoppy said Mr. Kellogg was at that
time along in years and rather portly, and they tried to discourage him
from buying a stallion. Some time later, Mr. Kellogg returned to the Diamond
Bar with a German named Schmidt and bought about half of their horses.2
Schmidt selected the horses they bought. The German later was known as
Carl Raswan, but, of course, Hoppy knew
nothing of this.
The
balance of the breeding stock was sold before 1930, and when the Diamond
Bar sold in 1943 a few Arab geldings went with it.
As
noted in the captions, some of the pictures with this article are from
Hoppy's album. They are 50 years old and have never before been published.
In spite of the fact that these photos are amateur snapshots and the horses
are not professionally posed in the style of today, it would appear to
me that both LETAN and HARARA
were well-balanced horses with more quality than was usual for their time.
So
this is the story of the F.E. Lewis horses -- whose influence on our present-day
Arabians is far out of proportion to their small number.
(1) According to Carol Mulder in "Harara 122" AHW Aug.
'74, Harara sired Rafihara 646 (x Rafih 471), foaled 1927 in Puerto Rico
and bred by Juan E. Serralles.
(2) Kellogg purchased Letan, Antez, Sedjur, Hasiker, Tamarinsk, and
Sedjur's 1924 filly, Mabruk by Ziki.
|
LETAN
86, Bob Tafaya, foreman of the Diamond Bar, up. This photo shows LETAN
to have had a head quite above the average of his day. He has good width
between the jaws, a well-pronounced jowl, a short head and relatively small
muzzle. From C.H.Hopkin's album.
