The Smartest Horse That Ever Lived - A True Story

I'm David Hoffman filmmaker and I'm about to tell you a story that is quite an incredible I mean it became a major book it's going to be a movie I believe it's about the most intelligent horse that ever lived the name of the horse is Jim Key the man who raised him was a slave but before I tell you that let me just tell you how I got into this story so I'm a young guy in New England starting to make films and I love the old book shops some of you may as well in those days you'd go into the book shop and you could find stuff from the Civil War for a quarter and on the corner they had these pamphlets because pamphlets was a major way of communicating at that time and I would sit there hour after hour on a cold day on a needed bookstore looking at these old pamphlets and buying them so I pick up a pamphlet about a horse called beautiful Jim Key the most intelligent horse that ever lived so now it's in the 1990s a time after the bubble where I had lost pretty much all of my money and I'm looking for ways of making a living and I had this pamphlet and I went to a writer in Hollywood who a friend of mine knew and she said I'd like to tell that story I'm from Tennessee where the horses from and the guy who raised him so let's find out if this story is real and we go to Tennessee and we find out that the story is real and I'm about to tell you that story it's a time before the Civil War Shelbyville Tennessee and a young slave boy bill key is being raised by John Key who has also two sons and John Key is a very kind man and he raises bill key like he's one of his sons educates him gives him responsibilities in the house and when he sees that young bill key has a unique ability with horses a kind of a horse sense he elevates him to become the horse leader of not only this plantation but of the surrounding area he raised bill with kindness and patience just like his sons so now it's the Civil War bilqis is a young man and he decides to go into the civil war on the side of the south to help his brothers who he protects all the way through the war and at the same time to get free slaves through the southern to northern wall that existed so he's helping slaves and he's helping these boys survive the south against the north and he's also acting like he's a spy for the north and he gets caught and he's being tried for treason but he's also a great cook I don't know how so he starts cooking for the guy in charge and he says look I can really play cards I am a master at cards and he while he's engaged with these guys in the north he begins playing cards with them making a lot of money he becomes surprisingly wealthy by the end of the Civil War he's freed several thousand slaves and he's protected John Key's sons and the war is over and he walks back down to Tennessee and the places of course somewhat decimated and John Key has lost the plantation he buys the plantation back for John Key so he has a home he then goes and sets up a horse operation in Shelbyville which becomes very famous beyond locally he sets up a racetrack a hotel a restaurant a blacksmith shop and a horse hospital I mean it's a major operation and he is a major horseman and he loves racing although he's not himself the guy who rides on the horse he's fascinated by it and he wants to create the greatest racehorse that Tennessee had ever seen the time is 1885 and he wants to breed an unbeatable racehorse he's at an auction in Mississippi in the deep south a black person in a world of white horse traders and up comes Loretta Loretta is being sold as a famous I think she was Egyptian horse who had came from a long lineage but had been destroyed by circuses she had lived in the circus all her life and really was down-and-out worth nothing and Bilkey bids 40 bucks and others in the room laugh at him look at that stupid black guy they didn't say black buying that horse but he could look in her eyes and he could see something special he talks about this later in what I'm about to tell you he buys Loretta and now he has to find a Hamilton who he can mate with Loretta to produce the greatest racing horse he contacts the owner of Tennessee volunteer the number-one racing horse at that time and they breed and they create a horse baby a Colt that is a complete total mess can't stand up does it walk right looks kind of goofy looks like some horse say his colleagues that should be shot taken out of its misery he doesn't do that he looks in the eyes of that horse and what he sees is something intelligent and he already had spent his life training horses and being around horses with kindness and patience and intelligence as he was raised he believed in that for every sentient being and he takes this horse and he begins to work with this horse Jim Kate talk to him sleeps in the stable with Jim key turns out for the rest of his life and Jim Keyes life this story is going to get unbelievable he trains him for three or four years and he begins to see real signs of intelligence out of Jim he finds it he can teach Jim fetch lie down play dead like a dog he also finds that Jim seems to be very interested in the other animals he comes over and he sniffs them he's kind to them in a way that bill feels is very unusual so when he's trained him in a number of these different skits he takes him on the road with one of Bill's big money making products Keystone liniment oil at that time liniment oil and other oils was sold by people who went on the road kind of circuses on the road and bill was very successful with Keystone but about to become hugely more successful selling Keystone using Jim key so he's on the road with the Kista liniment oil and here is a quote from a newspaper about someone who saw Jim and Bill during this Keystone liniment tour crowds gathered and dr. key would slip Jim key a piece of sugar and say now Jim use a powerful smart horse I know but what is your politics is it Republican Jim took a look of disgust in shake sir said no are you a prohibitionist no are you a populist no are you a socialist no the horse was unmoved are you a Democrat the horse's expression changes he snickered and made various noises the audience bursts into laughter with this encouragement Jim grasped a piece of chalk in his mouth and scrawls Jim on the blackboard maids changed from a cash register spelled the name of a man in the audience by selecting the letters from Iraq on the road Jim does all kinds of tricks that people could not believe now think about this this was a time when the horse was a part of the family but people did not think of the horses intelligent you kind of treated horses sort of like dumb animals skittish dumb they were like when you can't say cars although you keep treat your car kind of the same way but it was kind of like that everybody Adam but nobody thought of them like this horse was behaving and Jim becomes famous with Bill Keystone liniment takes off but he also begins to perform in Negro exhibitions they called them at these exhibitions people show up and Jim is in the front of the stage and Bill is on the side and he says to the audience things he says the horse things and the horse does from I'm going to tell you some of those things in a minute but picture now it's 1897 and he's performing somewhere in the south and a great New York circus guy Albert Rodgers hears about Jim key and bill key and goes down and tries to buy Jim key 10,000 bucks 20,000 bucks bill won't even consider it he sleeps with the horse every night and he says of course I won't sell him so Albert says well can we work together and form an act where you and Jim form in front of audiences I think we can make a lot of money and they do and everywhere they perform they are an amazing hit imagine this he reads and spells using his mouth he can count from 1 to 25 and up to $1 really and he can make change he can play the organ with his mouth just a few notes to show that he understands the organ he can tell time if you ask him what is the time now he moves the clock around to the proper time and he can use a phone he can actually pull the little numbers down on the old time telephones do you believe all of this well here's one of the things that happened by the way they ended up make several million dollars before the story I'm about to tell you which is what happens in 1904 a critical moment in their career but everybody is talking about this horse front-page news in newspapers around the country he's going to meet President McKinley spent a few I was with him and some Harvard guys get suspicious so a paper asked the Harvard guys to investigate and they do a real test they put bill in the back of the room they see whether there's any signals between them and they conclude the horse is for real here's a quote I love so this is about nineteen three while performing in Cincinnati is in a newspaper while performing in Cincinnati a soil towel by mistake was put in Jim Keyes trunk and Jim when he took it out threw it on the floor and shook his head as if to say I can't stand this the towel was used to wipe James mouth after he took a coin out of a glass of water which people thought was impossible at the time this created great amusement among the audience and one lady mrs. C long bought Jim six beautiful fringe towels on which he had sewn his name and one of the things that's important about this is that bill continues to treat Jim with his beautiful kindness and sweetness and the American Humane Society which exists at that time takes notice George and sell the head of it he says hey can I connect with you and maybe we could get kids to really pay attention to treat animals and horses in a way that they've never been treated before and they start a relationship beautiful Jim key and the American Humane Society so now we come to the high point of the story 1904 the st. Louis World's Fair there is a building called the Jim keep a billion why because he'd been getting audiences of 10,000 a night 15,000 night and at the World's Fair 22,000 people paid money to see Jim a night and one night Alison Longworth Roosevelt comes the daughter of the President President Roosevelt and she steps into the hall and everyone know it's Alison and she goes right to the front and she sits down and it just so happens that the st. Louis school system has sent a bunch of sixth grade kids also in the front role to have a spelling bee competition against Jim key and one of the words that comes up is Alison Longworth Roosevelt and Jim Key the horse spells Alison Longworth Roosevelt as well as McKinley and wins the spelling competition not that he's better than these best of kids but he's as fast so they conclude he has the spelling capability of a sixth grade student it's national news its major stuff he's bigger than any actor or athlete at the time really he's in every newspaper he's booming there's a song written about him there are all kinds of advertisers who want to do advertising with him obviously horse related things but also pullman car company the great railroad car company makes a special car for Jim and from Bill who sleeps with him in that car and for his dog monk so monk is with Jim all the time and from the time they connect every single performance also has monk in it and Jim is also kind to monk he bends over so monk can jump up on his back and stuff like that it's just beautiful there's a play written about Jim key in which he plays a role and the American Humane Society begins to do amazing things it actually produces a button that honors Jim and it produces a medal and two million children signed this pledge the mercy pledge the pledge says I promise to be kind to animals and to all sentient beings and that was signed by two million kids there's a special ambulance corps for animals which honors Jim he's very very famous he dies in 1909 and he's got a beautiful Cemetery stone at the place where Bill owns land and Hill dies also with the stone that honors beautiful Jim key so what happened to this story my colleague writes the book beautiful Jim key it becomes a best-seller well because I collected this pamphlet when I was a kid I loved that but Serendipity's cause and it's going to hopefully be a movie made because Morgan Freeman fell in love with this story and he said look get the story and I'll play Jim key well he's an old man I don't know how he's gonna do that but he wants to and Robert Rodat who wrote Saving Private Ryan he wrote a script based on this story as you know I love stories I'm always looking for stories and I believe that every story has a reason for being collected that sometime in the future it's going to become a story that people like you can see and hopefully enjoy I know this is an incredible story hard to believe but we really check this out Miriam Rivas the writer and I went to Tennessee for weeks I asked a lot of questions did a lot of research found personal letters from people whose grandparents saw Jim and billed understood everything about Bill including the house he lived in and we could see the racetrack and the cemetery stones lesson at least for me you never know about serendipity it's amazing and everything you're doing it appears to me and still does I find something it just interests me I don't know why but it does I keep it and I say someday there's going to be a story and I have a hundred of those in my garage and as part of my plans for the future I'm going to be sharing with you my subscribers some of these things that I've collected that haven't yet become great stories so that was my story a beautiful Jim key I hope you enjoyed it thank you

Channel: David Hoffman

Views: 3,568,052

Rating: 4.9000278 out of 5

Keywords: horse stories, Seabiscuit story, jim key, David Hoffman filmmaker, slave story, Tennessee history, Shelbyville, American Humane Society, humane movement history, 1904 world fair, St. Louis world's fair, 1904 St. Louis, St. Louis history, smartest horse, sentient being, sentient horse, horse intelligence, miriam rivas, beautiful jim key, Animals, pets, pet supplies, animal stories

Id: 4pACXxtbvVA

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/GigaFluxx]

Sharing this one behalf of my 71 year old mother who sent it to me

[u/hairygoosegg]

That’s pretty awesome I’m not gonna lie!